All the Young Dudes

I woke up on a typical November morning a few months ago to find the Google headline "The Best Harry Potter Novel Isn’t Written by J.K. Rowling". Rachelle Hampton had written a piece for slate.com about All the young dudes, a Marauder era fanfic that despite having been finished for a few years was still bouncing around the social medias.

"I first started reading All the Young Dudes in November 2020, while I was living at home," Rachelle writes. "It’s indisputable fact that if you live at home for longer than three weeks, you regress into a teenager."

Of course, this immediately struck a chord with me. A vivid memory of me wanting to finish a chapter of Harry Potter and the Psychic serpent on a Saturday morning and being displaced by my grandmothers need to vacuum precisely where I was sat bubbled up to the fore. I must have been 14 or thereabouts, and to this day, I wrestle, emotionally, with the shame at my teenage intractability whilst admiring my tenacity not to put down the book.

Psychic Serpent was also a fanfic, of course - I had a diet of nothing but, during the "Great Wait" for the next official instalment. I have a dozen or so that I treasure dearly, not all for their literary merits, but because they are intertwined with my growing up. There are parts of them that make me me still, and that's something I never want to lose.

yet, I'd pretty much put fanfiction away when the canon drew to a close. I recommend the odd story to some of my students and, if I am in a nostalgic mood, will leaf through an old one to reminisce. But reading new stuff was not only unnecessary given the amount of published books I get thrown at me, it was almost taboo. Something I’d moved beyond, perhaps?

But here was a mainstream news article, throwing my teenaged self back at me. So why not, I thought. My Kindle doesn't care what I put on it. Is it somehow shameful to read fanfiction? Would I be embarrassed to admit it to someone on the bus?

And as it turned out, I wouldn't. So I started reading it and, just under 14 hours of "focused" reading time later I finished the final chapter.

It's a brilliant story, of course. being gay in the setting and time of the book was fascinating to read about in and of itself, and that, coupled with the relationships, were the real draws. it’s not a children's story, but nor is it a Harry Potter story, nor really a magic story. It's a story of people, of how and what they feel. It's framed through the lens of Hogwarts, set in a world of werewolves to be sure, but that seems only necessary to dispense with much of the background the author would otherwise have to introduce. I wouldn't say it's a sublime read; the words didn't flow passionately nor wax eloquent much of the time. In essence, much was predictable, and it is difficult to reconcile the characters with their portrayal in Rowling's original novels to a great degree, even when the illusion is attempted. But it's a window onto a different part of the world to that which I see every day, and something that kept my attention throughout, and more, a haunting glimpse of an older me, which few books have managed to conjure.

It is a fitting way to start the new year.