SO WHAT'S ALL THIS ABOUT HARRY POTTER?

THOSE OF US who have not been sojourning on Mars have been hearing a lot about the Harry Potter phenomenon. It seems that a boy wizard going to a most unusual boarding school called Hogwarts has taken the world by storm. But what exactly is the phenomenon about? Are the Harry Potter books as good as they are made out to be? And what does it mean for children's literature, for children's reading, perhaps even for future cultural trends?

First of all, a brief word of explanation for those Martian visitors and indeed for anyone else who has done nothing other than gaze wide-eyed at the bestseller lists. Harry Potter, boy wizard who fights an eternal battle against the wicked Lord Voldemort, is the creation of English author J. (Joanne) K. (Kathleen, though this name actually belongs to her grandmother) Rowling. J.K. Rowling was, prior to the release of the first Harry Potter book, completely unknown as an author. The first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was written in intense bursts alter she got a brilliant idea on a train. She sent it to a publisher (who dearly hopes to remain nameless forever) who rejected it on the grounds that it was too "old-fashioned", and advised her to get an agent. Nothing daunted, she did--and the novel eventually found its way to Bloomsbury, a publishing company which, quite without knowing it, did exactly what all publishers dream of--backed a genuine twenty-two-carat-gold phenomenon.

Not that Bloomsbury knew it at first; that's the gorgeous thing about the Harry Potter phenomenon: it was no marketing blitz, but was genuinely created by the grassroots, by the readers who took it to their hearts. The novel was released at first in a small print run, in hardback (these are now collector's items) and then in paperback. No one thought much of it--except for the readers. Children began turning up in bookshops asking for the book, saying their friends had read it and they wanted to as well. In Australia, most bookshops did not even stock it at first; it was only when children who had overseas relatives or friends began to ask for it that the book found its way here too.

Word of mouth crept along slowly but surely; but by the time the second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, came out, the word-of-mouth snowball had grown into an avalanche. Bloomsbury began to realise they had a serious money-spinner on their hands. When the books started to pop up in children's book awards, and garnered rave reviews in a huge range of publications, they realised they had that even rarer thing--a book that is both a popular and a critical success. Of course, there were voices raised against the books from the beginning, and these have gained in volume---though not in power--since the books have become such a huge phenomenon.

The third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, sold enormously; and for the fourth, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Bloomsbury launched a marketing push such as has never been seen. Millions of copies sold out worldwide in the first week of the book's release; people, both children and adults, queued through the night to get their hands on a copy. Such scenes, with readers desperate to get their hands on their favourite books, had not been seen since the days of Charles Dickens. Who cared about television, computers, the internet? All anyone wanted to do was read, read, read. (It's interesting to note that though Rowling has of course become immensely rich, she does not seem interested in playing celebrity games; indeed it is Harry Potter, the character himself, who inspires the adulation, not the author.)

Parents and children rediscovered the supposedly lost art of bedtime family readings; children kept library and bookshop shelves empty; adults read the books themselves on trains, on planes, in office breaks. The publishing industry, always a strange cross between love and mammon, art and business, was beside itself with delight. Reading was cool again, hurrah! In their excitement, they started rediscovering that the supposedly "old-fashioned" quality so derided by that first publisher was actually what people wanted.

And what exactly was that old-fashionedness? Fantasy, fun, magic, allusions to all kinds of myths, legends, folktales; an extraordinary Englishness that somehow managed to be both familiar and exotic--a mixture of Tolkien, Lewis, Blyton, Ransome, Milne, Dahl, Billy Bunter and more; a battle of Good and Evil of titanic proportions; a cast of wonderfully archetypal characters--and above all, Harry himself, archetypal solitary hero, little boy lost with immense powers, clever, powerful kid beating adults at their own games, suffering in the midst of incomprehension and greed yet rescued to gain his true inheritance: how could children not identify with him?

Add to this a great many jokes, much eating, plentiful references to all kinds of gruesome things beloved of children--and of folktales--some wonderful send-ups of modern life, thoroughly engaging set pieces in the world of wizardry, and a great fertility of invention--and there you have it. Rowling intends to write seven books altogether in the series, one for each year that Harry is at Hogwarts; one published each year. If she can keep up the pace and sheer sense of fun of the first four books, many of us will be eagerly awaiting each new instalment.

How good are they? Well-known critics such as Anthony Holden and Harold Bloom, who would never, no doubt, usually go near any book for children, have pronounced on them. Both have consigned them to the ranks of fads. With great patrician elegance, Holden damns the books, and their author, for being lamentably politically incorrect and horribly middle-class. "Why not set the books in a secondary modern instead of a boarding school?" he asks, rhetorically, and then proceeds to castigate Harry and his creator for not being multicultural enough, feminist enough, politically engaged enough, socially aware enough, the whole caboodle, finishing with the final flourish that people will think Britain is terribly old-fashioned if they read these books, that nothing's changed, that it's vulgar theme-park Britain, "like the Royal Family and the Millennium Dome".

Without irony, Holden recommends that children be exposed to Beowulf instead--surely a model of feminist republican multicultural socially aware politically correct bumf, no doubt--without thinking that (as with our children) hey, they can be exposed to both! And that there's more in common between Grendel-fighfing, friend-loving, dragon-defying Beowulf in his dank fens and Harry Potter standing up for love and honour and good against Voldemort and his minions, than there ever would be between the Geafish hero and some issue-driven caricature in one of those socially-aware novels children--and adults--have had their noses pushed into for far too long. Holden thundered against the Harry Potter books as being escapist; but then Tolkien said that only jailers fear escapees.

WHAT IS HAPPENING in this case, I think, is that fantasy, so long the despised undercurrent of modern literature (though it was not so in the pre-industrial age, which could take its marvels with as much equanimity as its mundanities) is bursting up to the surface again, and in the process reinvigorating literary culture in a way perhaps not seen for a long time. Critics like Holden, with no understanding of fantasy and its ancient heritage--suspicious of it, indeed--have failed to see that it is no longer just a niche thing, easily dismissed; but is in fact the rising genre of our times, beloved by young people, but also by a large slice of the adult population. (Strange, in a way, because Holden championed Beowulf, and wrote so feelingly about Shakespeare, without admitting that fantasy remains at the well-springs of both.)

Fantasy is all about the liberating powers of narrative, about the glories and marvels of story; and in children's literature, it has found a most wonderful home. All those lists of great twentieth-century writers usually miss out on them, but here's a well-kept secret: the greatest, most loved and most enduring masters of the twentieth-century novel have been those who wrote for children. And most of them wrote fantasy. Rowling is following in that tradition, which itself follows on from the great traditions of the past: the folktale, the fairytale, the myth, the legend.

Once none of us, young or old, was so stupid as to think that because they dealt with other worlds and magical creatures, and the meaning of strangeness itself, such tales could only speak to children, or were not serious. What people cared about, what made a storyteller's creation live beyond the moment, was whether the story was good. Adults now have often been brainwashed into thinking we must consume books like we consume bran, for roughage. Pleasure, that deep, deep pleasure of childhood reading, we are told, must be forgone in favour of worthiness or trendiness or gold stickers or whatever. Children, however, do not give one hoot for trends or issues or gold stickers; they care about whether a story is good. And they've taken Harry Potter to their hearts because they know the stories are good.

That's the other field of Harry Potter objectors: those who claim that the books are evil, not because they do not follow the tenets of soixante-huitard philosophy, but because they feature witches and wizards and magic and the like. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the fundamentalists, the same folks who sought to ban C.S. Lewis's books on the grounds that they were too pagan, are busy at it again, getting hold of the wrong end of the stick. Ignoring completely the wails of the soixante-huitards about the books being most hideously traditional and much too concerned with moral absolutes, the puritan army marches in with drums beating and banners flying. Wicked, wicked, they thunder; spells, witches, wizards, elves, magical creatures and the like; thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!

I am minded of G.K. Chesterton's words: that the puritans managed to get rid of all the cheerful supernaturalism, all the fairies, the lighthearted traditional stuff, and wanted to hang onto only the idea of the diabolical, the ugly, the occult. The idea that the Harry Potter books are a million miles from the occult--that "black magic", in the form of Voldemort and his forces, is thoroughly hated and fought against every step of the way; that there are many Christian values inherent in the books, despite the nonappearance of God or mention of religion (and frankly, would it not be blasphemous, not to say ridiculous, to have God appear in a fantasy of this kind)-- seems altogether too much for these doughty fighters to understand.

So, if both the fundamentalists and the soixante-huitards condemn them, where does that leave the books? Pretty much in a good position, I suspect. Of course, that is not to say the books are above criticism--they're certainly not perfect. I admit myself to a certain feeling of discomfort about the concept of "Muggles"--non-magical folks, the majority of humans, in fact, who are, alternately, either pitied, hated, reviled, patronised or ignored, but always bewared of. But on the other hand, if magical folk are a persecuted minority within a Muggle majority, that is exactly how they would regard that majority. You've only got to think of say, Gypsies to know the truth of it. And the term "Muggle" itself has passed into use in our family to describe excessively conventional, plodding, boring people!

Rowling is good at her characterisation; though people have complained of "stereotypes", to my mind, they are actually more archetypal. And her portrayals, in Goblet of Fire, of the beginnings of adolescent torment and angst for Harry and his good friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, are very well done. Her language, whilst not necessarily always perfectly turned, is sophisticated and allusive; no choppy little sentences and thin descriptions for her. Her inventiveness and her sprightly use of traditional sources are always, for me, a great delight.

My feeling is that children exposed to the Harry Potter books are much more likely to be opened up to the whole treasure-chest of the riches of traditional story, as well as to the myriad possibilities of fantasy--and history. Unlike many faddish books of recent years, such as the meretricious Goosebumps series and others cashing in on television-style gore and grue, the Harry Potter books seem to be leading children on to read more and more widely. Wonderful books which had not been in print for a while, such as Dianne Wynne Jones' gorgeous Chrestomanci series, are back on our shelves; truly brilliant writers of fantasy, like England's Philip Pullman, are getting more and more notice; Narnia and Lord of the Rings are getting a good workout; publishers are looking for more new fantasy.

The latest bestseller to hit the New York Times list is an amazing series of Victorian-style melodramatic novels for children, full of bad, bad villains, hideous catastrophes, stern moralising, puns, and dense, allusive language--adored by adults and children alike. New Yorker Daniel Handler, writing under the memorable pen-name of Lemony Snicket, is the author of A Series of Unfortunate Events, about the lachrymose adventures of the beset Baudelaire children. And just as Harry Potter has a quintessential Englishness about it, so Snicket's series has a quintessential American quality about it--the wonderful lateral-minded, anarchic, non-magic fantasy of, say, James Thurber. They augur well for children's books, and, I like to think, for culture in general: for here we have a new willingness to re-embrace the past, not in a fuddy-duddy, nostalgic kind of way, but vividly, with pleasure, with excitement, and reinvention and rediscovery.

Sophi Masson's latest novel is The Green Prince (Hodder Science Fiction and Fantasy.)