/ 3 October 2006

Sustaining the magic

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

JK Rowling

(Bloomsbury)

So is this a childish phenomenon or an adult one? One may be arrested, as I was, by the image, during a break in British TV coverage of a cricket match, of a Marylebone Cricket Club member about a third of the way through Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (some 12 hours after the book’s publication); but the truly extraordinary thing about it is that it is not all that extraordinary. One has become used to the spectacle of adults reading JK Rowling’s work in all kinds of public places, unembarrassed about being seen immersing themselves in a world of spells. It is a phenomenon that one struggles to imagine the more austere cultural critics commentating on without perplexity.What would Walter Benjamin have had to say about it? Or Karl Kraus? That its popularity is a symptom of a mass regression to infancy, perhaps? It may constitute a desire for a temporary flight from adulthood, but that isn’t exactly the same thing. And besides, what highbrow critic ever dismissed Wagner because of his use of magical elements? (‘Tristan is rubbish because it has a love potion in it. Discuss.”)Still, much of the criticism levelled against Rowling does seem to fall under the heading ‘category error”. To complain about her — shall we say — conservative imagination, her somewhat stilted dialogue or, as one critic cruelly put it, her ‘mumsy and artless prose”, is to miss the point.The target audience, semi-officially, is in the nine-to-12 age range, and on those terms the books are infallible. They deliver. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix also delivers more of the same, a shade more grown-up, with extra explanation of the back- story. The book’s prodigious size has proved an asset rather than a handicap. Although my heart does go out to all those parents who will be obliged to read the book aloud, Phoenix can be raced through fairly quickly by the solitary reader, which is itself a testament to the fluency of Rowling’s narrative. As for ‘mumsy and artless” — that was my line when I compared Rowling unfavourably with Ursula le Guin, who also wrote a series of books beginning with a young would-be adept being sent to wizard school to enhance and discipline his power, and learn to confront his destiny. But reading this book has made me realise that the comparison is specious — the two authors are barely involved in the same process at all. All children’s authors have to take their worlds immensely seriously, and that is about all that Rowling and Le Guin have in common once you have noted the superficial similarities. Le Guin writes seriously; Rowling writes just the way an 11-year-old would ideally like to write. That said, the learning process throughout Potter is slow. We have lapsed behind real time now; Harry is 15, in the fifth year, while his readers have aged two extra years since his last appearance; and one may wonder at Harry’s continuing amazement when an abandoned phone-box turns out to be a lift leading to the Ministry of Magic. Harry’s amazement is Rowling’s anticipation of her ideal reader’s, a self-conscious attempt to work up our awe. It is one of the curious features of the series that Harry’s speeches almost always sound stilted and gawky. There is an unavoidable element of redundancy to them, as the whole sequence is already chiefly about the processes of his mind.The people to watch out for and relish are Harry’s friends, the Weasley twins and Hogwarts headmaster Dumbledore. The twins’ appetite for practical jokes has neither diminished nor, to my surprise, become tiresome. ‘I think we’ve outgrown full-time education,” says Fred at a moment of supremely conceived anarchy, and only the extremely churlish would fail to be delighted at the manner of their departure from the school. If one pole of Rowling’s imagination is the comic mayhem of the Weasleys, the other is Dumbledore. She has to be very careful with what he does and says. On his authority rests the authority of her entire structure, just as is the case with Aslan in the Narnia books, or Tolkien’s Gandalf. It is important for such characters to be like ideal fathers: they are by no means without a sense of fun, but their word is ultimately law — even when the world turns against them. Dumbledore spends a good deal of time in Phoenix as a fugitive — he is sacked as headmaster — and this expulsion from Eden is an almost inevitable development for Rowling as it is for Potter and the reader. Tellingly, Hagrid, the half-giant who teaches ‘care of magical creatures”, is absent for much of the novel, and it occurred to me that one of the conditions of maturity is having to leave such lovable grotesques behind. The Potter books are already stacked with Pucks and Calibans; and Dumbledore is a Prospero figure if ever I saw one. Something quite upsettingly dramatic is going to have to happen to him by the time the book is over, mark my words. One of the matters that Rowling addresses here is the establishment of first principles, as important as plot-lines in magical worlds. When you have magic in operation, and non-metaphorical magic at that, the attentive child is going to be very keen to ask: ‘If they can do X, then why can’t they do Y?” Le Guin, Tolkien and CS Lewis all ultimately had to connive in the dismantling of their own magical worlds, but this may not be an option open to Rowling. We do, though, get good enough explanations as to why some people die and never return; and some do return, but as ghosts; and why Harry still lives with the Dursleys.The pressures Rowling is under, both to deliver and not to crack up, are almost inconceivable. This may give her a sympathetic push when describing Harry’s trials. (The critic Robert Winder suggested to me that one of Harry’s punishments in Phoenix is strikingly reminiscent of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony. I won’t spoil either story for you by saying which.) But however she’s managed it, she’s still on form. You have to hand it to her. —Â