You can’t, as they say, argue with success, and there’s no doubt that J. K. Rowling’s success has been phenomenal. She is now a very rich woman and that’s before she has finished the series. Not only has her boy hero made her rich, he has also given her the chance to tell the BBC what to do–a rare and wonderful privilege. Rowling would only allow the Corporation to broadcast the boy wizard’s adventures if the tale was uninterrupted. So Stephen Fry read Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone from start to finish on Boxing Day and netted one and a half million young listeners. The New York Times Parent’s Guide to the Best Books for Children ends its Harry Potter entry, “Read ’em all. In order.” But the judges of the Whitbread Book Award, one of the foremost UK literary prizes, passed Harry Potter by. Despite having sold 833,000 hardback copies since July 2000, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire did not even make the short list and one judge was quoted as saying that it “wasn’t up to it.” No doubt J. K. Rowling was able to bear this with the equanimity colossal commercial success tends to impart, but it was certainly a sizeable put-down.
So if it is not literary merit that sells the books, then what is it that does? They are first and foremost extremely approachable. There is not a lot of difficult vocabulary. The most challenging words in the books tend to be those Rowling has invented — witches’ charms, the names of the Houses at Hogwarts, the names of some of the characters — but for the most part the books’ diction is easy and seldom polysyllabic. A child with a fairly low reading age would not find the pages a challenge. This is immediately attractive. The story is accessible without overmuch effort. But then so is Alice in Wonderland.
Once more she found herself in the long hall, and close to the little
glass table. “Now I’ll manage better this time,” she said to herself, and
began by taking the little golden key, and unlocking the door that led
into the garden. Then she set to work nibbling at the mushroom (she
had kept a piece of it in her pocket) till she was about a foot high;
then she walked down the little passage: and then — she found herself
at last in the beautiful garden, among the bright flower- beds and the
cool fountains.
So we can’t take Rowling to task for not demanding more of her readers. As great writers before her have done, she makes it easy for them to enter her world.
This approachability extends to the characters. Harry himself is a nice straightforward boy and (leaving aside the ability to travel via chimneys and cook by magic) his best friend Ron Weasley’s family is similarly perfectly ordinary, i.e., there are too many children for the budget, Dad is overworked, Mum keeps the show on the road and they are a happy lot. Hermione, third member of the central triumvirate, is a grind whose parents are dentists (and nonmagic Muggles), but she is also loyal and true. Of the staff at Hogwarts, Professor Dumbledore, the Headmaster, is a genial, wise father figure, Hagrid the giant game-keeper, a burly loveable chap with a heart of gold, and Professor McGonagall, though strict, is always fair-minded. Even the bad guys are standard issue. Draco Malfoy is the snobbish sneerer beloved of all writers of boarding school stories, and his lieutenants, Crabbe and Goyle, are the thickoes who always trail along behind such a fellow. So far, so straightforward. Harry is also obliged to spend time with the Dursleys, his uncle and aunt and revolting cousin Dudley, grotesques who could well have stepped fully-fledged from the pages of Roald Dahl. Over the course of the four volumes a large cast of characters emerges — elves, trolls, goblins, mad professors and the like — all of whom are easy to understand or recognize. Gilderoy Lockhart in The Chamber of Secrets is one more blowhard; Rita Skeeter, in The Goblet of Fire , a tabloid muckraker with an appalling prose style and ethics to match. There are a lot of those about. So it is not hard for the reader to catch hold of the players. Even the blackest of all — Lord Voldemort, or He who-must-not-be-named, a.k.a. as You-Know-Who — is not someone it takes long to get to know. He is unspeakably evil, has orphaned Harry and, as his final revenge, is plotting a comeback to finish him off. Harry has a permanent souvenir of his childhood encounter with Voldemort: his forehead bears a lightening-flash scar, which throbs agonizingly when danger from the Dark Lord is close. Voldemort strikes terror into every heart.
So both language and character are easily absorbed. But there is more to success than this. It is not, I think, the magic that does it. Magic has been around for a long time. How about this?
For a few moments, Diamond seemed to be borne up through the
depths of an ocean of dazzling flame; the next, the winds were
writhing round him like a storm of serpents. For they were in the midst
of the clouds and the mists, and they of course took the shapes of the
wind, eddying and wreathing and whirling and shooting and dashing
about like grey and black water, so that it was as if the wind itself had
taken shape, and he saw the grey and black wind tossing and raving
about like grey and black water, so that it was as if the wind itself had
taken shape, and he saw the grey and black wind tossing and raving
most madly all about him. Now it blinded him by smiting him upon the
eyes; now it deafened him by bellowing in his ears; for even when the
thunder came he knew now that it was the billows of the great ocean
of the air dashing against each other in their haste to fill the hollow
scooped out by the lightning; now it took his breath quite away by
sucking it from his body with the speed of its rush. But he did not
mind It. He only gasped first and then laughed, for the arm of
North Wind was about him and he was leaning against her bosom.
Magic, in 1871, from George Macdonald’s At the Back of the North Wind. Magic is nothing new. Alice, The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, Cinderella, Snow White, The Phoenix and the Carpet — the magic list is endless. And how about all those cartoon characters? Smashed to smithereens, splintered beyond repair, up they pop, bold as brass, in the next frame.
It is the word cartoon that holds the clue. Much has been made of the fact that the Harry Potter series has taken children back into the wonderful world of reading. Countless tots now long for nothing more than to curl up in bed with a book. But what is reading? What is it for? As a child, out of sheer desperation I would read the back of the cereal packet, just to feel the print going into my eyes. I don’t think it did much for my overall literacy. It wasn’t really reading, just word gobble.
The same might be said of these four books. They are the direct result of television, comic books, and newspaper strips. The Independent on Sunday put it well: “Like Gameboys, Teletubbies and films by George Lucas, Harry Potter has permeated the national child consciousness.” Event follows relentlessly upon event, as J. K. Rowling conjures up yet another Hippogrif, Grimm or Basilisk, another feast of “Blocks of ice-cream in every flavour you could think of, apple pies, treacle tarts, chocolate eclairs and jam doughnuts, trifle, strawberries, jelly, rice pudding …”, another ghost or ghoul, another magic device, another game of Quidditch. Nothing happens as a result of character, many episodes are irrelevant to the basic plot. The books feel more and more like pieces of string, joined together with random knots, until, at the final chapter, there is enough to roll up into a ball.
What, for example, is the point of Gilderoy Lockhart, featured in The Chamber of Secrets? He in no way advances the plot and serves merely as a page-filler. That’s not to say he isn’t quite a good joke, but he is a superimposed joke, not an intrinsic and necessary part of the tale. The same could be said of the Knight Bus in The Prisoner of Askaban, or the camping episode in The Goblet of Fire. They are funny, but they don’t move us along. Perhaps the most striking example of sacrificing character to plot requirements comes in The Chamber of Secrets. Here a sequence of nasty events — strangled roosters, a petrified cat, an attacking serpent, terrifying writing on the wall — all turn out to have been the work of Ginny Weasley, young sister of Harry’s best friend Ron. But as she was enchanted at the time, she is not responsible and after a rest she feels “perfectly happy again.” This is the Agatha Christie school of cheating – the murderer is always the person beyond suspicion. The reader, paying attention and trying to solve a mystery, has been shortchanged.
Some might argue that over the course of the four stories there is change. But it is cosmetic. Students develop crushes on each other, they use cooler slang, their magical abilities become more sophisticated. But they do not change. Even supercilious Draco Malfoy only manages to play slightly nastier practical jokes (that usually fail) and develop a more vicious tongue. Despite always being presented as a most unpleasant piece of work he never does anything of consequence. Hermione acquires a social conscience, but it only sends her back to the library for research. The plots themselves involve death, fraud and family betrayal. There is an attempt at class consciousness, Ron and Harry quarrel and, at one point, nobody will even speak to Harry. But it all passes. Nor does Harry himself change. At the end of the last book he is once again off to spend his summer holidays with his loathesome relations. Having managed to defy death at the hands of You-Know-Who several times by this stage, it would not be beyond him, surely, to decide he would rather go somewhere else.
But Harry must go back to Privet Drive, for what we have here is a formula. In each book the gameplan is as clear-cut as are the rules of Quidditch. Trial and tribulation, interspersed with jokes (some of them rather good), mistaken identity, further unravelling of the past, all lead to another triumph for Harry. Harry Potter four, Voldemort nil. There is never a doubt in the reader’s mind but that Harry will win through. Harry may be apprehensive, but we are not. In Aspects of the Novel E. M. Forster wrote of how “tell us a story” was whispered by cavemen at night around the fire, asking “and then, and then, and then?” He goes on to make the point that the great story makes us ask “why? why? why?” and that the transition from “what next” to “why on earth?” is where art begins. In none of the Harry Potter books do we ever ask “why?”
J. K.Rowling deserves her success. I had rather be tied to a wheel of fire than have to sit down and push the saga of Harry through to its conclusion. More jokes required, more ordeals, more spells, more words before Lord Voldemort can bite the dust. More conversations with publisher, agent, and film producer, more marketing, more product. For the Harry Potter series is a marketing triumph. Books are under embargo,then released simultaneously country-wide, while children camp on pavements to be sure to have the unattainable under their arms before it’s sold out and they are the odd one out in the classroom — from the publisher’s point of view it is almost as good as selling state-of-the-art trainers. But I do not think the end of the story will be a dramatic change in children’s reading habits. Libraries will not be filled with kids weeping over the death of Little Nell, or wondering if Romeo and Juliet are going to get it together. Harry Potter is a craze — who knows what the next one will be?
There is perhaps a lesson to be learned here. When I read the first book, by far the best, formulaic, humorous, and inconsequentially alarming, it reminded me of the stories I used to tell my daughter, making them up in the dark before she went to sleep. Eventually, peaceful breathing would mean enough coincidences and surprises had been pulled out of the air until the next night. Maybe that’s something parents could be doing more?