We are about to enter the time of superlatives. Although JK Rowling’s publisher has been cagey about what we should expect after last weekend’s release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, we know we are on course once more to experience a record-breaking publishing phenomenon.
The book will have an initial print run of more than 10-million in the United States — the biggest first printing of any book, ever. The previous volume, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, was the fastest-selling book in history, shifting more than five million copies in a single day.
Although we can measure the size of the phenomenon by crunching numbers, that doesn’t help us to understand why Harry Potter stands quite so large in our culture. And Harry is not alone — in a way, his success only serves to echo and reinforce the equally unexpected breakthrough of The Lord of the Rings 50 years ago. That, too, was conceived for children but then came to define, in defiance of critical opinion, what many adult readers were looking for.
Alongside Rowling and JRR Tolkien in the children’s sections of bookshops are, of course, many other writers who have created similarly detailed magical universes. Yet there are only two others, Philip Pullman today and CS Lewis in Tolkien’s day, who have managed to break into the imaginations of grown-ups as well as children with irrefutable force.
Their appeal is being underlined, right now, by their reinvention in the cinema. While Peter Jackson’s vision of the Lord of the Rings faded out 18 months ago, audiences can expect the Chronicles of Narnia to begin at the end of this year, Pullman’s His Dark Materials to start next year and Harry Potter to go on and on.
It remains hard for critics to explain the size of this phenomenon without patronising these audiences. Many observers have put the popularity of these books among adults down to mere infantilism. But it is still worth asking why so many readers should feel this abiding need to crawl into burrows and magical wardrobes.
Even when they do not topple all the way into fantasy land, you often see novelists finding a way of sneaking a little magic into their narratives. This kind of magic is not like the unpredictable enchantments of the magic realist writers — it is always reassuring, muffling rather than sharpening the problems of everyday life.
But none of these books is as reassuring as the grand fantasy worlds, whose writers answer a particular yearning. Above all, these books comfort readers against the harshness of a secular world. Although rationalism has captured minds in the West, it has not captured hearts on quite the same scale. It is tough to live in a world where there is no grand force that cares for your existence, no sense of purpose to the universe. Even if you were brought up on very high-minded atheism, as I was, you can still find a totally rationalist world a rather dry and quiet place.
Pullman, who describes himself as agnostic and sees ”no evidence of a god whatsoever”, gives voice to what it is like to feel that god-shaped hole when one of his characters, Mary Malone, describes how she once wanted to be a nun: ”What I miss most is the sense of being connected to the whole of the universe. I used to feel I was connected to God like that, and because he was there, I was connected to the whole of his creation.”
That isn’t to say Pullman’s books, or those of a Christian writer such as Lewis, give readers a direct substitute for monotheistic religion. Because, while you could say that these books fill a god-shaped hole, you could equally say that they fill a wizard-shaped hole, or a dragon-shaped hole. For in these books the supernatural is not confined to some distant force off in the sky — it is howling and mewling and roaring all around the characters, in talking eagles and stones and rings and wands and swords of power. Even Lewis, the most Christian writer of the lot, celebrates not a monotheistic but an animistic universe in Narnia. The rupture between pagan and Christian Europe was a harsh one, in which pagan believers were violently persecuted; in the Narnia books we find a happy continuum between pagan and Christian beliefs.
Gorgeous as all these playful encounters between angels and witches, shamans and talking animals clearly are, the heavy hand of prophecy always drives the most popular of these recent fantasy worlds. Frodo’s mission to destroy the ring is enunciated in typically portentous rhetoric: ”If I understand aright all that I have heard, I think that this task is appointed for you, Frodo; and that if you do not find a way, no one will.”
By the end of Rowling’s last volume, Dumbledore had replayed the words of the prophecy for a reluctant Harry: ”The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches … either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives.”
The sense of order expressed by such prophecies gives a religious tone to these fantasies, leading to a very particular view of heroism. In order to fulfil their destiny and re-assert the order of the universe, Frodo must give up the ring, while Pullman’s Will and Lyra must give up their love. And we are gradually learning that Harry Potter’s heroism is going in the same direction.
With the repetition of this idea that true heroism is about pity and love, it is becoming clearer that the books will only end with some supreme sacrifice from Harry. Will he have to break his wand? Return to the Muggle world? Or is there some other sacrifice being prepared that we cannot yet imagine?
It is hardly new to suggest that art is stepping into the places that God has vacated — Wagner said more than a century ago that ”when religion becomes artificial, it is for art to salvage the essence of religion”. But it is crucial to remember that, however far they go in filling spaces religion once filled, these books do so in the spirit of entertainment, not doctrine.
Much as we may enjoy them, such tales do not stand as old myths stood. They demand nothing from us. We can create clubs to admire them, but not churches to channel their authority. Even those that lay claim to being religious allegories are tales to comfort, not commandments to live by, as easily sampled by atheists as by believers.
You could say that it is infantile of readers to enjoy them, but you could also say that it is very grown-up of those readers to satisfy their infantile desires in children’s books, rather than holy books. — Â