Why Michael O'Brien Opposes Harry Potter

Summed up in one review of The Father's Tale.  Excerpts:

...Readers familiar with O'Brien's work are no doubt aware that he proceeds from an essentially Manichean worldview befitting of an ascetic. He employed this worldview to great effect in the novel `Father Elijah,' which dealt with the beginning of the apocalypse and necessarily categorized characters and situations as good or evil. This time, however, in the confines of a more conventional work--and let us here posit that `The Father's Tale' is not a work of fantasy, sci-fi, or apocalypse, but general fiction--the worldview causes the book to suffer from several serious handicaps.

Chief among these is the treatment of characters. Most seemed childishly one-dimensional. The good are pure, innocent and worthy of our unquestioning admiration; those that are not good are portrayed as sinister, insensitive and unfeeling: beyond redemption. There is very little gray area....



O'Brien's intolerance for character development is manifest in that he fails to present characters that desire to be good but fall short. There's a certain stylistic priggishness that saps the pleasure out of reading the book. This stands in marked contrast with other writers of the genre. The genius of Flannery O'Connor (`Wise Blood') and other Catholic writers--Walker Percy (`The Last Gentleman'), Evelyn Waugh (`Brideshead Revisited'), and Oscar Hijuelos (`Mr. Ives' Christmas'), to name a few--is the effectiveness with which they portray souls in distress; men and women steeped in the grittiness of life, sinners capable of committing acts of mercy. Stated another way, these writers have the ability to laugh with sinners while O'Brien cries with saints. But there's more to it than that: sinners cry, too; and it is their pain, their dark nights of the soul on the gravelly road toward grace that make for timeless fiction...

Now again--I love the Children of the Last Days series. Father Elijah kept me up till late at night to finish it. Plague Journal had wonderful insights, and Eclipse of the Sun is fantastic. A Cry of Stone was deeply moving. I love O'Brien's work. But I keep saying it's almost literary. I think this reviewer has pegged many of the reasons why. 

And the review unintentionally lays out all the reasons why O'Brien dislikes the Harry Potter series.  Rowling's characters are not one-dimensional.  "...the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters," said Sirius with a wry smile. (Order of the Phoenix, Ch. 14)  The good are not all "pure, innocent and worthy of our unquestioning admiration."  Nor are all the evil characters simply evil,  although at least Voldemort is portrayed as "sinister, insensitive and unfeeling: beyond redemption."  But even there, we have reasons for the character to be what he is, and we see the option offered for the character to become other than he is, even if he refuses those chances consistently.

Anyway--I suspect that a large part of the reason for O'Brien's creative choices comes from his determination to do good and avoid evil in his writing, which is admirable to a point.  But his is not the only way to tell a good story loaded with the truths entrusted to us in revelation.  Rowling has taken a different path to tell the same story of the love of God and the triumph of love over death.