For that reason, I awaited this summer's installment in J. K. Rowling's magical saga with almost as much interest as any Potter-besotted kid. I had enjoyed the first three, but had read the latter two while taking enough painkillers to levitate a horse. This summer, that's not the case.
I'm relieved to report that Potter 4 -- ''Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire'' -- is every bit as good as Potters 1 through 3. It's longer, though. ''Goblet'' is as long as ''Chamber'' and ''Prisoner'' combined. Is it more textured than the first three? More thought-provoking? Sorry, no. Are such things necessary in a fantasy-adventure aimed primarily at children and published in the lush green heart of summer vacation? Of course not. What kids on summer vacation want -- and probably deserve -- is simple, uncomplicated fun. ''Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire'' brings the fun, and not just in stingy little buckets. At 734 pages, ''Goblet'' brings it by the lorry load.
Puns and giggles aside, the story happens to be a good one. We may be a little tired of discovering Harry at home with his horrible aunt and uncle (plus his even more horrible cousin, Dudley, whose favorite PlayStation game is Mega-Mutilation Part 3), but once Harry has attended the obligatory Quidditch match and returned to Hogwarts, the tale picks up speed.
In a Newsweek interview with Malcolm Jones, Rowling admitted to reading Tolkien rather late in the game, but it's hard to believe she hasn't read her Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Although they bear the trappings of fantasy, and the mingling of the real world and the world of wizards and flying broomsticks is delightful, the Harry Potter books are, at heart, satisfyingly shrewd mystery tales. Potter 3 (''Azkaban'') dealt with Harry's parents (like all good boy heroes, Harry's an orphan) and cleared up the multiple mysteries of their deaths in a way that would likely have pleased Ross Macdonald, that longtime creator of hidden pasts and convoluted family trees.
Now, returning to Hogwarts after attending the Quidditch World Cup, Harry and his friends are excited to learn that the Triwizard Tournament is to be reintroduced after a hiatus of 100 years or so (too many of the young contestants wound up dead, it seems). Aspiring wizards from two other schools (Beauxbatons and the amusingly fascistic Durmstrang Academy, location unknown) have been invited to spend the year at Hogwarts and compete in the contest, which is composed of three beautifully imagined tasks. These can only be performed well by contestants who can solve the riddles that bear on them; both children and students of Greek mythology will enjoy this aspect of Rowling's tale.
Like the Sorting Hat, one of Rowling's early ingenious bits of invention, the Goblet of Fire is essentially a choosing device. It's supposed to spit out three flaming bits of parchment bearing the names of the three contestants in the tournament, one entrant from each school. In a vivid and marvelously tense scene, the Goblet of Fire spits out four parchment fragments instead of three. The fourth, of course, bears the name of Our Hero. Although Harry is supposedly too young to compete in such a dangerous series of tilts, the Goblet has spoken, and of course Harry must step into the arena. If you think young readers won't lap this up, you never had one in your house (or were one yourself). Adults are apt to be more interested in just how Harry's name got into the Goblet in the first place. This is a mystery Rowling works out with snap and verve. And, unlike the denouements I remember from the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries of my youth, where the culprit usually turned out to be some vile tramp of the lower classes, the solution to the Goblet mystery, like the answers to the Triwizard riddles, struck me as fair enough.
A long the way, Rowling gives us Harry's first date (not with the alluring fifth-level dream girl Cho Chang, unfortunately), at least one thought-provoking subplot (involving house-elves who rather enjoy their status as kitchen slaves) and an extremely large dose of adolescent humor (one mildly off-color joke, punning on the word Uranus, will likely go over the heads of most grade-school readers and amuse the brighter junior high school set). There's also a moderately tiresome amount of adolescent squabbling. Adults can safely speed through these bits; it's a teenage thing.
Can anyone wonder at the fabulous sales success of these books? The Harry Potter series is a supernatural version of ''Tom Brown's Schooldays,'' updated and given a hip this-is-how-kids-really-are shine. And Harry is the kid most children feel themselves to be, adrift in a world of unimaginative and often unpleasant adults -- Muggles, Rowling calls them -- who neither understand them nor care to. Harry is, in fact, a male Cinderella, waiting for someone to invite him to the ball. In Potter 1, his invitation comes first by owl (in the magic world of J. K. Rowling, owls deliver the mail) and then by Sorting Hat; in the current volume it comes from the Goblet of Fire, smoldering and shedding glamorous sparks. How nice to be invited to the ball! Even for a relatively old codger like me, it's still nice to be invited to the ball.
It would be depressing to announce that the best-selling book in the history of the world, a position this book will probably hold only until Potter 5 comes along, is a stinker. ''Goblet of Fire'' is far from that. Before Harry appeared on the scene, escape-hungry kids had to make do with R. L. Stine, the uninspired but wildly successful journeyman who inspired the ''Goosebumps'' phenomenon. Rowling's books are better natured, better plotted and better written. They bulge with the sort of playful details of which only British fantasists seem capable: there's the Whomping Willow, which will smash hell out of your car (and you) if you get too close to it, snack foods like Cauldron Cakes and Licorice Wands and the satisfyingly evil Lord Voldemort (so evil, in fact, that most of Rowling's characters will only call him ''You-know-who''). The Dursleys, Harry's unpleasant guardians, explain the boy's long absences by telling their friends that Harry attends St. Brutus's Secure Center for Incurably Criminal Boys. And the book opens with the murder (offstage, don't worry) of a witch named Bertha Jorkins. Rowling doesn't exactly come out and say it's what the unfortunate Bertha deserves for taking her vacation in Albania, but she certainly implies it.
Is there more going on here than fun? Again, not much. In a good deal of British fantasy fiction, the amusing inventions are balanced by themes of increasing darkness -- Tolkien's ''Rings'' trilogy, for instance, in which the fascism of Mordor begins as a distant bad smell on the breeze and develops into a pervasive atmosphere of dread, or C. S. Lewis's Narnia books, in which the writer's religious concerns invest what begin as harmless make-believe adventures with a significance that becomes, in the end, almost unbearable (and to this reader, rather tiresome). Taken to its extreme, the id of British fantasy produces a Richard Adams, where the unfortunate talking dogs Snitter and Rowf suffer almost unspeakable hardships and the bear-god Shardik comes to stand for all the promises religion ever made and then broke; where every sunlit field of scampering rabbits conceals its shining wire of death.
In Rowling's work, such shadows can be perceived, but they are thin shadows, quickly dispelled. Harry's adventures remain for the most part upbeat and sunny, despite the occasional cold pockets of gruel; more Lewis Carroll than George Orwell. The British fantasy they may actually be closest to is J. M. Barrie's ''Peter Pan.'' Like any school, where the clientele is perpetually young and even the teachers begin to assume the immature psychological characteristics of their pupils, Hogwarts is a kind of Never-Never Land. Yet Harry and his friends show some reassuring signs of growing up eventually. In the current volume there is some discreet necking, and at least a few sorrows and disappointments that need coping with.The fantasy writer's job is to conduct the willing reader from mundanity to magic. This is a feat of which only a superior imagination is capable, and Rowling possesses such equipment. She has said repeatedly that the Potter novels are not consciously aimed at any particular audience or age. The reader may reasonably question that assertion after reading the first book in the series, but by the time he or she has reached ''Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,'' it becomes increasingly clear that the lady means what she says. Nor can there be any question that her stated refusal to dumb down the language of the books (the current one is presented with such British terms as petrol, pub and cuppa unchanged) has lent the stories an attraction to adults that most children's novels simply don't have.
...And so now the hurly-burly's done, the battle's lost and won — the Battle of Hogwarts, that is — and all the secrets are out of the Sorting Hat. Those who bet Harry Potter would die lost their money; the boy who lived turned out to be exactly that. These books ceased to be specifically for children halfway through the series; by Goblet of Fire, Rowling was writing for everyone, and knew it.
The clearest sign of how adult the books had become by the conclusion arrives — and splendidly — in Deathly Hallows, when Mrs. Weasley sees the odious Bellatrix Lestrange trying to finish off Ginny with a Killing Curse. ''NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!'' she cries. It's the most shocking bitch in recent fiction; since there's virtually no cursing (of the linguistic kind, anyway) in the Potter books, this one hits home with almost fatal force. It is totally correct in its context — perfect, really — but it is also a quintessentially adult response to a child's peril.
... very few mainstream writers, from Salon to The New York Times, have really stopped to consider what Ms. Rowling has wrought, where it came from, or what it may mean for the future. The blogs, by and large, haven't been much better. They seem to care about who lives, who dies, and who's tattling. Beyond that, it's all pretty much duh. So what did happen? Where did this Ministry of Magic come from?
Well, there were straws in the wind. While the academics and bighead education critics were moaning that reading was dead and kids cared about nothing but their Xboxes, iPods, Avril Lavigne, and High School Musical, the kids they were worried about were quietly turning on to the novels of one Robert Lawrence Stine. Known in college as ''Jovial Bob'' Stine, this fellow gained another nickname later in life, as — ahem — ''the Stephen King of children's literature.'' He wrote his first teen horror novel (Blind Date) in 1986, years before the advent of Pottermania...but soon you couldn't glance at a USA Today best-seller list without seeing three or four of his paperbacks bobbing around in the top 50.
These books drew almost no critical attention — to the best of my knowledge, Michiko Kakutani never reviewed Who Killed the Homecoming Queen? — but the kids gave them plenty of attention, and R.L. Stine rode a wave of kid popularity, partly fueled by the fledgling Internet, to become perhaps the best-selling children's author of the 20th century. Like Rowling, he was a Scholastic author, and I have no doubt that Stine's success was one of the reasons Scholastic took a chance on a young and unknown British writer in the first place. He's largely unknown and uncredited...but of course John the Baptist never got the same press as Jesus either.Rowling has been far more successful, critically as well as financially, because the Potter books grew as they went along. That, I think, is their great secret (and not so secret at that; to understand the point visually, buy a ticket to Order of the Phoenix and check out former cutie Ron Weasley towering over Harry and Hermione). R.L. Stine's kids are kids forever, and the kids who enjoyed their adventures grew out of them, as inevitably as they outgrew their childhood Nikes. Jo Rowling's kids grew up...and the audience grew up with them.
This wouldn't have mattered so much if she'd been a lousy writer, but she wasn't — she was and is an incredibly gifted novelist. While some of the blogs and the mainstream media have mentioned that Rowling's ambition kept pace with the skyrocketing popularity of her books, they have largely overlooked the fact that her talent also grew. Talent is never static, it's always growing or dying, and the short form on Rowling is this: She was far better than R.L. Stine (an adequate but flavorless writer) when she started, but by the time she penned the final line of Deathly Hallows (''All was well.''), she had become one of the finer stylists in her native country — not as good as Ian McEwan or Ruth Rendell (at least not yet), but easily the peer of Beryl Bainbridge or Martin Amis.
And, of course, there was the magic. It's what kids want more than anything; it's what they crave. That goes back to the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and good old Alice, chasing after that wascally wabbit. Kids are always looking for the Ministry of Magic, and they usually find it.
One day in my hometown of Bangor, I was walking up the street and observed a dirty-faced boy of about 3 with scabbed knees and a look of extreme concentration on his face. He was sitting on the dirt strip between the sidewalk and the asphalt. He had a stick in his hand and kept jabbing it into the dirt. ''Get down there!'' he cried. ''Get down there, dammit! You can't come out until I say the Special Word! You can't come out until I say so!''
Several people passed by the kid without paying much attention (if any). I slowed, however, and watched as long as I could — probably because I have spent so much time telling the things inhabiting my own imagination to get back down and not come out until I say so. I was charmed by the kid's effortless make-believe (always assuming it was make-believe, heh-heh-heh). And a couple of things occurred to me. One was that if he had been an adult, the cops would have taken him away either to the drunk tank or to our local Dreamboat Manor for a psychiatric exam. Another was that kids exhibiting paranoid-schizophrenic tendencies are simply accepted in most societies. We all understand that kids are crazy until they hit 8 or so, and we cut their groovy, anything-goes minds some slack.
This happened around 1982, while I was getting ready to write a long story about children and monsters (It), and it influenced my thinking on that novel a great deal. Even now, years later, I think of that kid — a little Minister of Magic using a dead twig for a wand — with affection, and hope he didn't consider himself too old for Harry Potter when those books started appearing. He might have; sad to think so, but one thing J.R.R. Tolkien acknowledges that Rowling doesn't is that sometimes — often, really — the magic goes away.
It was children whom Ms. Rowling — like her Fear Street precursor, but with considerably more skill — captivated first, demonstrating with the irrefutable logic of something like 10 bazillion books sold that kids are still perfectly willing to put aside their iPods and Game Boys and pick up a book...if the magic is there. That reading itself is magical is a thing I never doubted. I'd give a lot to know how many teenagers (and preteens) texted this message in the days following the last book's release: DON'T CALL ME TODAY I'M READING.The same thing probably happened with R.L. Stine's Goosebumps books, but unlike Stine, Rowling brought adults into the reading circle, making it much larger. This is hardly a unique phenomenon, although it seems to be one associated mainly with British authors (there was Huckleberry Finn, of course, a sequel to its YA little brother Tom Sawyer). Alice in Wonderland began as a story told to 10-year-old Alice Liddell by Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll); it is now taught in college lit courses. And Watership Down, Richard Adams' version of The Odyssey (featuring rabbits instead of humans), began as a story told to amuse the author's preteen daughters, Juliet and Rosamond, on a long car drive. As a book, though, it was marketed as an ''adult fantasy'' and became an international best-seller.
Maybe it's the British prose. It's hard to resist the hypnotism of those calm and sensible voices, especially when they turn to make-believe. Rowling was always part of that straightforward storytelling tradition (Peter Pan, originally a play by the Scot J.M. Barrie, is another case in point). She never loses sight of her main theme — the power of love to turn bewildered, often frightened, children into decent and responsible adults — but her writing is all about story. She's lucid rather than luminous, but that's okay; when she does express strong feelings, she remains their mistress without denying their truth or power. The sweetest example in Deathly Hallows comes early, with Harry remembering his childhood years in the Dursley house. ''It gave him an odd, empty feeling to remember those times,'' Rowling writes. ''[I]t was like remembering a younger brother whom he had lost.'' Honest; nostalgic; not sloppy. It's a small example of the style that enabled Jo Rowling to bridge the generation gap without breaking a sweat or losing the cheerful dignity that is one of the series' great charms.
Her characters are lively and well-drawn, her pace is impeccable, and although there are occasional continuity drops, the story as a whole hangs together almost perfectly over its 4,000-plus page length.
And she's in full possession of that famously dry British wit, as when Ron, trying to tune in an outlaw news broadcast on his wizard radio, catches a snatch of a pop song called ''A Cauldron Full of Hot Strong Love.'' Must have been some witchy version of Donna Summer doing that one. There's also her wry send-up of the British tabloids — about which I'm sure she knows plenty — in the person of Rita Skeeter, perhaps the best name to be hung on a fictional character since those of Jonathan Swift. When Elphias Doge, the perfect magical English gentleman, calls Rita ''an interfering trout,'' I felt like standing up and giving a cheer. Take that, Page Six! There's a lot of meat on the bones of these books — good writing, honest feeling, a sweet but uncompromising view of human nature...and hard reality: NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH! The fact that Harry attracted adults as well as children has never surprised me.
Are the books perfect? Indeed not. Some sections are too long. In Deathly Hallows, for instance, there's an awful lot of wandering around and camping in that tent; it starts to feel like Ms. Rowling running out the clock on the school year to fit the format of the previous six books.
And sometimes she falls prey to the Robinson Crusoe syndrome. In Crusoe, whenever the marooned hero requires something, he ventures out to his ship — which has conveniently run aground on the reef surrounding his desert island — and takes what he needs from stores (in one of the most amusing continuity flubs in the history of English literature, Robinson once swims out naked...then fills his pockets). In much the same manner, whenever Harry and his friends get into a tight corner, they produce some new spell — fire, water to douse the fire, stairs that conveniently turn into a slide — and squiggle free. I accepted most of these, partly because there's enough child in me to react gleefully rather than doubtfully (in a way, the Potter books are The Joy of Magic rather than The Joy of Cooking) but also because I understand that magic is its own thing, and probably boundless. Still, by the time the Battle of Hogwarts was reaching its climax of clumping giants, cheering portraits, and flying wizards, I almost longed for someone to pull out a good old MAC-10 and start blasting away like Rambo.
If all those creative spells — produced at the right moment like the stuff from Crusoe's ship — were a sign of creative exhaustion, it's the only one I saw, and that's pretty amazing. Mostly Rowling is just having fun, knocking herself out, and when a good writer is having fun, the audience is almost always having fun too. You can take that one to the bank (and, Reader, she did).
One last thing: The bighead academics seem to think that Harry's magic will not be strong enough to make a generation of nonreaders (especially the male half) into bookworms...but they wouldn't be the first to underestimate Harry's magic; just look at what happened to Lord Voldemort. And, of course, the bigheads would never have credited Harry's influence in the first place, if the evidence hadn't come in the form of best-seller lists. A literary hero as big as the Beatles? ''Never happen!'' the bigheads would have cried. ''The traditional novel is as dead as Jacob Marley! Ask anyone who knows! Ask us, in other words!''
I began by quoting Shakespeare; I'll close with the Who: The kids are alright. Just how long they stay that way sort of depends on writers like J.K. Rowling, who know how to tell a good story (important) and do it without talking down (more important) or resorting to a lot of high-flown gibberish (vital). Because if the field is left to a bunch of intellectual Muggles who believe the traditional novel is dead, they'll kill the damn thing.
It's good make-believe I'm talking about. Known in more formal circles as the Ministry of Magic. J.K. Rowling has set the standard: It's a high one, and God bless her for it. (this is a combination of two essays written by Stephen King)
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