Barbara Ludman
HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN by JK Rowling (Bloomsbury)
The newest Harry Potter hit the shelves this month, drawing South Africa into the Pottermania that has been sweeping American and British bookshops for the past couple of months. A few weeks ago, if you’d told a school librarian you had a copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban you’d have seen an urgent gleam in her eyes – “Is it out? Where can I get it? My sons are fighting over who gets to read it first.” S’true. Actual conversation, circa mid- September.
For an adult who wants to know what the kids are up to, the Harry Potter books should actually be read in order. The best is the first, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, an astonishing, well-written, moving and funny tale of a mistreated orphan boy who’s rescued by Britain’s secret community of witches and wizards and whisked off to boarding school to learn the art.
Wonder is piled upon wonder. The train that takes Harry and his fellow wizards- in-training to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is boarded at King’s Cross Station on an invisible Platform Nine and Three Quarters. The student wizards get there by walking through the solid ticket barrier dividing Platforms Nine and Ten when none of the Muggles – that’s the rest of us, the non- wizards – are watching.
There are fantastic things to eat on the train, like Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans, which come in ordinary flavours, like chocolate and peppermint but also in liver and spinach and – if you’re very unlucky – in vomit flavour. There are fabulous pets – strange cats, cowardly rats, toads and owls, who aren’t messengers of doom but merely messengers, carrying packages and letters from home. There are magical creatures – a baby dragon, a three-headed dog (called Fluffy), a bad-tempered spider the size of an elephant.
There are diaries that talk back, pictures whose subjects go off to tea with one another (“Do you mean Muggle pictures don’t move?” asks one astounded youngster from an all-wizard family), chess pieces that give the player advice.
There’s the oddest teaching staff one will ever encounter, including a ghost – a teacher who had died giving a lecture so boring that nobody, not even the teacher himself, noticed he’d gone incorporeal. There’s splendid advice: “Never trust anything that can think for itself, if you can’t see where it keeps its brain,” advises Harry’s best friend’s father.
And there’s a truly evil villain, a brilliant wizard who went over to the Dark Side soon after graduation from Hogwarts, tried to kill baby Harry after finishing off his parents, and is still after Harry, one way and another. The element of danger runs through all three of the Harry Potter books. (The second, if you’re looking for it, is called Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.)
A parallel world, adventure, humour pitched at the level of the ideal reader – a 12-year-old boy – plus insights the reader’s parents will appreciate – one might say the books have traces of Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University, Roald Dahl’s wicked humour and the breakneck adventure of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The books may be a bit too long, a bit too British, and the wands and broomsticks used by witches and wizards seem oddly out of place to a reader in Africa. But the rest of this parallel world rings true on a continent where conversing with the spirit world is not unusual. And the characters – from Harry himself, a scrawny, dark-haired boy, to his snobbish enemy, Draco Malfoy, and the school swot, Hermione Granger – are universal.
Judging by the speed with which these books disappear off the shelves of the few libraries with the money to buy them, the Harry Potter books fulfil a crucial need: despite the competing charms of cyberspace, television, magazines and video games, these are books that boys – and girls – actually read.
More pity, then, that Warner Brothers has bought the rights to the series. Look for a Spielberg spectacular – but make sure the books are around before the kids discover how much easier it is to watch Harry Potter than to read about him.