The Hindu : Real magic?

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jul 05, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Real magic?

By Hasan Suroor

Clearly, there is something about the Potter story that has cast a spell on millions of young readers cutting across linguistic, cultural and geographical barriers.

A GENUINE mass literary phenomenon? Or a huge marketing rope trick? That's the big question being asked as millions of children around the world pore over "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix", latest in the Harry Potter series of books, which, in an unprecedented sales frenzy, became a worldwide best-seller within hours of its dramatic midnight release last month.

Six years after the first Potter book was published , blazing a new trail in children's literature, they now even have a name for it — the Potter Phenomenon. It has been a commercial sensation in the history of modern publishing, giving a new lease of life to a one-time ailing Bloomsbury which is expected to show a £15-million profit this year, thanks to the Potter series.

And J. K. Rowling, once an unemployed and struggling single mother, is now estimated to be worth more than the Queen of England. It has transformed her personal life so dramatically that she "dreads" a life after Harry Potter which is just two books away.

When she sat down to write the first Potter book, she had just been through a broken marriage and was living on dole. She wrote the book in long hand, sitting in a coffee shop because she could not afford a computer. It was the most depressing period of her life, and even in her wildest fantasies — the stuff the Potter books are made of — she couldn't have conjured up a future in which she would be the "king" of the literary market.

As magic wands go, the Harry Potter magic has clearly worked wonders for anyone who has been touched by it. A multimillion-pound merchandise industry has sprung up around the Potter adventures with children and adults alike queuing up to buy Harry Potter t-shirts, mugs, caps, masks, pencil-sharpeners, ash trays, broomsticks. Some of the more obscene ones such as a Potter lavatory seat and Potter toilet roll were shot down by an angry Ms. Rowling when she discovered what was going in the name of promoting the book.

Mention Harry Potter, and statistics leap at you from all sides: the first four novels sold nearly 200 million copies in 55 languages and 200 countries; the previous Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" was the "fastest-selling book in history"; the latest tome was the "most pre-ordered book in history" with the online bookseller, Amazon, alone ordering more than one million advance copies; and with 100,000 copies sold within hours of its release, it broke all records for a single-day sales in Britain. It has helped HMV, which owns Britain's Waterstone's bookstore chain, make a profit of £96 million and generally given a boost to summer spending.

More: the film adaptations of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" (released in India with a different name) and "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" were the biggest box-office grossers for any children's films; and the buzz has already started about the next Potter film, "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban". As an example of hardcore marketing and a belligerent media hype, the Potter Phenomenon is hard to beat, and one day when hopefully marketing boys are feeling a little low, it might be used to perk them up.

So, what's it that makes Harry Potter tick? I must admit that I have read only one Potter book and that too only partially but clearly there is something about the Potter story that has cast a spell on millions of young readers cutting across linguistic, cultural and geographical barriers. There is no doubt that Ms. Rowling has immense talent for story-telling (it is not easy for adults to write for children, and it is even more difficult to write from their perspective) but the key to her success lies in her ability to excite children's imagination and their craving for fantasy in an age of almost stifling logic and political correctness, particularly in the West. Here was a fairy tale, teeming with witches and wizards that offered children the time of a lifetime to escape into a world of magic and fantasy. And they lapped it up.

And once the book caught on in the West, the Third World had to follow suit. How could the Westernised Third World elite not keep up with what was "in" in London and Paris? But "literary" merit is only half the story that lies behind the Potter Phenomenon. The real half is how it was marketed. The first book sold on its own strength, but the trick was to replicate its success — and it lay in generating a hype that would create so much peer pressure that any child, who did not possess a Harry Potter book or did not see a Potter film, would feel "left out" — not part of the crowd, a "nerd". The queues of sleepy children we saw outside British bookstores in the middle of the night to get a copy of the latest Potter book shows how well the trick has paid off.

Meanwhile, for those brought up on an idea of Britain that had more than just a whiff of cultural and intellectual snobbery, it must be a little unsettling to see that one of the most visible symbols of modern Britain currently is not its ancient universities, or Shakespeare, or even cricket, but the adventures of a fictional magical wizard of the kind Indian grandmothers once routinely invoked to send naughty children to bed.

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