Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s
Stone: The Illustrated Edition. By J.K. Rowling. Illustrated by Jim Kay.
Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic. $39.99.
It is hard to accept that it
has been the better part of a generation – 18 years, since 1997 – since we
first met Harry Potter, “the boy who lived,” and were first immersed in J.K.
Rowling’s astonishingly vivid world of magic and muggles through Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
(unfortunately retitled Harry Potter and
the Sorcerer’s Stone for American consumption, losing some resonance and
sense of real-world history through the change). Once ensconced in the
consciousness of young readers and adults alike – Rowling’s books were
extraordinarily rare in their ability to bridge very large age gaps – Harry and
his cohorts never went away, becoming societally ubiquitous through seven
books, eight feature films, spinoffs and Web-based sequels and expansions and a
great deal more. The visual elements of Rowling’s books were always important
to their effectiveness: Jonny Duddle did the British children’s editions,
Andrew Davidson the British adult paperback versions, and Mary GrandPré the U.S. editions published by
Scholastic. But as fine as these illustrators’ works were, they were incidental
to the story Rowling told, not integral to it. Now that the Harry Potter books
are affirmed as modern classics on the level of the works of C.S. Lewis, E.
Nesbit, perhaps even J.R.R. Tolkien (three other British authors known by their
initials rather than their full names), it is possible to envision them with
illustrations that pervade the pages from start to finish, drawing upon and
expanding the textual elements and turning the series into something lying
somewhere between graphic novels and traditional illustrated books.
This can work only if the
illustrations are exceptional ones, and those by Jim Kay most assuredly are. Kay
does darkness particularly well, hinting even in this earliest and least-dark
of the novels at some of the demonic depths that will emerge later. The spiders
in Harry’s under-the-stairs cubbyhole, which emerge from a very darkly tinted
scene to walk across the next page, are just one example of foreshadowing here
(whether intended or not). For that matter, Hagrid, although a decidedly good
and at times a comic character, shows in Kay’s illustrations as a great bear
looming over everyone and everything he encounters, a coiled mass of power just
waiting to erupt. Kay is simply brilliant at capturing visually the essence of
characters such as Draco Malfoy (thoroughly chilling as a handsome but deeply
cold preteen) and Albus Dumbledore (more careworn, older-looking and somewhat
more cerebral than when seen elsewhere). The ghosts that appear before the
Sorting Hat does its duty are genuinely chilling here, and the hat itself, a
kind of patchwork Easter bonnet, is simultaneously hilarious and more than a
touch scary: a long green feather protruding from it looks disturbingly like a
Lovecraftian tentacle. Even more doom-shadowed is Severus Snape, the first view
of him showing him so dark – in front of a wall of many mysterious objects and
potions – that he seems more background than foreground, more an absence than a
presence, and all the more intimidating as a result.
Nor is it only the
characters that are beautifully interpreted, or reinterpreted, here. The first
sight of Hogwarts makes it far more chilling than Rowling’s prose describes it
as being. Hagrid’s hut is a burst of color and cheer, but faintly ridiculous –
just the sort of place where Hagrid, who is faintly ridiculous himself,
belongs. A two-page, black-and-white spread of “Newt Scamander’s Guide to
Trolls” provides a surprising level of amusement in the midst of the otherwise
scary sequence in the girls’ bathroom: Kay includes “Inside a Troll’s Mind,”
where there is a little bit of room for “kittens” and even less for “keep
thinking it’s Tuesday,” and also shows a “trollwig,” known to “feed on troll
earwax.”
Harry, Ron and Hermione look only a little
like the characters as seen in the original novels, whether British or
American, and even less like their portrayals in the eight-film sequence. But
they look remarkably like themselves:
Kay has done a wonderful job of envisioning them as rather gangly,
still-finding-their-way-in-life preteens, a jumble of nerves and awkwardness
with their magical powers and all-too-human bodies barely beginning to develop.
Kay has also done simply splendidly in letting his imagination roam into visual
areas that are not crucial to the story but that enhance it significantly.
There is, for example, a gorgeous full-page display of dragon eggs “from
‘Dragon-Breeding For Pleasure and Profit,’” from the prickly, bright-red
“Chinese Fireball” to the large, pineapple-like “Ukranian [sic] IronBelly.” All
these illustrations and many more – and, on pages without illustrations, blobs
of color that could be anything from paint spatters to blood – make this
illustrated version of Harry Potter and
the Sorcerer’s Stone an experience not to be missed by existing and all-new
Rowling fans alike. At the end, when Gryffindor’s triumph over Slytherin is
affirmed, the main impression left by Kay’s illustration is of how young the principals of the story are,
how little they know of what lies ahead for them and their world, how little
they understand that the darkness they have faced and overcome in this first
book is but a small foretaste of what will envelop them in later volumes. Kay
has done something remarkable here: he has not improved Rowling’s material so much as enlarged it and re-envisioned
it, putting his own stamp on the characters, the world they inhabit, and the
trials they endure. The Harry Potter books are deservedly acclaimed as modern
classics; their illustrated versions, if Kay continues to produce them at a
level this high, will deserve the same designation – at a different place on
home and library bookshelves.
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