The Haunted Wood, page 49
Publishers usually bust a gut to persuade the media to take an interest in their books and bookshops to stock them. With Harry Potter, it was the other way round. Newspaper reviewers were sent copies of the books by motorcycle courier at midnight: they were expected to read all night and file the next morning so that their reviews could feature on the following day’s news pages. When in 2003 the Sun was offered a pre-launch copy of the first three chapters of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by a forklift driver at the printers, they calculated that enraging the publishers wasn’t worth the scoop. They phoned the police and instead made a story out of setting up the sting operation that led to his arrest.
The economics of the books got seriously strange. Supermarkets discounted the titles so heavily that they lost money on every copy sold; independent bookshops took to restocking from Tesco, where they could pick up stock more cheaply than from wholesalers or even the publisher. And when, around the launch of Deathly Hallows, the supermarket chain Asda accused Bloomsbury of “blatant profiteering” and “attempting to hold children to ransom” by pricing the book at £17.99, Bloomsbury canceled Asda’s order of half a million hardbacks. “If they want their 500,000 books, they’ll have to come and make peace with us,” they said. “It could be good news for all their disappointed customers, because they don’t have to go to a soulless Asda shed to buy their book.” It took Asda less than a day to make a groveling reversal.
At the end of the nineteenth century, there was no clear and stable distinction between children’s books and those written for adults; they shared bestseller lists, such as they were, and they shared a readership. As the twentieth century progressed, children’s writing became, for the most part, a separate literary and publishing domain, and the story of its development across that century is the story of its flourishing in that niche. But at the very end of the twentieth century, we seemed to be returning to where we were at the end of the nineteenth, though from the other direction. Adults were reading children’s books; to the extent that –to save the blushes of commuters – “adult editions” of the Harry Potter books were published in 2007 with “sophisticated” covers in sombre shades of gray, designed to make them look less like children’s books.*
That crossover appeal didn’t prevent their vast cultural footprint from provoking the old anxieties that adults have always had about children’s writing – particularly in the culturally and religiously conservative parts of the United States. The book-burners and censors against whom Judy Blume had struggled in the 1980s rallied to denounce Harry Potter a generation later. They are always with us, and always have been. Children’s writing is powerful magic, and those who fear that magic will always seek to control it. In several places in the US, copies of Rowling’s books were burned by fundamentalist Christians who believed they were encouraging children to take up witchcraft. “Behind that innocent face is the power of satanic darkness,” said pastor Jack Brock of the Christ Community church in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 2001. “Harry Potter is the devil and he is destroying people.”
Latterly, the cultural left has also taken issue with Rowling’s books. It has been pointed out that the characters are overwhelmingly white and heterosexual. This is perhaps in keeping with Rowling’s mid-twentieth-century inspirations, most of which, as I’ve previously discussed, tend to be racially and sexually homogenous, and as Anglocentric as the Potter books are. The foreign characters in the book do get somewhat stereotypical names – viktor Krum, Seamus Finnigan, Fleur Delacour, and Cho Chang. The goblins who run Gringotts Wizarding Bank have even been denounced as antisemitic stereotypes; though it’s worth noticing that the hook-nosed semitic figures of which Rowling’s critics complain are drawn from the imagery in the films rather than their descriptions in the books.
No doubt, had she known that her work would attract the almost theological scrutiny it has, Rowling would have thought harder about some of the thinner representations that her novels contain. She has said that she thinks of Dumbledore as having been gay and welcomed the casting of a black actor as Hermione Granger in The Cursed Child, pointing out that Hermione’s race isn’t specified in the books. It’s not really a debate for these pages. For what it’s worth, it seems to me that to ask a children’s book, no matter how beloved, to be entirely free from stereotypes (or even jokes that lean on stereotypes), or to faithfully and without exception represent the whole range of human diversity, is a lot to ask it to carry. Imperfect though they may be, the central moral message of these books is the fight against “othering,” bullying, eugenics, and racism.
Even less a debate for these pages is Rowling’s gender-critical intervention in the twenty-first-century argument over trans rights. It’s not an issue that has anything to do with her children’s writing (unless you count – bit of a stretch – the prefect Percy Weasley catching his brother Ron leaving Moaning Myrtle’s domain and exclaiming in shock: “That’s a girls’ bathroom!”). Except, perhaps, in one respect. The reaction against the books from the progressive left has differed from the reaction from the reactionary right not just in ideological character, but generationally: the pushback, here, is coming not from parents who disapprove of Rowling’s books but from young adults who grew up adoring them.
There’s a case, which seems to me convincing, that it’s the very generation that grew up with the Harry Potter books that has most enthusiastically embraced so-called “cancel culture.” The extreme reaction against Rowling by those who have decided that she’s transphobic – which extends to the boycotting of her books and the intellectual property that flows from them just because of their association with the author’s opinions – looks a little bit like the product of a generation whose ardent Harry Potter fandom shaped its understanding of the world.
Cancel culture takes a sorting-hat view of human nature: the hat peers deep into your soul, and after no more than a minute – though usually instantly – it assigns you a moral identity. A generation primed to take a goodies-vs-baddies worldview, energized by the books’ sense of an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil, and seeing no need to put aside childish things, has turned with some decisiveness on the author of those books when it decided she was on the other team. The revolution, in other words, has eaten not its children but its parent.
But the revolution, for a generation that has carried a children’s-book worldview into young adulthood, has continued. Young adult fiction, and children’s fiction read by adults, has continued to thrive, as has fan fiction. Publishers always being in search of the last big thing, the influence of Harry Potter on both what has been written and how it has been published is incalculable. After the swerve into something like social realism described in the previous chapter, the pendulum swung decisively back in the early years of the twenty-first century.
The ostensibly adult soft-porn franchise Fifty Shades of Grey started life as online fan fiction for Stephanie Meyers’s YA vampire series Twilight (originally published 2005–2008). Fantasy and SF novels aimed at adolescents have been everywhere. In addition to Twilight, it’s near impossible to imagine the successes of G.P. Taylor’s Shadowmancer series (began 2003), Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & The Olympians (began 2005), or Suzanne Collins’s dystopian science-fiction Hunger Games (began 2008) in a world in which Harry Potter had never happened. Some of those writers were candid in acknowledging the debt. G.P. Taylor said in 2005: “I got a copy of Harry Potter, counted the number of words that were on the page, measured the width of the margin, counted the number of chapters in the book, how many pages were in the book and set my computer screen up so that it would have 468 words on the page. My chapters were the same length as the Harry Potter chapters; I thought, ‘This must be how you write a book.’”*
* John Redwood, speech reported in the Daily Telegraph, 3 July 1993.
* E. Nesbit, Wings and the Child: or, the Building of Magic Cities (Hodder & Stoughton, 1913), [p].
* With Great Pleasure, BBC Radio 4, 25 May 2000.
† Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 10 November 2000.
* Sean Smith, J.K. Rowling.
* Interview with Megan Phelps-Roper, in “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling’ podcast, The Free Press, February 2023.
† Simon Hattenstone, “Harry, Jessie and me,” Guardian, 8 July 2000.
* A.S. Byatt, “Harry Potter and the Childish Adult,” New York Times, 7 July 2003.
* Lindsay Fraser, “Harry Potter – Harry and Me,” Scotsman, November 2002.
† “Chronicles of Earthsea,” Guardian, 9 February 2004.
* Sean Smith, op. cit., [p].
* Harry reads a library copy of Quidditch Through the Ages in Philosopher’s Stone, Fantastic Beasts is a Hogwarts textbook, and Dumbledore leaves Hermione a copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard in his will.
* The cross-generational appeal of the Harry Potter franchise even extends to its merchandising. A typical review for Mattel’s now discontinued Nimbus 2000 vibrating Broom on Amazon read: “I’m 32 and enjoy riding the broom as much as my 12-year-old and 7-year-old.”
* James Francken, “A Writer’s Life: G.P. Taylor,” Daily Telegraph, 14 August 2005.
Darkness Visible
PHILIP PULLMAN
Northern Lights; The Subtle Knife;
The Amber Spyglass; La Belle Sauvage;
The Secret Commonwealth; Daemon Voices
THE OTHER GREAT CROSSOVER FANTASY SERIES OF THIS third golden age owed no direct debt to Harry Potter. Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights (1995) was first published two years before Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. The success of the subsequent volumes in the His Dark Materials trilogy no doubt benefited from the spotlight swinging onto fantasy literature for children, but Pullman got under way quite on his own. Like the Harry Potter books, Pullman’s work looked knowingly backward over the fantasy writing of the past, and like those books they took it in a quite new direction. Indeed, if Harry Potter can be seen as a summum of what came before, His Dark Materials can be seen as an overthrowing.
Philip Pullman (1946–) was a schoolteacher in Oxford when the first volume of the trilogy that made his name arrived in print, and it’s a book that wears its connection to a children’s classic of the past on its sleeve. Northern Lights is a direct riposte to the evangelical Christianity of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, and it draws much of its energy from its engagement with Lewis. As the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has said shrewdly, “In a peculiar way, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is quite a tribute to Lewis – because, although Philip loathes the Narnia stories, he clearly recognises that there is enough imaginative bounce and energy in them to demand a serious response.”*
Pullman reacted to Narnia – which he first encountered as an adult and read with an accordingly skeptical eye – with a version of the enduring anxiety about the influence that children’s stories can have on their impressionable audience. He has called the Narnia books “wicked”: “I find them very dodgy and unpleasant – dodgy in the dishonest rhetoric way – and unpleasant because they seem to embody a worldview that takes for granted things like racism, misogyny and a profound cultural conservatism that is utterly unexamined.”† Speaking at the Hay Festival in 2002, he said he saw in Lewis’s fiction “a peevish blend of racist, misogynistic and reactionary prejudice; but of love, of Christian charity, [there is] not a trace.” But rather than ban or burn them, he set out to write something better – a thrilling, high-concept adventure story animated by a fierce loathing for the institutional manifestations of religion, and the will-to-power that drives them.
Pullman’s work is for a higher age-group than that of Rowling. Pullman himself doesn’t consider it a children’s story, and it can be and is read by adults without the need for a blush-saving alternative cover design.‡ It draws its title from a line in the second, still more influential, literary predecessor to which it responds: Paradise Lost (1667). In Book Two of Milton’s epic poem, Satan escapes from hell and prepares to journey across the dizzying vastness of Chaos:
…this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus’dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th’ Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wild Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look’d a while.
That turbulent passage indicates some of the complexity of Pullman’s ambition in the book. Chaos is a site, for Milton, of creation and destruction, its formless elements at ceaseless war with themselves unless and until God ordains them “his dark materials to create new worlds.”
Among the central mysteries of the multiverse of His Dark Materials is Dust – which in one of the constituent worlds of Pullman’s multiverse is analogous to the undetectable dark matter hypothesized by modern physicists as the sine qua non of the universe’s existence in the form it takes. Pullman’s imaginative multiverse grapples to bring together concepts in theology and in theoretical physics, which puts these sophisticated books in a territory that straddles the science fiction and fantasy genres. As a character in the third book puts it, “Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself.”
Dust is the fundamental grounds of existence – and it is the material form of consciousness itself. As such it is associated with free will, and the Church accordingly seeks to conceal and if possible destroy it. The story’s villains have forgotten, or want others to forget, that “from dust ye came and to dust ye must return”: that every sentient creature in the multiverse, including God (or “the Authority”) himself, is a product of Dust.
Accordingly, the Authority, we discover in the final book, is not an omnipotent and benevolent higher being, still less the immortal creator of the universe. He was the first Angel to form from Dust, and conned those that came after into believing him to be apart from and above the creation. By the time we meet him he is a feeble, geriatric, half-mad creature encased in a protective box, and whose powers are exercised on his behalf by a tyrannical regent. The “fallen Angels” – those who rebelled against the Authority and its sublunary Magisterium – are the heroes of this story. If Milton was (as William Blake said) “of the Devil’s party without knowing it,” Pullman is fully and consciously signed up to the Devil’s party – though in the service of a stridently moral liberal worldview.
This is intellectually chewy material. But – did I mention? – it is also an extraordinarily involving adventure story and a virtuoso feat of world-building that cross-shades its fantastical inventions with plausibly built-out edifices of science, politics, and organized religion. Perhaps the most memorable and original peculiarity of the books is the existence of “daemons”: animal familiars who accompany each character and are in some sense embodied representations of their souls. To be separated from your daemon causes agonizing pain, and there’s a profound taboo on making physical contact with another person’s daemon. These daemons change form in children but become fixed in their shape when the child goes through puberty. One of the books’ principal antagonists, the wonderfully sinister, “sweet-faced” Mrs Coulter, has a golden monkey as a daemon.
In recognition of his debts to his predecessors in the canon, from Lewis and Milton and (in the second trilogy) Spenser to the Boys’Own-style adventure stories whose narratives he echoes, Pullman has said that he sees his own daemon as a corvid: “I think she’s a raven. She belongs to that family of birds that steal things – the jackdaws, the rooks, crows and magpies – and I admire those birds.”*
The trilogy’s first protagonist, introduced in Northern Lights, is eleven-year-old Lyra Belacqua, who inhabits a steampunk version of Oxford and goes on to travel to the Arctic north (and the titular aurora) in a hot-air balloon, to encounter mercenaries, giant bat-like “cliff-ghasts,” flights of witches and – something you never saw in even C.S. Lewis’s least mimsy moments – an honest-to-goodness armored bear:
Out there climbed Iorek Byrnison, the bear in armour. Without it he was formidable. With it, he was terrifying. It was rust-red, and crudely riveted together: great sheets and plates of dented discolored metal that scraped and screeched as they rode over one another. The helmet was pointed like his muzzle, with slits for eyes, and it left the lower part of his jaw bare for tearing and biting.
In battle, Iorek is even more thrilling:
The armoured bear at the charge seemed to be conscious of no weight except what gave him momentum. He bounded past Lyra almost in a blur and crashed into the Tartars, scattering soldiers, daemons, rifles to all sides. Then he stopped and whirled round, with a lithe athletic power, and struck two massive blows, one to each side, at the guards closest to him […] Iorek struck again, twisting to one side, slashing, snarling, crushing, while bullets flew about him like wasps or flies, doing no harm at all.
