Journal

Harry Potter

Posted on November 3rd, 2004, in the evening

Ever joined a bandwagon a long way down the track?

I spotted Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in a charity shop two weeks ago for about 50p, and feeling the need for some lighter reading (coupled with the high recommendation of the adoration HP receives from the nine-year-old daughter of the family I lodge with) I thought I'd pick it up. And after I picked it up I barely put it down again before I'd finished it.

Since then I've been (even more) obsessively scouring second hand shops, looking for the rest in the series. I've now found and read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (book two), and have a delightfully second hand (by which I mean stained, coloured-in, battered) copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (book four), which I obviously can't read until I find book three!

J K Rowling's influences from the canon of children's books of the last century are pretty clear - there's more than a hint of Matilda in Harry's upbringing, and the main action is set in a classic boarding school context, but her gift for story telling is their equal and she mixes a beatifully coherent and captivating new potion from the familiar ingredients.

Harry Potter isn't crafted like the intense and powerful layers of Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' trilogy, but where Pullman's work is ideologically driven, Harry Potter is primarily fun. When I read 'His Dark Materials' I hurt with the tension between on the one hand my love and sympathy for Lyra and even something of the critique Pullman is making against Christianity, and on the other the contrast between the deadly Christianity he destroys in his fiction and the releasing, life-affirming freedom I've found in my own. The only analogous sorrow I feel reading Harry Potter is over the savaging J K Rowling's fantastic work has received from some Christian circles.

By my own admission I haven't read beyond the second book yet, but on the basis of what I've come across so far I don't think accusations about Harry Potter promoting evil could be further off the mark. Magic is simply a story-telling device in Harry Potter, pitched not that differently than in Tolkein. I don't think I'm being naive - I think I'm receiving these books in the spirit that they were intended, which is one of fun, of courage, of loyalty, and of good overcoming evil.

If the charity shops of South East London don't come up with the goods soon I might even have to resort to buying the rest new!