Potter’ draws on all the traditions of the children’s book, owing something to each
of the names mentioned in the last paragraph but one; and something (the scar on
Harry’s forehead) to the comic book hero Captain Marvel, whose trademark is a
lightning bolt. In George MacDonald’s story, it is the North Wind which conducts
the boy to the magical world. Access to Lewis’s Narnia was through a wardrobe;
access in Rowling is by the Hogwarts Express from Platform Nine and Three-
Quarters at Kings Cross. Lewis’s tone was rather solemn, but Rowling gets a lot of
fun out of alternating everyday suburban routines with the magical world: Potter is
a consciously ordinary name. A more sophisticated comic switching to and fro had
been perfected by T. H. White, who wrote for adults who had read Malory.
Harry Potter, for those who do not know, is an orphan, lodged with relatives, the
horrible Dursleys, who misinform him about his parents’ deaths and try to deny him
his future as a wizard. The hostile caricature of these greedy materialists is more
jarring than the cruelty of Cinderella’s elder sisters or of Dickens’s Creakles and
Murdstones. Rowling does not rise to the heights of Mrs Creakle breaking the news
to David Copperfield that his mother is dead; the Dursley treatment of Harry is
merely nasty and silly. Rowling’s magical world is well thought-out and engaging;
her own story of innocence, hard work and good fortune is like a fairy tale. The scale
of her success, due to professional promotion and the cinema, has made her many
times richer than Dickens. That is not her fault. Like Antonia Byatt and Ursula
Fanthorpe, Joanna Rowling prefixes her writing name with initials only, in her case
at the insistence of her publishers’ editor at Bloomsbury: he advised that boys of
Harry Potter’s age would never read a book written by a woman; not a view to be
cheerfully voiced in the Bloomsbury of Virginia Woolf. JKR herself also has the
commercial gift of second sight: early in the first book of the Potter saga a character
prophesies:‘He’ll be famous – a legend – I wouldn’t be surprised if today was known
as Harry Potter Day in future – there will be books written about Harry – every child
in our world will know his name.’
Why are such children’s books so successful? Classically they have a brave young
man of humble background, an evil tyrant, girls who are kind, castles, hidden treas-
ure, good magic triumphing over bad. Rowling piles the formulas on top of each
other,making Hogwarts Academy a boarding school, a castle and a school for
wizards.From the undying formulas of the boarding school story she takes faithful
friends and slimy foes, good chaps, nutty teachers, the dorm, the dining hall, snobs,
bullies, swots and crushes and their counterparts in Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers
and St Clare’s books. Skill and courage are shown in school games and in adventures
underground. JKR combines these conventions with those of children’s Gothic of
the kind once found in Blyton’s The Castle of Adventure: castle, plucky young hero,
girls who turn out to be surprisingly plucky too, forbidden knowledge, underground
passages,loyal servants; also, magic tricks, broomsticks, witches, and Evil. Birds and
animals are added, as in Pullman.
JKR is both derivative and novel. Her young readers do not know the traditions,
and she is endlessly inventive with new detail and narrative twist. She writes in an
undemanding style in the easy-reading register of children’s books; as did Lewis and,
in olden fashion, Tolkien. She is not above cliché though she has a good line in
running jokes, and in names, Malfoy, for example, and Voldemort. As in Malory, a
formulaic frictionless style helps with the relation of extraordinary things, allowing
the archetypes to operate unimpeded. JKR has Good warring with Evil in a series of
encounters. This is like a medieval Christian romance, though the cosmology is less
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