Part of the secret of Rowling’s success is her utter traditionalism. The Potter story is a fairy tale, plus a bildungsroman, plus a murder mystery, plus a cosmic war of good and evil, and there’s almost no classic in any of those genres that doesn’t reverberate between the lines of Harry’s saga. The Arthurian legend, the Superman comics, “Star Wars,” “Cinderella,” “The Lord of the Rings,” the “Chronicles of Narnia,” “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” Genesis, Exodus, the Divine Comedy, “Paradise Lost”—they’re all there. The Gothic paraphernalia, too: turreted castles, purloined letters, surprise visitors arriving in the dark of night, backed by forked lightning. If you take a look at Vladimir Propp’s 1928 book “Morphology of the Folk Tale,” which lists just about every convention ever used in fairy tales, you can check off, one by one, the devices that Rowling has unabashedly picked up. At the beginning of the story, Propp says, the villain harms someone in the hero’s family. (The evil wizard Voldemort murdered Harry’s good-wizard parents when the boy was a year old, and tried to kill him, too.) The hero is branded. (Voldemort’s attack left Harry with a scar in the shape of a lightning bolt on his forehead.) The hero is banished. (Harry is forced to go live with his loathsome aunt and uncle, the Dursleys.) The hero is released. (Harry is finally informed that he is a wizard, and goes off to live at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.) The hero must survive ordeals, seek things, acquire a wise helper, all of which Harry does. The villain must change form and leave bloody trails; Voldemort obliges. According to Propp, a fairy tale is supposed to end with the hero’s marriage, but Rowling may break ranks here. She has said that the series will be seven novels long, one for each of Harry’s years at Hogwarts. He started there at age eleven, so he will be seventeen when we say goodbye to him. In the line in front of Books of Wonder, there was heated speculation as to who is going to end up as Harry’s girl. (I say Ginny Weasley.) I doubt we’ll have a wedding, though. Seventeen’s a little young.
So Rowling’s books are chock-a-block with archetypes, and she doesn’t just use them; she glories in them, plays with them, postmodernly. At the Dursleys’ house, Harry lives in a cupboard under the stairs, with spiders. Rowling is also a great showoff when it comes to surprise endings, and this, I think, is actually a fault of the books, or of the last two. The dénouements last for pages and pages, as red herrings are eliminated, false identities cleared up, friends unmasked as foes, and vice versa. Not only is this too complicated, the surprises are too surprising. How can Sirius Black, who has been stalking Harry throughout “The Prisoner of Azkaban,” turn out to be a good guy—indeed, the boy’s godfather? How can Scabbers, whom we have known and loved for three volumes as a dusty, useless little rat, snoozing in the sun, emerge at the end of that book as a deep-dyed villain in disguise? It seems to invalidate all our prior experience of the series. Not to speak of the sheer confusion. Faced with the equally counterintuitive revelations at the end of “The Goblet of Fire,” Harry thinks, “It made no sense . . . no sense at all.” I agree with him, but apparently we’re in a minority.
Rowling has said that she has no trouble at all thinking herself back to age eleven, and the novels show it. There are toilet jokes, booger jokes. There is a ball game, Quidditch—with four kinds of players (all flying on brooms) and three kinds of balls—that sounds as though it were made up by a clever eleven-year-old. And the books are filled with children’s problems. Do you have bad dreams? Did you find your Christmas presents rather a letdown? Do you hate the new baby in your house? Do you wish you had different parents? Is there something weird that lives under your bed and makes noises at night? If so, Joanne Rowling is thinking about you. Best of all is her treatment of the social nightmares of the schoolyard: cliques, bullying, ostracism, kids who like to remind you that your family doesn’t have much money. Such problems are perhaps more pressing in the English boarding school, on which Hogwarts is modelled. (Last year, in the Times Book Review, Pico Iyer claimed that Hogwarts was a near-exact replica of Eton, where he did his time.) But the situation clearly rings a bell with Rowling’s American readers, too.
More, even, than the Potter books’ sensitivity to preteen terrors, it is their wised-upness, their lack of sentimentality, that must appeal to Rowling’s audience. However much they have to do with goodness, these are not prissy books. Harry lies to adults again and again. He also hates certain people, and Rowling hates them, too. Uncle Vernon Dursley is not only cruel; he spits when he talks. Harry says the Dursleys wish him dead, and he’s right. As for the forces of good, they are often well out of reach. In “The Sorcerer’s Stone” there is a heart-stopping scene in which Harry comes upon a mirror, the so-called Mirror of Erised, and sees his dead parents in it. His father waves at him; his mother weeps and smiles. Reading this, you think, Oh, good, thank God—Harry’s not really alone, not really an orphan. Yes, he’s being hunted down by a remorseless villain—in each of the books, Voldemort pursues him—but his parents’ spirits are there to protect him. Then Dumbledore, Hogwarts’s wise headmaster, appears and tells Harry that the Mirror of Erised shows us not what is but what we desire. (Read “Erised” backward.) Harry is alone.
The great beauty of the Potter books is their wealth of imagination, their sheer, shining fullness. Rowling has said that the idea for the series came to her on a train trip from Manchester to London in 1990, and that, even before she started writing the first volume, she spent years just working out the details of Harry’s world. We reap the harvest: the inventory of magical treats (Ice Mice, Jelly Slugs, Fizzing Whizbees—levitating sherbet balls) in the wizard candy store; the wide range of offerings (Dungbombs, Hiccup Sweets, Nose-Biting Teacups) in the wizard joke store. Hogwarts is a grand, creepy castle, a thousand years old, with more dungeons and secret passages than you can shake a stick at. There are a hundred and forty-two staircases, some of which go to different places on different days of the week. There are suits of armor that sing carols at Christmastime, and get the words wrong. There are poltergeists—Peeves, for example, who busies himself jamming gum into keyholes. We also get ghosts, notably Nearly Headless Nick, whose executioner didn’t quite finish the job, so that Nick’s head hangs by an “inch or so of ghostly skin and muscle”—it keeps flopping over his ruff—thus, to his grief, excluding him from participation in the Headless Hunt, which is confined to the thoroughly decapitated.
The Hogwarts staff is a display case all its own: Mad-Eye Moody, the professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts, who, apart from his ocular problems, has a chunk of his nose missing and a wooden leg ending in a clawed foot; Rubeus Hagrid, the gentle-giant gamekeeper, with his pet, Norbert, a baby dragon, whom he feeds a bucket of brandy mixed with chicken blood every half hour. Norbert isn’t the only monster. There are also centaurs, basilisks, and hippogriffs, together with hinkypunks, boggarts, and, my favorites, the grindylows. Harry encounters his first grindylow in a tank in a professor’s office: “A sickly green creature with sharp little horns had its face pressed against the glass, . . . flexing its long spindly fingers.” (Later, the grindylow shakes its fist at him.) To deal with such encounters, and other life events, the students must learn many spells: “Expelliarmus,” to get rid of something; “Waddiwasi,” to extract gum from keyholes; “Peskipiksi Pesternomi,” to make pixies leave you alone. Hogwarts is a whole, bursting world.
Most of Rowling’s characters are types, and excellent as such, but some rise to a richness beyond the reach of British central casting. Voldemort, for example. When he failed to kill the infant Harry, Voldemort was disempowered, and it is in this weakened state that we first encounter him in “The Goblet of Fire.” But he isn’t just weak. He is—grotesquely, disgustingly, terrifyingly—a baby: “hairless and scaly-looking, a dark, raw, reddish black. Its arms and legs were thin and feeble, and its face—no child alive ever had a face like that—flat and snakelike, with gleaming red eyes.” Soon—as soon as he is immersed in a potion made from Harry’s blood and someone else’s hacked-off hand and various other ingredients—he becomes his adult self again, which is not so handsome either, but that first sight of him, that little red thing, swaddled in blankets, is a triumph of horror fiction.
It’s horror with a difference, though. Rowling’s favorite writer, she has told interviewers, is Jane Austen. She also loves Dickens. And it is in their bailiwick—English morals-and-manners realism, the world of Pip and Miss Bates, of money and position and trying to keep your head up if you have neither—that she scores her greatest victories. A nice example is the scene, in “The Sorcerer’s Stone,” where Harry and Ron meet for the first time, on the train that is taking them, as entering students, to Hogwarts. Each is handicapped. Harry, though he is famous throughout the wizard world (because, as an infant, he repelled Voldemort’s attack), and though he has a pile of gold left to him by his parents, is without family and utterly ignorant of wizardry. Ron comes from a long line of wizards, and he has family galore, but that is his problem: five older brothers, no position. He is always dressed in hand-me-downs; his mother always forgets what kind of sandwich he likes; he has no spending money. Together, in the train compartment, the two boys comfort and help each other. Harry shares the wizard candies he buys from the vender (he can afford them); Ron explains the wizard trading cards that come with the candies (he understands them). Harry gives Ron prestige; Ron gives Harry a sense of belonging. All this is done very Englishly, very subtly, in small gestures, but in the end each boy, because of the other, arrives at Hogwarts slightly better armed against the harshness of the world.
The subject of the Harry Potter series is power, an important matter for children, since they have so little of it. How does one acquire power? How can it be used well, and ill? Does ultimate power lie with the good? (In other words, is there a God?) If so, why is there so much cruelty around? These are questions that Milton, among others, addressed before Rowling, and she is not ashamed to follow in their wake. Voldemort is an avatar of Milton’s Lucifer; Dumbledore of Milton’s God, who so mysteriously permits evil in the world.
Each of the novels approaches the problem from a different angle. The first, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” is heroic. We meet our champion; he is a child; we watch him grow into competence and faith. The second volume, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” is quite different: secular, topical, political. Sexism is not a major problem at Hogwarts. The school is coed. Several of the Quidditch champions are girls. Harry’s friend Hermione, the know-it-all girl, the hand-up-in-class girl—Rowling has said she based the character on herself as a child—is not forced to go through the Katharine Hepburn treatment (take off her glasses, unpin her hair) before she becomes likable. But racism is a problem at Hogwarts. Yes, the student body includes Cho Chang and Parvati Patil and Dean Thomas, who has dreadlocks. (Rowling forgot about a few other groups, though. I would not have minded if the evil Professor Snape had not had a hook nose, greasy black hair, and sallow skin—standard features of the rapacious Jew—or if the chief villain of “The Sorcerer’s Stone” had not worn a purple turban, been prone to faint and weep, and had the name Quirrell, which is rather close to “queer.”) But the wizard world is in the grip of an overarching race war, a campaign to rid wizardry of those with Muggle, or non-wizard, blood. This ethnic-cleansing campaign, led by Voldemort, is the subject of “The Chamber of Secrets.” It fails, but only for the time being. We will hear about it again.
The strangest volume is the third, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” the psychological installment, featuring a pack of demons—operating at Voldemort’s bidding—who are the most frightening monsters in the series so far. These are the Dementors: huge, cloaked, faceless creatures, with rotting hands, who, if they get you, clamp their jaws on your mouth and suck out of you every thought of happiness. The Dementors represent depression. Actually, if I’m not mistaken, they represent a specific, British theory of depression—John Bowlby’s theory that loss of a parent in early childhood is a major risk factor for that disorder. At age one, Harry lost both his parents. (I don’t know much about Rowling’s childhood, but she has told interviewers that she suffered a period of depression as an adult, and had to get professional help.) In any case, the Dementors are after Harry, and he escapes them only with the help of a teacher named Lupin. To Lupin alone can he fully confide his fears, and Lupin’s teachings are the closest thing, in the Potter series, to overt psychological counselling of child readers. At the end of “The Prisoner of Azkaban,” this nice man turns out to be a werewolf (Rowling’s antisentimentality again), but he’s a good werewolf.
The new book, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” is the central pillar of the projected series of seven and is thus a transitional volume. It introduces many new subjects, notably sex. (Harry is fourteen now, and mightily taken with Cho Chang.) Also, the politics become more ambitious. Rowling now asks her readers to consider the cynicism of government officials, the injustice of the law courts, the vagaries of international relations, the mendacity of the press, even the psychology of slavery. (“They’re happy,” Ron’s brother says of the house-elves. Hermione does not agree.) This is a great, toppling heap of subjects, and Rowling takes seven hundred and thirty-four pages to deal with them. (Has there ever before been a children’s story seven hundred and thirty-four pages long? What confidence!) Where the prior volumes moved like lightning, here the pace is slower, the energy more dispersed. At the same time, the tone becomes more grim. Voldemort has been restored to power. Things will now become harder for Harry, and for all the wizard world. Dumbledore says so.
There is much for Rowling to resolve in the remaining volumes, above all the question about power—is it reconcilable with goodness?—that she poses in the first four books. Already in “The Sorcerer’s Stone,” Quirrell says, “There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.” As Harry has grown, he has become more powerful and ambitious and, at the same time, more virtuous. In “The Goblet of Fire,” as in all the books, there is a big contest, which Harry longs to win. The contest is in three parts, and in each part, lest we miss the point, Rowling shows Harry handicapping himself, hurting his chances of victory, out of concern for others. He wins, but how will he do, thus compromised by altruism, in future contests? Remember: Voldemort is back.
Even more interesting, however, is a strange matter—something about the kinship of good and evil—that Rowling has been hinting at since the beginning of the series. Harry and Voldemort have a lot in common. Both have Muggle blood; both are orphans. Their wands contain feathers from the same phoenix. When they meet in armed combat in “The Goblet of Fire,” their wands, as they touch, produce a single stream of light, which binds them together. There is some connection between these two. (Shades of “Star Wars.”) I don’t know what Rowling has in mind here. Maybe it’s the Miltonic idea of evil as merely good perverted. Or maybe not.
But that is the main virtue of these books, their philosophical seriousness. Rowling is a good psychotherapist, and she teaches excellent morals. (Those parents who have objected to the Potter series on the ground that it promotes unchristian values should give it another read.) She also spins a good yarn. Undoubtedly, it is Voldemort and the Dementors and the grindylows that have gotten these books translated into forty languages and won them sales, before “The Goblet of Fire,” of more than thirty million copies. But her great glory, and the thing that may place her in the pantheon, is that she asks her preteen readers to face the hardest questions of life, and does not shy away from the possibility that the answers may be sad: that loss may be permanent, evil ever-present, good exhaustible. In an odd, quiet moment in “The Goblet of Fire,” Harry stands alone in Hogwarts’s Owlery, gazing out into the twilight. He sees his friend Hagrid digging in the earth. Is Hagrid burying something? Or looking for something? Harry doesn’t know, and for once he doesn’t investigate. He seems tired. He just stays there, watching Hagrid, until he can see him no more, whereupon the owls in the Owlery awaken and swoosh past him, “into the night.” In this volume, some darkness has fallen. With the light—the next three books—new griefs will surely come. ♦
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