Hatred and evil of this kind will never succeed.” It’s Theresa May speaking as yet another wave of hatred hits London. It could well be a phrase taken out of Harry Potter. The invidious rise of the individual against the system. The outsider challenging the nanny state that Britain represents. London Bridge is falling down and there are no fair ladies waiting for it to be built up. London the city and what it represents is an icon of normality ripe for destruction. That is the horror of our times.
It makes the rise of Harry Potter, the eponymous hero of the seven-book saga that’s trawled the world, something of a prophetic tale. As young wizards and witchlets raise their wands on the 20th anniversary of his arrival as the 12-year-old orphan, who is the designated hero of our times, we ask ourselves: are we hooked on Harry Potter because of the magic of his personality?
Do we huddle in our caves because Dumbledore, the headmaster at Hogwarts, tells us: “It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.” In the midst of chaos there is literature.
In as many ways as you can cry “Lumos!” or let there be light, J.K. Rowling has illuminated the imagination of people across the world with her deft juggling of genres.
As the publishing figures get ready for another stratospheric leap and the first editions of The Philosopher’s Stone are being sold for $45K, we cannot help but put on our ‘Sorting Hats’, Hogwarts style of course, and wonder: have we been blindsided into buying the myth due to the marvels of global marketing or are we hooked on Potter because of other magical reasons.
So far, so Cinderella
The author of what has easily become one of the world’s most spectacular publishing ventures is something of a legend herself. The first image of her should warm the elastic of any would-be writer’s innerwear. A single mother with a small child, Rowling sat in a café just to keep warm while typing out her manuscript. Her first draft did the rounds of publishers before Bloomsbury saw its magical quality and swiped it. Hurrah! So far, so Cinderella.
Or to quote Rowling: “I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”
Harry is saved in his first encounter with the motiveless malignity of Voldemort, the epitome of evil who destroys his parents. But Lily has encased him with love and that memory remains to save him. The image of mother-love is invoked as tenderly as any visual representation of the Holy Mother and Child. So far, so Madonna.
Rowling’s latest pictures show her with a golden aura around her, looking slightly bemused, but filled with the magic of one of her own words: Amortentia. It’s described as “The most powerful love potion in the world”.
In Rowling’s case it’s a love potion called success. Let it be said here that one of her best gigs has been her inventive way with words. As she has said, “Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic.” She is the high priestess of word-magic. So far, so Roald Dahl.
But what no one could have predicted is how from the very first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone— described as a children’s fantasy novel—the sales would be astronomical. The first three books in the series occupied the first three slots in the New York Times bestseller lists, with the same thing happening in the U.K. charts. The number of languages in which Harry Potter rules has risen to 76 by the last count. There are Chinese Harry Potters lurking behind the Great Wall and a Bengali version where Harry Potter bumps into a fan called Jhontu. There’s even a Harry Potter pornography site where consenting adults greet each other with the words: “Come Slyther-in and feel my wand!” The fourth book Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire roared its way to become the fastest selling book in history. The sixth book Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince sold 6.9 million copies in the U.S. in the first 24 hours.
By now lining up at the doors of bookshops before midnight with the jagged Potter scar and the round spectacles was as mandatory as the flowing gowns and witch’s hats. The merchandising industry apparated itself in all its multi-pronged glory. Not to be outdone, the Potter films franchise that followed created a bigger buzz with the real-life actors who brought their own dazzle to the Potter mystique.
The rise of the boy saviour casting spells on the populace was not without its detractors. Some saw in Harry a New Age messiah who could challenge Christian beliefs, particularly in the last book where he seems to have been killed only to rise again. There is all the business with the Horcrux that Harry has to destroy before he can tackle Voldemort. There are ostensibly six of them, each one containing a fragment of Voldemort’s essence, maybe his soul.
As British as tea
The seventh one like the Seventh Seal is lodged unknown to him in Harry himself. These do lead to interesting ideas.
Do they hark back for instance to Manichaeism and the story of the Persian prophet Mani, who started as a 12 year old? He preached the existence of good and evil in which every person was enjoined to confront the evil and fight to the end.
The darkness that overtakes the second part of the series is both thrilling from the storytelling point of view and disturbing to vigilantes who complain that children need to be protected from the idea of death and damnation that visits some of the characters. But with children being the casual victims of what we see around us—whether in attacks on civilian targets in the name of religion, whether as forced child soldiers in wars or as victims of horrible crimes of paedophilia—it is possible to ask if we can insulate them from hatred and evil merely by airbrushing the truth. Rowling is an old-fashioned storyteller in some ways. She makes horror lurking behind the dark forest a part of her landscape.
Potterheads will groan but de-constructing the myth, it’s interesting to notice how conventional the series actually is. That perhaps is its charm. It is as British as afternoon tea. Hermione warms a pot of tea when the three of them, Harry, Ron and Hermione, are huddling under an invisible tent in the middle of a dark forest in the last book while trying to hide from various ghouls. That is very reassuringly Enid Blyton. And the books, in the plot trajectories they take, are really very much a darker, magic version of Enid Blyton and her various find-outers who battle “bad people” while picnicking at various sandy beaches and caves. The Potter books revisit the Blyton theme of children foiling adult evil while adding on a Tom Brown’s School Days feel of boarding schools and the mystique of being tucked away in a dark and gloomy institution run by strange individuals.
As Thomas W. Hodgkinson commented when he was reviewing Stiff Upper Lip, a book that described the dark side of what went on in boarding schools: “But the point is that J.K. Rowling’s success is a multi-million pound proof that many children love the idea (at least) of boarding schools.” Or as someone says in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix : “Have a biscuit, Potter.” Who can resist Rowling’s offer of both the biscuit and the tin?
The author is a Chennai-based writer and critic.
