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| Illustration by Mary GrandPre |
A literary post by Nicholai Stuckwisch, borrowed with permission from the Mirabile Dictu Substack:
"This year I returned to the Harry Potter series for the first time in well over a decade, and I was genuinely surprised by the experience. I was prepared for a comfort read and nostalgia trip as I listened to the audiobooks in the background of other activities. I was not prepared for how much they gave me to think about or the new perspective I developed compared to the literal dozens of previous trips I took through Harry’s story. Even though I had not read or listened to any of the books since before college, I felt confident in my recollection of not just the plot but the themes, lessons, and noteworthy takeaways the wizarding world had to offer. Instead, I discovered that returning to a childhood favorite as an adult children of your own puts an entirely new spin on things.
"My father discovered Harry Potter pretty early on and was reading the books out loud to my older siblings before I was old enough to have any awareness or interest in the story. Some time between the release of The Goblet of Fire and The Order of the Phoenix, when I would have been seven or eight years old, my dad picked up the first four audiobooks narrated by the fantastically talented Jim Dale on CD. My younger brother and I, who shared a room at the time, struck up a habit of listening to Harry Potter at bedtime that we would continue pretty steadily for the next ten-odd years. Periodically we’d interrupt our endless cycle of starting and restarting the books with The Chronicles of Narnia or a one-off pick-up from the library, but Jim Dale’s voice bringing the cast of Harry Potter to life was a mainstay of my adolescence.
"When The Order of the Phoenix came out, I was 'finally' deemed old enough to stay up and listen to dad read aloud, and the journey of experiencing that plot for the first time as a family group was electric in a way I can’t trace to any other stories. All of us loved to theorize about what was coming, but I recall my dad being particularly invested in sleuthing out the twists and turns. He’d often pause mid-chapter with a 'You know what…' in a voice that you, of course, can’t picture but is burned into my memory. I believe my dad reading out-loud was also my first exposure to book six, but for sure by the time Deathly Hallows came out I was an avid enough reader that I was reading on my own simultaneously and independently while also listening to my dad read out loud. Those evenings of uncovering the later part of Rowling’s saga as a family and when all my peers were also on the edge of their seat for what would come next was a pivotal part of becoming a Potter fan for me.
"As I progressed to the later half of high school, I negotiated my way into getting my own sleeping quarters apart from my younger brothers, which meant I stopped partaking in the nightly audiobooks. I’m actually fairly confident that I never physically read the first three books in the series. I also stopped doing nearly as much reading and essentially all audiobook listening through college and into the first few years of my marriage. The more removed I was from nightly immersion into the series, the more neutral towards or even critical of the series I became. At no point did I adopt the opinion that the books were bad, but I did (and do) have a fairly negative perception of the film series overall, Rowling’s extracurricular commentary after concluding the series, and the absurd premise of The Cursed Child, along with my own criticisms with worldbuilding inconsistencies in the series resulted in me ranking the series fondly in my memory, but not particularly highly 'objectively' speaking.
"A few years ago, I began making a conscious effort to get back into regular reading and found myself rediscovering my great, nearly forgotten joy for the hobby in the process. I have always been particularly fond of the fantasy genre as a whole and long series with large books in particular, and so that kind of book has dominated my reading list for the last three or four years. My preference these days is certainly for reading a physical book, but I am also a child of the digital age who is embarrassingly uncomfortable being left alone with his own thoughts, so I supplement my reading with Audible – especially when I’m driving alone or working on projects that require my hands but not so much my brain.
"Back in April, my wife and I welcomed our fifth child (and first son), and I am blessed to work for an employer with a very generous parental leave policy, which meant I had a month and a half where my schedule involved considerably more time doing dishes and laundry. I was on the hunt for a new series. As I scrolled through the shared library of my in-law’s Audible account, I found myself reaching for something nostalgic and familiar that I could frequently pause and potentially half listen to when I needed to shift from chore mode to primary parent mode during my wife’s recovery.
"At some point six or so years ago, I came across a video from a YouTuber I’m a fan of, Austin McConnell, critiquing The Cursed Child, which I am proud to say I still have not read for myself. In that video, Austin made the argument that Harry Potter is not chiefly a fantasy series but rather a mystery series within a fantastical setting. I watched that video somewhere around the time I became hooked on J. K. Rowling’s character driven detective series which distinctly does not take place in a fantasy setting, and Austin’s observation rang true to me and reconciled with my own memories of the books. After re-listening to the entire series over the last few months, I find myself agreeing even more heartily.
"I don’t consider myself a mystery connoisseur by any stretch of the imagination, although I have thoroughly enjoyed the majority of mysteries I’ve read. Even with my limited sampling of the genre, I feel quite confident in asserting that Rowling is a master at crafting compelling, character driven mysteries and I think she’s proven herself now across two spectacular series. The amount of clever and subtle foreshadowing spread throughout the entire Harry Potter series is genuinely remarkable. In every single book, I found myself awed by how well every step of the narrative carefully sets up the plot twists and grand reveals, not just for the climaxes of the individual books but for the arcs both of the major characters and the series as a whole. Very often in books and film I find that plot twists either feel painfully predictable or so far out of left field that they are unearned, but the unveiling of each mystery in the Potter series feels it could have been predicted, but only if you were paying close attention and actively trying to piece it together.
"I still have nit-picks with the wizarding worldbuilding of the series. There are a lot of things that just don’t make sense to me or that hardly seem to hold up under close scrutiny, but in retrospect those things hardly seem to matter when I consider that the fantasy world is a backdrop adding extra flavor that helps bring the characters and plot alive, but is far from the true heart and soul of what the books have to offer. Rowling’s gift as a writer is not in creating a grand fantasy epic with a complex magic system or intricate lore.
"As I noted previously, my dad was one of the many avid fans of the series constantly trying to sleuth out what was coming next. If memory serves correctly, he was pretty spot on with a lot of his predictions although I can’t drum up any of the specifics of what he got right or wrong. One thing I distinctly remember from the Potter hay-days was my dad, a pastor in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, arguing not only against the perspective that Harry Potter was evil or satanic but that it actually had distinctly Christian themes and undertones running throughout. Before Rowling publicly said anything about her faith, I remember my dad guessing she was a Christian and that this could give us clues as to what would happen in the rest of the story. In my own revisiting of the series through an adult lens, I wouldn’t say that I view the story as overtly Christian, outside the presence of many traditionally Christian morals and the way all great stories point to THE great story. Certainly (spoiler alert), Harry’s sacrifice and resurrection in the final book evokes some compelling Christ-like imagery, but Harry Potter is not Chronicles of Narnia overly using fantasy as a Christian allegory. I would say it is more comparable to The Lord of the Rings in the sense that you can see a foundation permeated with Christian morality and mythos.
"Even though I wouldn’t classify Harry Potter as Christian fantasy, I would say that the beauty in the series is the way Rowling has crafted a story proclaiming the value of life, loving human connection, and living life according to a sense of honor, duty, and objective morality that is far greater than individuals or even a social collective. These are all things that Christians should seek out and praise in fictional and even fantastical literature – especially in a world where the modern literary landscape is littered with morally ambiguous, if not outright deplorable, characters and no one genuinely worth rooting for. Grimdark and Romantasy fly off the bookstore shelves, but I strongly suspect stories like Harry Potter that show sincere and heartfelt good triumphing over unambiguous and unapologetic evil will endure the test of time far longer.
"While, returning to the great writing, the clever mysteries, and the inspiring storytelling of the series was a joy, the aspect of the series that astounded me the most after such a long time away was the cast of characters. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but revisiting Harry and the rest as an adult, husband, and father, as well as just a person with a far more nuanced and informed outlook on the world was enlightening. Rowling’s knack for capturing compelling characters who feel impossibly real and tangible is, in my opinion, her single greatest strength. She knocked it out of the park in Harry Potter, and she’s still crushing it in her currently in-progress Cormoran Strike detective series.
"So much of what Harry and his peers think,do, and feel hits so differently to me as someone closer to the age of Lupin or Sirius than it ever did when I was closer to being Harry’s own age. The dumb decisions characters make feel more genuine and believable when I think about the way I viewed the world as a teen or preteen. The coming of age humor, especially as the characters start navigating the murky waters of romance, is so much funnier, cleverer, and bittersweet as a happily married man who is eternally grateful to be out of the dating pool. Above all, the emotional weight and heart of the series, the themes of self-sacrifice, love, and bravery, feel deeply profound in a way I simply couldn’t appreciate in the same way fifteen or twenty years ago.
"Rowling is infamous within my circles for her declaration that she always viewed Dumbledore as gay. While I still think Rowling’s post-publishing commentary on Dumbledore on the series in general was unnecessary, unhelpful, and uninspiring (The Cursed Child really should just not exist), I also don’t think claiming Dumbledore was always gay is as much of a character assassination or piece of revisionist history as it might appear on the surface.
"The reality is that Dumbledore’s sexuality is completely irrelevant to the story, because one of the things that Rowling does a remarkable job of demonstrating across the books is the fact that romantic (eros) love is not the only, or even the most,compelling love there is. The love of parents for their children and the deep bonds of loving friendship are far more prevalent and important to the story than any romantic relationship. The way characters demonstrate their love toward one another and cherish the beauty of life is – in my opinion – the single most beautiful thing about the entire series. We need more stories that are not afraid to show deeply profound and unapologetically loving relationships between characters, independent of sexual tension or attraction, and we need more villains that showcase the way that evil is very often tied to the absence or perversion of love.
"Harry Potter is absolutely worth revisiting or picking up for the first time as an adult – far more so than I would have thought six months ago. I still won’t recommend the series for its status in the fantasy genre, but in a world dominated by Grimdark and Romantasy, I would argue that Rowling is a modern day Tolkien or C. S. Lewis: proving that you can tell timeless stories with profoundly relatable characters that profess great truths and beauty in a way that is approachable even for young children while still respecting your reader along the way."
[My second eledst son,] "Nicholai Stuckwisch is husband to Hannah and father to five. He works in accounting, and has mastered the art of making elaborate spreadsheets. In his free time, he enjoys reading, playing board games, and visiting with friends and family."
