The anticipation of a good book.
July 21st, 2007
At midnight last night I wrote a little entry for my business blog about how my wife and daughter were out buying a copy of the last Harry Potter novel — even though we already have a copy en route from Amazon.com. As it turns out though, both of the bookstores my ladies attended had sold out of books through pre-orders alone; my wife found the same thing when she looked in the book section of a local supermarket this morning. So now it’s down to the waiting.
Meanwhile, I’ve just finished a good old mystery — hardly perfect, yet expertly done — by John Dickson Carr: The Crooked Hinge, which was published in 1938. Lately I’ve read several “locked room” mysteries, of which Carr remains the undisputed master even today. Carr himself said that the best book in the genre was Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room, which I read on vacation at the beginning of this month. Leroux’s book bears the stamp of its time (it appeared in 1907) and has flaws of its own, yet it shines because of its close appreciation of human psychology. Both of the books also contain plenty of red herrings and false suspects to throw the reader (if not the mountainous Dr. Fell or young Joseph Rouletabille, the detectives in the two books) off of the scent of the murderer.
This morning I read the last hundred pages of The Crooked Hinge, in which the story picked up steam and rattled on to its surprising conclusion. Each successive chapter seemed to cast a new member of the dramatis personae as the prime suspect for murder. I had that enjoyable sensation you get with a good mystery of not being able to put it down until I had read to the end — which, given my short attention span, is unusual for me. What is so curious about the Harry Potter phenomenon is that millions of people have the same reaction to one story. I wonder how many cumulative hours of sleep have been lost throughout the English-speaking world in the past 18 or so hours, as Harry Potter devotees have stayed up most or all of the night to read as far as they can? I have no doubt that if my wife had come home with a copy of the book last night, she would have sent our daughter to bed (without protest, since the girl was up hours past her bedtime and was happy but exhausted), then sat up for hours satisfying the reading hunger that this story has sparked in so many of us.
It must have been like this when Charles Dickens was in his prime, when hundreds of thousands of readers waited for each new issue of Master Humphrey’s Clock or All the Year Round so that they could read the next installment of Barnaby Rudge or Great Expectations. It is doubtful that Jo Rowling will enjoy anything like Dickens’s critical reputation 150 years from now, but it would not surprise me a bit if the Harry Potter were still in print by then. And even if Rowling does not assail what we think of as the peaks of literature, there is no doubt that she is a great teller of yarns. My hope is that she will keep writing with this much narrative engagement, and that her readers will continue to seek out great stories with which to scratch the narrative itch that she has awakened. All of us deserve to enjoy the sense of whetted appetite that a long-anticipated book brings, and the sensation of not wanting to put the book down until every page has been devoured.
(Addendum, 2 p.m.: The book just arrived at our house. I expect our daughter will emerge from her room in about six hours.)