All you have to do is phone us on 015396 25321 or email davidboulton1@compuserve.com. We'll do the rest. 9 SOF 43 / September 2000 SOF 43 / September 2000 You may not have heard of Harry Potter... if you have spent the last five years sealed inside a crate in Mukden, Manchuria.
ANNE RICHARDS traces HP to his SOUrCE...
Harry Potter and the Coblet of Fire, by JK Rowling (Bloomsbury), £14.99 the world of dumbledore, voldemort and the dementors Why have adults and children everywhere been devouring this and the other Harry Potter books?
Because, in the first place, the orphaned Harry, bullied and victimised by his appalling aunt and uncle and grotesque cousin Dudley, discovers a glimpsed feeling that the world of the banal and the mundane which makes up everyday experience is not all there is.
So, for all people who long for something more, an extra dimension, the discovery of a world beyond this world, a world of magic and amazement just beyond a wall, or between two platforms at Kings Cross station, the Hogwarts fiction satisfies these deep feelings.
But this is first a “constructed” world. Hogwarts exists by magic. The sky-ceiling with its changing weather is a magic trick. Much of what exists is an illusion. Some of it is kids’ fantasy - a town where you can stuff yourself on magic sweets, a wild forest full of magic animals, ghosts and secret passages, friendly elves and passwords. This is the world of pretend and make-believe (this last a suggestive phrase!).
J K Rowling’s particular genius, however, is to get beyond this fairyland stuff and match Harry’s human thoughts and feelings, the internal discourse about his personhood and his humanity, to the magical environment. He may be a wizard but he is no Gandalf.
We may identify with his adolescent angst absolutely. In this fourth book in the series, during which we continue to grow up with him, Harry has a row with his best friend and doesn’t speak for ages but feels terrible about it. He feels intense jealousy when the girl he fancies goes out with another boy. He is touchingly embarrassed when Moaning Myrtle, a ghost of a pimply, dreary girl who haunts the girls’ toilets, finds him in the bath.
This is not superhero stuff either. Yet at the heart of Goblet of Fire is a test which asks us just who we think we ought to be. Harry is faced, not just with danger and trial, but with agonising moral decision. Nor is this merely a fairytale paradigm. Around him friends begin to explore the stories of others’ lives and to discover tragedy and inequality (why does idiotic Neville live with his grandmother?). This is nicely balanced against hurtful stories made up about Harry and his friends by a magic hack-journalist - a pretty piece of irony for today’s world.
As usual in Rowling’s books, people turn out not to be what they seem. Friends are enemies, enemies are sometimes on your side. Making your way through relationships is neither easy nor clear-cut. At the end of Goblet of Fire, Harry has to face Evil personified as Lord Voldemort. There is a death, a real death with grief, shock and mourning. Magic cannot fix this. Evil is in the world and is not always vanquished by the desire to do good. This constructed world may be the stuff of fantasy but it is not perfect. The headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, may be the God of this magic world in whom we trust, but he too suffers powerlessness and tragic loss when death comes to his school.
Yet Hogwarts is not an entirely enclosed fiction.
Christmas and Easter happen there. Magic is set within a larger epistemology which is the source of understanding good and ill. There is a sense that there is an ultimate destiny beyond even this magic world.
Evil beings called Dementors can send your eternal being to ultimate destruction. Resurrection as a magic trick is not an option, but love and sacrifice do bring renewal into the world and generate the ability to make good choices. So, is the world of magic construction, with its fantasy of magic sweets and jolly jokes, unicorns, feasts and a witch doctor who can cure all ills, complete in itself, or is there another and ultimate reality into which pain, suffering and death can be placed? Is the best there is love, or ultimately Love?
What issues from Voldemort’s wand at the point of final conflict may give clues as to how Rowling wants this question answered. Overcome your distaste for the hype: read the book and judge for yourself.
Anne Richards is Mission Theology Adviser to the Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England dot comma Baby on the way? Don’t want a christening but would like to know how to organise your own babywelcoming ceremony?