Barry Trotter and The Shameless Parody

1/10

There are bad books and there are bad books. Hidden just under the surface of this immature, vulgar, and poorly constructed text, there is something really interesting about importance of literature in an age of multimedia and movie tie-ins. Accordingly, I argue that it belongs the former category of bad.

The book opens by saying, “[i]t is poorly written, incredibly crass, and contains jokes about bodily functions that would embarrass a five-year old”. This, unfortunately, is true. Towards the beginning, I felt bad for Bumblemore being surrounded by the characters he is. However, I lost this sympathy early in when I learned he was just as bad as the rest. I didn’t even care that, after he had eaten a trick candy, he had “grown an extra (non-functioning, thank God) penis”. I just had to accept that this was what I was reading. Critically, the book came across as very low-effort as there were many spelling and grammatical errors, aside from the nonsense plot and lack of characterisation. The main ‘joke’ was, ‘how funny is taking characters and locations that you are familiar with in Harry Potter and changing them minimally to avoid copyright infringement. With the regard to the other ‘jokes’, I grouped them into the following categories, including notable examples of each. Please note that some encompass multiple categories. 1. Actual violence/injury or hoping for violence/injury against another character, “maybe old Snipe’s got cancer of the wand”; 2. Characters with low intelligence or are mentally disabled, “Miss Cringer is teaching at a remedial wizards school outside Hogsbleede”; 3. Blatant or thinly veiled sexual references, “stayed far away from the infamous Buggering Bitch”, a sentient tree; 4. Juvenille humour, “’Do you know I had to deliver a baby this morning? Very messy business, Muddle birth… I nearly threw up on it”, or a Snoop Dogg equivalent character called ‘Poop Dogg’; 4. Toilet humour, e.g., a run in with ‘Flatulent Fanny’. “’Ohhh,’ Fanny moaned as another gastric salvo sputtered to life… Everybody hates me [ploot!] but it’s not my fault,’ Fanny said weakly. ‘I’m lactose intolerant [brrrip].’” She is not the only lactose intolerant character in the text; 5. References to genitals, “Earwig had been confined to Barry’s room since she went for Dorco Malfeasence’s [sic] soft bits five years ago”. 6. Poor hygiene, “what makes He-Who-Smells so evil?”; 7. People who are crazy or mentally unsound, “hardened in Barry’s mind, from the merely eccentric to the genuine article, an A-1, government inspected, UL-laboratories tested nutbar”, “that 62 IQ really paid off”. Nevertheless, I have to put my hands up and own up to getting a couple of chuckles from the text. The inclusion of shoehorned in characters to address issues with diversity in the Barry Trotter universe, deconstructing Quiddit as a narrative device, a sequel to Citizen Kane, and the lines; “If you were rich, you could afford to send your kids to the few ‘magical academies,’ but for these the waiting list started at conception. Or before, if you believe in astrology and oracles”; “His teeth were bad enough to make a third-world dentist gag”; were somewhat amusing to me. All things considered, botched circumcisions, bowel blocker hexes, etc., the book has almost no literary merit. “I will not repeat the exact words and phrases, but I assure you that they conjure up images of enduring foulness and represent the outer bounds of verbal depravity”.