Literary holes

I recently finished rereading the Harry Potter books, which I enjoyed just as much this time around, as when I was reading one a year, as they came out. They really are the perfect escape reading, taking you into a fascinating, amusing, and quite believable world where you can wave your wand and get the knitting needles to knit a sweater, where owls deliver the mail (and know where to go to deliver it), where only those who have seen death can see the particular kind of horses pulling the carriage, where you can swear to a map that you are up to no good, and it will show you how to avoid anyone you want to avoid, by showing where everybody in the castle is, as they move from place to place (obviously a naughty school boy's dream). J.K. Rowling is a great story-teller, an excellent writer, and it pleases me no end that her "children's" books filled so many children with an eagerness to read...and also made her rich.

But. I realized, as I neared the end of Book Six, that she had been guilty of leaving a literary hole in these books. Nobody ever bathes! Or takes a shower. There is frequent mention of bathrooms when we are at Hogwarts (School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, for the uninitiated) – indeed, much of the action of Book Two (The Chamber of Secrets) takes places in one of the girls' bathrooms. But there is no mention of there being tubs or showers there, it just sounds like toilet stalls (in one of which the whiny ghost, Moaning Myrtle, resides) and wash basins (which in the end prove to be the entrance to the hidden Chamber).

In Book Four – The Goblet of Fire – we do see the prefects' bathroom, which has a big sunken tub in the middle of the room. Our hero, Harry Potter, takes a bath there (even though he's not a prefect), because it has been suggested to him as a way to solve a particularly pesky riddle he's grappling with. But he's not actually taking a bath; he's trying to solve his riddle.

Throughout all the books the kids hang out in the Common Room in the evening until they go up to bed in the dorms. They get up in the morning and immediately go down to breakfast in the Great Hall. This is specifically stated. But from the evidence nobody ever does one thing in support of personal hygiene. There's never a reference to "After he'd showered..." or comments from any of the characters like "I'd tired, I'm going to take a bath and go to bed." The kids play vigorous games of Quiddich, often in miserable weather that results in their being muddy from head to toe, but there's never a line like, "he headed for the showers to clean off the mud and clear his head."

I'm always bothered when I become aware of something in a written work – or a dramatic work, like a movie or T.V. show – that detracts from the believability of that work. Another example that comes to mind is the author Robert Parker's hero Spenser, still being a tough guy at the age of 70 (in one of his earliest books, from the early '70s, Spenser mentions having served in the Korean War. If you're, say, 19 in 1952, by 2007 you're an easy 69 years old). Rowling did such a great job of making this fantasy world of hers understandable and believable. It surprises me that she overlooked this "hole" in the overall fabric.