THE PERILS OF HARRY POTTER
Like many famous children’s authors, J. K. (Joanne Kathleen) Rowling, author of the brilliant and phenomenally successful Harry Potter books, remains in close touch with her own childhood. “I really can, with no difficulty at all, think myself back to 11 years old,” she has told Time magazine. Rowling is also clearly on the side of children. She has created a world in which her young heroic trio have special abilities, while conventional adults are either clueless or cruel or both. Her heroes’ secret power takes traditional folktale forms (flying brooms, ghosts, transformation, speaking animals, spells, and potions). But it can also be seen as a metaphor for the special powers of childhood: imagination, creativity, and especially humor—as well as being exciting, her books are often very funny.
The Harry Potter stories belong to an ongoing tradition of Anglo-Saxon youth fantasy that begins with Tolkien and T. H. White, and has been continued splendidly by writers like Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Philip Pullman, and Diana Wynne Jones. (Jones’s excellent Charmed Life, like the Potter books, takes place in a school for juvenile witches and wizards located in an enchanted castle.) What sets Rowling’s books apart from their predecessors is partly a lighthearted fertility of invention that recalls L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. Even more important is the fact that hers, like Baum’s, is a fully imagined world, to which she has a deep, ongoing commitment. For six years, even before she began the first book in the series, Rowling was imagining and elaborating its fantasy universe. She has already planned seven Harry Potter novels, one for each year Harry will spend at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, an institution that seems to be located (like J. K. Rowling herself) somewhere in Scotland.
Harry, Rowling’s hero, is a natural-born wizard, but at first he doesn’t know it. When we meet him he is ten years old and in the classic Cinderlad situation: a poor, lonely orphan, despised and abused. Harry lives with his deeply unpleasant aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, in a country that much resembles Britain in the 1960s or 1970s, before the Internet, digital phones, and interactive video.
The Dursleys live in a village (actually a London suburb; one of Lurie's mistakes here) called Little Whinging (a joke that most readers may not get: the mainstream, untrained in dialects, would call such a place Little Whining) and, like most of the locals, are Muggles—people who have no magic powers. They hate the very mention of the supernatural, and refuse to give Harry any information about his dead parents. (“They were weirdos, no denying it, and the world’s better off without them in my opinion,” Vernon declares.) Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia are as cruel to Harry as any fairy-tale stepparent: they feed him poorly and clothe him shabbily; they make him sleep in a dark, spider-infested cupboard under the stairs; and they destroy his mail. Even worse is their son, Dudley, a spoiled, overweight, greedy bully who, with the help of his large and hateful bully friends, makes Harry’s school and home life actively miserable.
From the point of view of an imaginative child, the world is full of Muggles: people who don’t understand you, make stupid rules, and want nothing to do with the unexpected or the unseen. Harry’s story also embodies the common childhood fantasy that the dreary adults and siblings you live with are not your real family; that you have more exciting parents, and are somehow special and gifted. Harry has an outward manifestation of his gift: a scar in the shape of a lightning bolt on his forehead, the sign that even as a baby he could not be killed by the evil offstage Dark Lord Voldemort, whose very name most people fear to utter.
As in many folktales, you can often tell a character’s character from his or her name, and “Voldemort” neatly combines the ideas of theft, mold, and death. Harry Potter, on the other hand, has a name that suggests not only craftsmanship but both English literature—Shakespeare’s Prince Hal and Harry Hotspur, the brave, charming, impulsive heroes of Henry IV —and Beatrix Potter, who created that other charming and impulsive classic hero, Peter Rabbit.
At the start of each story Harry Potter is living in exile at the Dursleys’. But presently, with the help of magic, he is rescued and enters an alternate world in which imagination and adventurousness are rewarded. A comic cockney (actually West Country; Lurie does not bother with the accent shibboleths) half-giant named Hagrid introduces him to a parallel magical Britain, one entrance to which is through the back door of a scruffy London pub called The Leaky Cauldron. After a shopping trip in which Harry visits a bank run by goblins and purchases unusual school supplies, including “one plain pointed hat (black) for day wear” and the Standard Book of Spells (Grade 1), he takes a special train to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from Track Nine and Three-Quarters at King’s Cross Station—a train and track that are invisible to Muggles.
Hogwarts School, it turns out, is located in a huge ancient castle, well equipped with towers, dungeons, ghosts, secret passages, and enchanted paintings and mirrors. The subjects taught there include Divination, Defense Against the Dark Arts, and Care of Magical Creatures. But in other ways Hogwarts resembles a classic English boarding school—one that, in keeping with the times, is co-ed and multiracial. There are four houses, which compete intensely in the school sport of Quidditch, a sort of combination cricket, basketball, European football, and hockey played on flying broomsticks, in which Harry turns out to excel. The teachers wear black gowns and dine at a head table, and there are prefects and a Head Boy and a Head Girl.
Just as in many schools, however, the student population is roughly divided into jocks, brains, nice guys, and dangerous Goths. Harry, Ron, and Hermione are in the jock house, Gryffindor, where, according to tradition, “dwell the brave at heart.” Ravenclaw House emphasizes “wit and learning,” while the kids in Hufflepuff are described as “just and loyal . . . And unafraid of toil.” The bad characters live in Slytherin House, where they “use any means / to achieve their ends.”
Even before he arrives at Hogwarts, Harry acquires an enemy in Slytherin House, the mean, snobbish, unscrupulous Draco Malfoy, whose name translates readily into “Dragon Bad-Faith.” Draco has a couple of goons (these are surnamed Crabbe and Goyle) to back up his constant sneering and bullying. As a hero and local sports star, Harry also attracts fans; naturally modest, he finds their intense admiration and constant attention as embarrassing as J. K. Rowling reportedly does.
But Harry has more serious problems. The plot of each book essentially centers on the attempts of dark forces to destroy him. As is customary in modern fantasies, from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to Star Wars, lurking in the background is an evil, powerful figure (almost always male) who wants to rule the world. Often these characters at first they seem impressive and even glamorous. There is something admirable in their desire for knowledge and power, whereas their followers, motivated mainly by fear, greed, and revenge, are wholly repulsive.
Harry, of course, always escapes his enemies, but this gets harder with each book. Rowling has said that as time passes the stories will turn darker. “There will be deaths,” she informed Time magazine (in . Already in volumes 3 and 4 it is not so easy to tell which side anyone is on. Characters who at first seem friends may be foes, or vice versa; and good but weak people may be seduced into doing evil because of their own fear or folly. In the third volume, Prisoner of Azkaban, for instance, a scruffy but harmless-looking pet rat called Scabbers turns out to be a wicked traitor who, even in human form, has a pointed nose, prominent ears and incisors, and small watery eyes.
Rowling describes her characters with a psychological subtlety rare in children’s books and even in much adult fiction. In Chamber of Secrets a ragged, oppressed house-elf named Dobby is constantly torn between loyalty to his evil masters the Malfoys and his wish to save Harry’s life. Whenever he is on the edge of revealing their plots, Dobby hits himself over the head with the nearest blunt object, repeating “Bad Dobby!”
Another attraction of the Potter books is that the good characters are not perfect. Harry excels at Quidditch, but he is only an average student, unlike Hermione, who studies for the fun of it and is a bit of a prig. Hagrid, the lovable half-giant gamekeeper, has a weakness for dangerous magical creatures: he sees his vicious pet dragon Norbert and the acromantulas (huge spiders) that live in the Forbidden Forest as cute and cuddly. The British, of course, are fanatic animal-lovers; and it may be that this is Rowling’s comment on the peculiar or even dangerous but beloved pets that visitors to England sometimes encounter.
Though Rowling’s child heroes are imperfect, they are usually smarter and braver than adults. Some of the nicest teachers at Hogwarts, though friendly and knowledgeable, often don’t have a clue as to what’s going on around them. Others are weak and incompetent, or complete phonies like the handsome media-intoxicated Professor Lockhart, who claims to have performed the magical exploits of other, less photogenic wizards. A few have even sold out to the Dark Powers or their representatives.
The headmaster of Hogwarts, the elderly silver-haired Professor Dumbledore (like Tolkien’s Gandalf, whom he much resembles), maintains a kind of benign detachment from events except in moments of great crisis. A. O. Scott, writing in the online magazine Slate, has perceptively remarked that “Dumbledore’s benevolent but strict theology, involving the operations of free will in a supernaturally determined world, is classically Miltonian.”
The appeal of the Harry Potter books, to judge by the flood of reviews and essays that greeted their appearance, is wide and varied. They can be enjoyed, for instance, as the celebration of a pre-industrial world: Hogwarts Castle is lit by torches and heated by fireplaces, and mail is carried by owls of different sizes, including tiny little scops owls (“Local Deliveries Only”). As with most first-rate children’s and young adult books, there is something here for everyone. Pico Iyer sees the stories as only half-fantastic accounts of life in an English public school (in his case, Eton), “designed to train the elite in a system that other mortals cannot follow.” There, as at Hogwarts, he claims, “we were in an alternative reality where none of the usual rules applied.” A. O. Scott, on the other hand, thinks that “being a wizard is very much like being gay: you grow up in a hostile world governed by codes and norms that seem nonsensical to you, and you discover at a certain age that there are people like you.” (It seems unlikely that Harry Potter is gay; in the third volume he shows romantic interest in an extremely pretty Ravenclaw Quidditch player called Cho Chang, and in volume 4 he and Ron proudly take twin students called Padme and Parvati Patil, dressed in saris, to the Yule Ball.)
Any wildly successful work of art attracts detractors as well as admirers of all sorts. The most famous liberal scholar of the folktale, Jack Zipes, has called the books overrated, and criticized them for promoting a conventional, patriarchal view of the world. On the other hand, the sort of conservatives who object to the teaching of evolution and the big bang theory of creation have complained that the stories portray witchcraft in a favorable light. This is not a new idea: from time to time the same accusation has been made against the Oz books, which in some cases have then been removed from schools and libraries along with all other representations of cute or friendly wizards and witches.
In my favorite local bookshop the other day, I saw what at first seemed to be two new Harry Potter books displayed on the counter. One was called Pokémon and Harry Potter , the other Harry Potter and the Bible. But instead of additions to the series, they turned out to be warnings. In the first, by Phil Arms, I read that “the dark occultic nature of Harry Potter . . . is opening the lives and homes of countless millions of parents and children to satanic influences.” The second went even further, suggesting that “an unseen spiritual force of darkness” may be driving the Potter phenomenon.
According to Richard Abanes, the Hogwarts books are “filled with potentially harmful messages exalting occultism and moral relativism.” Abanes is dismayed by the many parallels between the authors of the magical textbooks Harry studies and the names of historical occultists, and hints that J. K. Rowling may be more involved in contemporary witchcraft than she admits. He speaks of “the very tangible possibility that many children will become so enthralled with magic and wizardry that they will seek out the paganism that is available in the real world.”
Abanes also complains that Harry Potter, Ron, and Hermione are not model children. They break rules, disobey orders, and sometimes conceal their rebellious behavior by lying. Moreover, “they are often rather proud of themselves and their misdeeds.” The books contain what he calls “countless examples of behavior that parents would deem less than admirable, ....” This is quite true, and is probably one of the reasons for Harry Potter’s popularity with kids; it is also in the great tradition of children’s literature. Tom Sawyer and his friends drink, smoke tobacco, swear, and play truant from school. In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy refuses to do housework for the Wicked Witch of the West, and Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden disobeys and deceives adults, finding her way not only into the forbidden garden but into the room of her invalid cousin Colin, whose bedridden existence has been concealed from her. Books like these do not present their child characters as perfect and obedient, but as curious, independent, and enterprising.
The world of Narnia is simple and eternal: goodness, peace, and beauty will eventually triumph. The world of Harry Potter is complex and ambiguous and fluid. And in this, of course, it is far more like our own world, in which it is not always easy to tell the ogres from the gentle giants. When we choose books for our children, do we want them to teach obedience to authority or skepticism, acceptance of the status quo or a determination to change what needs to be changed?
Joanne Rowling’s own story, like Harry’s, is in the classic European folklore tradition. As almost everyone now knows, when she was working on Philosopher’s Stone, she was a young single mother with long red hair, living on public assistance in Edinburgh. Because her flat was unheated, she would put her small daughter into a stroller and push her about the streets until the child fell asleep. Then she would go to a cafe, order a cup of coffee, and write.
Rowling’s fairy goodmother was the Scottish Arts Council, which gave her a grant that made it possible for her to finish the first volume. But even then she had trouble getting transportation to the ball. Nine English publishers rejected Philosopher’s Stone before Bloomsbury took it, and her editors had no idea it would be a success. At first they made no special attempt to promote the book, and printed only a small number of copies.
Now, of course, all that is history. At one point the first three volumes of the series were number one, two, and three on best-seller lists. This annoyed publishers of adult fiction so much, and their protests were so vociferous, that the editors of the paper finally agreed to begin listing juvenile bestsellers separately. The first volume has been translated into (at last count) twenty-eight languages. A plain-cover edition has also appeared in England, for adults who are embarrassed to be seen reading a children’s book. Though this edition costs two pounds more than the original, it very soon sold twenty thousand copies.
In the fall of 2001 the Warner Brothers film of Sorcerer’s Stone (US title) opened to generally good reviews and crowds of fans. To accompany the release there were Harry Potter T-shirts, lunch boxes, video games, and action figures. There were also even more interviews with J. K. Rowling, and more intrusive articles about her life.
For Rowling herself this was clearly not an unmixed blessing. In the fourth volume of the series, Goblet of Fire, Harry and Hermione are persecuted by the repellent Rita Skeeter, a scandal-sniffing female reporter for the tabloid Daily Prophet, who does her best to persuade their friends to betray personal secrets, and nearly causes a disaster.
Whatever she feels about all this attention and success, the folktale heroine J. K. Rowling, once a welfare mother, has clearly now become a fabulously rich princess. Will she now find true love and live happily ever after? Will she be destroyed by the curses of religious fundamentalists, or fall under the spell of wicked merchandisers and publicists? Her story promises to be almost as interesting as the future adventures of Harry Potter himself.
Not all classic children’s books, of course, present nature as wholly benevolent or even manageable. In the tales of J. R. R. Tolkien, for instance, some trees, like Treebeard, are wise and good; others are malevolent. I love willows, which here in Ithaca are the first to put out leaves in the spring and the last to lose them in the fall. But in English folk tradition, as Tolkien knew, the willow plays an ambiguous role, and his willows are dangerous. This is also true in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, where the Whomping Willows delight in slapping and hitting anyone who gets too close to them.
