Potter Mania

 

 

POTTER MANIA
Books: The Harry Potter books have been the quintessential stomach churner, jaw dropper, that fills every writer's dream notebook

By Geeta Doctor

Great Goblets of Fire! Harry Potter's done it again. Ten hours after it was released in a small town in Pennsylvania, an owl hooted. It was the witching hour predicted by the wizard of media power, Marshall McLuhan. The world had been shrunk into a village so small, you could hold it in your hand and whisper in its ear, 'Harry Potter is back.'

Best Buy: Penny Calomiris (r) buys eight copies of Goblet of Fire at the Barnes and Noble Bookstore, Maryland, at midnight on July 8.

My midnight caller from Pennsylvania had just confirmed what we all knew was going to happen. Victory bonfires were being lit from one dark mountain top to another, as the news travelled along the invisible channels of communication, flowing through the ether, through sound waves, underground cables, antennae, through cyber space, in a revolution more potent than any conventional magic. The global village was in thrall.

Children were lined up outside selected bookshops, waiting to storm the bastion. Just as their grandparents might have boasted, 'I lived through the battle of the Somme,' they would one day be able to tell their future offspring, 'I was there when the fourth Harry Potter was launched.'

Since the decade which declared the 'End of History' had more or less written its obituary, it has been left to fiction to create its own version of potted (pun intended) history. It's a non-event of such spectacular dimension, that like the Millennium mania, the 'rivers of fire', 'night of a thousand stars', 'celestial showdown with a Comet' type of hype, it now ranks as an historical benchmark in its own right.

Long before the launch, the advance frenzy had assured that thanks to e-tailing and the Amazonian attractions of the online bookshop, 40,000 advance orders had been placed.

Only four people in the world had apparently had access to the book, which like the underground vault, Gringotts in Potterland, had been safely deposited in a real-life bank vault. 'Everything seems so real,' a child is quoted to have exclaimed, as he pored through the latest book. The opposite may be said of the marketing strategy for the fourth Potter. 'Everything looks so magical.'

This blurring of the lines between what we know to be just a children's book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and the extraordinary sense of expectation it has created is what makes the event so fascinating. Every year, from the time the first book was released in 1997 (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone) there has been a new Potter. Yet no one who has read the book so far has denied that it was every bit as exciting as it was supposed to be. 'It was absolutely enthralling,' said my late night confidante. 'It's massive, 640 pages for the hard-cover, but I could not put it down. Harry Potter just gets better every time.'

The Potter books have been the quintessential page turner, stomach churner, jaw dropper, that fills every writer's dream notebook. 'What about the death of a major character, can you tell me who it is ?' I asked. 'Muggle!' she hissed. 'Only a Muggle could ask such a question,' she cried. Thanks to Harry Potter, 'Muggle' has become the favoured term of abuse, the way 'bourgeois' used to be some years back.

Is this what the whole saga is about? The class war newly minted, with Harry Potter as the little people's hero, waiting in a quiet English suburb of Thatcherian omnipotence to take his place in Tony Blair's spin-doctored egalitarian world? Notice, for instance, what images we are fed of Potter's creator, the elegantly anonymous, J.K. Rowling. She's a single mother, we are continually reminded, who used to live on welfare, struggling to write her masterpiece sitting in the public arena of whatever pub or diner that she could find on the streets of Edinburgh, just to keep warm.

The mystery that surrounds her even as her creature has appeared on the cover of some of the best-known magazines around the world only adds to her allure. She's like the 'Golden Snitch' in the famous Quidditch matches that resound through the different books, like magical Olympiads between the good guys and the bad.

The Golden Snitch is a ball, no large than a walnut, that hovers in the air like a puffball, with tiny fluttering silver wings. As Harry has found to his chagrin, the Golden Snitch has a teasing way of suddenly appearing within sight and just as suddenly veering off into the atmosphere and disappearing beyond reach. That's exactly the effect that Rowling seems to have on the public. She appears very briefly, when a book is about to be launched, and tells you just the bare minimum that she can about her creation. She says that she's just as mystified as everybody else about the response to her book. 'I just wrote the sort of book that I would like to read,' is all that she will admit.

As this deliciously percipient paragraph in the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone describes it, the archetypal Muggles, Harry's uncle and aunt, the model for the new Conservatives liberated into capitalist bondage by the Thatcher era, have no clue of what is about to happen to them. 'When Mr and Mrs Dursley woke up on the dull, grey Tuesday our story starts, there was nothing about the cloudy sky outside to suggest that strange and mysterious things would soon be happening all over the country. None of them noticed a large tawny owl flutter past the window.'

The quiet weaving together of extraordinary and the occult, with the everyday and the ordinary is what makes the Harry Potter adventures so compelling. It will no longer be possible for anyone who's read the book to stand at King's Cross station, London, and not feel like stepping through the barriers between the platforms nine and ten and hop onto the Hogwarts Express.

Rowling is Mary Poppins without the Edwardian smarminess and the syrupy songs. She creates a magical fantasy world, where anything can happen, and children can take a train to a boarding school where the magical arts are part of the regular curriculum, but she's much more rooted in today's world of realpolitik. The rich boys, Draco Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle are as recognisably nasty as any real-life brats, who rely on their fathers' money and position to back them.

The terror unleashed by the Lord of darkness, Voldemort is much more mysterious and malevolent than anything that you might normally find in a children's book. He has the 'motiveless malignity' of the thwarted individual, we have so often been witness to, in the last century as the television screens have relentlessly beamed down images of the neighbourhood child molester and paedophile, the random killer of children in a kindergarten school, the self-motivated messiahs who destroy others for the sheer excitement of the act.

Indeed, part of the fascination of the Potter saga has been the relentless battle with evil. If there has not been a continual slithering under the bed of all manner of creatures that creep around in the night, that takes place in the corridors of Harry's boarding school, the surrounding countryside is filled with steamy vapours caused by the mysterious 'Dementors', woods that suck people into their depths and enough bogs and lakes to give Scotland a boost as the new Transylvannia.

Rowling wears her knowledge of magical arcana lightly, but she's obviously read up on the subject of the alternate lifestyles of werewolves, vampires, hounds from heaven, magic two-way mirrors, damps spirits hiding in the water closet, like the delightfully named, 'Moaning Myrtle' to keep academics busy for the next two decades, when they start de-constructing the Muggle era.

It's not surprising that some people have already begun to demand a ban on the book in some schools in North America, as being a walk too far on the side of Satan and his gang. The fourth book shows Harry engaged in yet another struggle against Voldemort. Each time, a little more of his own life story is revealed. In knowing the enemy, he also begins to know himself. If there is a conscious exploration of the magical side of life, however, it is a variety of Earth magic, a reaction perhaps to the extreme materialism of the Dursleys and the Muggle world.

This could also explain the potent charm of the book world-wide, if we go beyond the power of the market to influence parents and sell the books. Every culture recognises the subterranean forces that a familiarity with magic implies. Even if they may not be familiar with the griffins, the unicorns, the dragons that are very casually summoned up to view, as the pets that inhabit the forest in which Hagrid the gamekeeper lives, the idea of these hybrid creatures are very much there, in the collective unconsciousness, as Carl Jung might say.

Notice for instance, this description of a monster that guards a trapdoor in the first book. 'They were looking straight into the eyes of a monster dog, a dog which filled the whole space between the ceiling and the floor. It had three heads. Three pairs of rolling mad eyes, three noses twitching and quivering in their direction, three drooling mouths, saliva hanging in slippery ropes from yellowish fangs.' This is writing at its simple best, both comic and horrible at the same time, with its evocation of a wildly dribbling mastiff . A child will thrill at the idea of its triple heads, just as in so many descriptions of primitive villains, the legends emphasise the multiple heads and quivering hands of the anti-hero.

Having got her larger universe of the Muggle world and Harry Potter's magical world finely meshed, so that like Alice in Wonderland, another enduring myth of childhood, her hero can weave in and out of the loops, Rowling also possesses the comic gift of the typical English writer of being able to create an excitement just in the naming of names. There are wonderfully suggestive names, Snape, Lupin, Quirrel, Peeve, that tug at the memory long after they have vanished from sight.

She has some deliciously disgusting food items that the children manage to share between them. Her magic seems to lie in making her stories complex enough to snare readers into that state of suspended child-like wonder, when you look into the dark and ask yourself, 'What next?' And yet simple enough to satisfy that most discerning of readers, today's child.

wizard

 

The real Rowling
The first two novels she wrote were for adults which never got published. So it is ironic that J.K. Rowling, 34, should end up writing primarily for children. She says she did not plan it that way, it just happened. After leaving Exeter University, where she read French and Classics, she started work as a teacher but daydreamed about becoming a writer. One day, stuck on a delayed train for four hours between Manchester and London, she dreamt up a boy called Harry Potter. That was in 1990. For the next five years Rowling worked on Book One and plotted out the whole series, comprising seven novels, one for each year Harry spends at Hogwarts. In the meantime, she went to teach in Portugal, married a Portuguese TV journalist, had her daughter, Jessica, divorced her husband and returned to Britain when Jessica was just three months old with no job in hand.

J.K Rowling waves goodbye to fans as her train leaves King's Cross in London

Rowling's sudden penury made her realise that it was 'back-against-the-wall time' and she decided to finish her Harry Potter book. She could not face her cold and miserable flat, so she would walk the streets of Edinburgh, pushing Jessica in a buggy until she fell asleep, and would then rush into a cafŽ and write for two hours, the baby sleeping next to her. Once the matter was ready, she typed out two manuscriptsÑshe could not afford to photocopy itÑand sent them to two agents in London whom she had picked out of a yearbook in the local library. The rest is history.

Rowling says the urge to be a writer came to her early, during what she describes as a 'dreamy' internal childhood. She began writing stories when she was six. She also read widely, whipping through Ian Fleming at age nine. Sometime later she discovered Jane Austen, whom Rowling calls 'my favorite author ever".
Her first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, won the Smarties PrizeÑthe children's equivalent of the BookerÑand sold 70,000 copies in Britain. It was sold to eight other countries, netting a $100,000 advance for the American edition, a huge sum for a first novel, unheard-of for a children's novel.
Sangeeta John

 The Week (Jul 17, 2000)

 

Home Up Potter Mania Four's a Charm Goblet of Fire The magic lives on Trouble with Harry Hoopla


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Revised: October 09, 2000 .