It's Witchcraft. - Review - book reviews

National Review, Oct 11, 1999 by Andrew Stuttaford

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, by J. K. Rowling (Scholastic Press,

309 pp., $17.95)

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, by J. K. Rowling (Scholastic Press, 341 pp., $17.95)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, by J. K. Rowling (Scholastic Press, 435 pp., $19.95)

It's enough to make you choke on your fava beans. In bookstore new-fiction aisles, this was meant to be the summer of Hannibal Lecter: aesthete, Renaissance scholar, and serial killer. Instead he has had to share the limelight with Harry Potter, the schoolboy hero of a series of British children's books. The second of these, The Chamber of Secrets, was released in the U.S. at about the same time as Thomas Harris's Hannibal. On September 19, more than three months later, it was Number Three on the New York Times bestseller list, five places ahead of the unfortunate Dr. Lecter. The same week, the first Harry Potter (The Sorcerer's Stone), which has been on the list for the better part of a year, came in at Number Two. That's pretty good for works of very English fantasy, and astonishing for books aimed at children. To add to the cannibal's misery, the most recent Harry Potter, The Prisoner of Azkaban, has now arrived in America, released early by its U.S. publishers as a result of the large number of copies of the British edition that were making their way across the Atlantic.

Probably by broomstick. For the Harry Potter books are about witches and wizards. In the finest tradition of children's stories, Harry is an 11-year-old orphan being brought up under appalling conditions by grotesque relatives. But, as always in these tales, our hero discovers that he has another, greater destiny. To find his future, Arthur pulled a sword out of a stone. Young Potter just receives letters, hundreds of them, delivered by owls. Harry Potter, it turns out, is a wizard, and he is required to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Not least because he has an enemy, Voldemort (the splendidly chosen names are one of the strengths of these books), a great wizard who has gone over, as George Lucas would recognize, to the dark side. Voldemort was responsible for the deaths of Harry's parents and wants to finish off the son. If Harry is to survive, he will need all the training he can get in the magical arts. The books (there will eventually be one for each of the seven years Harry is due to spend at Hogwarts) detail his adventures at the school and the intensifying struggle with the forces of the wicked Voldemort.

So far, so good, but this is unexceptional stuff, not enough to explain why so many people are wild about Harry. Part of the answer, of course, lies in skillful marketing, not only of the novels but their author. And why not? Hers is a story almost as magical as Harry's.

J. K. Rowling was a divorced single mother on welfare at the time she wrote The Sorcerer's Stone, mainly, it is said, in an Edinburgh cafe (her apartment was too cold). A Kinko's Cinderella, she couldn't even afford to photocopy her manuscript. She typed it out twice on, naturally, a battered old typewriter. In interviews she comes across as a pleasant sort, the only worrying note coming when she describes her books as "moral."

Moral? In the sanctimonious world of contemporary children's literature, that's a frightening word, all too often a synonym for "politically correct." Rowling does her best to oblige. Minority characters are carefully included in a saga that is otherwise inescapably Anglo-Saxon. Unusually for an English boarding school, Hogwarts is coeducational. Its principal sport, the enjoyably savage Quidditch (a sort of aerial hockey), can be played by both sexes. Harry's boarding house includes girls on its team: Their unpleasant opponents at Slytherin House do not.

It's no surprise, therefore, when Rowling reveals leftish social prejudices all too typical of the British intelligentsia. Harry's main rival at the school, nasty Draco Malfoy is-two strikes-both rich and aristocratic. Meanwhile, the dysfunctional Dursleys, Harry's ghastly family, are a caricature of the vicious bourgeoisie that would have delighted Vyshinsky. They are contrasted with the poor-but-happy Weasleys, a wizard household that befriends Harry. Old man Dursley is a brutish capitalist, director of a company that makes drills. The Bob Cratchit-like Mr. Weasley, on the other hand, is a good-government type, a noble, underpaid bureaucrat at the Ministry of Magic.

But by the standards of our irritating era this is mild. Neither Harry nor any of his circle appears to have two mommies, inner-city malaise is confined to the sinister folk in Knockturn Alley, and no one hugs a Whomping Willow tree (it would hit back). The Potter phenomenon is, in fact, reassuring. The lad's no pinko. There is plenty here for the more traditionally minded, and tradition sells, it would seem. Part of the appeal of these books is that they offer fantasy, but within a reassuring structure. There are rules.

Hogwarts School is strict, and its exams are tough. Strip away the contemporary trimmings, and the reader is left with a rather old-fashioned English boarding-school tale, even down to the feasts. Harry "had never seen so many things he liked to eat on one table: roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, fries, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup, and for some strange reason, peppermint humbugs." This is not a school for our tofu times.