A Guide to the Harry Potter Novels

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2008), "A Guide to the Harry Potter Novels", Library Review, Vol. 57 No. 8, pp. 636-637. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530810899612

The recent (July 2007) completion of the Harry Potter series, all seven of them ending with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Bloomsbury, London), is a good time to take stock of some of the critical issues that arise with any publishing phenomenon like it. The international success of Harry Potter has overwhelmed the rather precious debate by experts as to whether the stories have done well more from marketing hype than from storytelling appeal. In a horse race, storytelling is coming out in front.

This makes it interesting, then, to revisit a critical work like Julia Eccleshare's guide to the novels. Eccleshare is an author, journalist and broadcaster and has published numerous books and articles about children's reading over the years. The guide appears in a series from Continuum, called contemporary classics of children's literature, which itself deserves notice: others in the series are a study of children at war, fiction that frightens, fantasy fiction and alternative worlds and families in fiction. More information can be found on the publisher's website at www.continuumbooks.com.

Any librarian or teacher (or even parent) who has lived through the accelerando of Harry Potter since the first one appeared in 1997 (and then won awards all over the place in 1998 and went on to storm the world) will recognise the reservations Eccleshare has about the books. She comes into the frame at the time (round about 2000‐2001) when the philosopher's stone and the goblet of fire were hitting the bookstalls. Without pretension, she reminds us of how useful it is to stand back from the razzmatazz of book reading and selling and library work and the rest, to take stock of what makes Harry Potter books tick.

Fantasy and magic and school stories had all been done before: we already had Lewis and Tolkien, Cooper and Garner, Dahl and Mayne, Pratchett and White. Magic was not new, caricatures of school and teachers were not new, alternative worlds had been going strong in science fiction and children's fantasy for decades, and school bullies (like Malfoy) went back to Tom Brown and beyond. So what exactly was it that made Harry Potter take off? Was it the coherent inventiveness of Rowling's alternative world – Hogwarts, Diagon Alley, Gringott's bank, Harry's friendship with Ron and Hermione, Hagrid's strength and human weakness, the great over‐arching battle between good and evil in the form of Harry and Dumbledore on one side and Voldemort on the other (with Snape somewhere in the middle – you know where he really stands by volume seven!).

Perhaps it was the imaginativeness of the game of Quidditch, the way issues like class and bullying came out even in a school for wizards, the fascinating transitions between one world and another (on station platforms or through portkeys or by disapparating). Probably, it was also that the magic – which was sheer fun in classrooms and at the Dursleys – had a clear and increasingly menacing dark side, as the books develop, as Harry and his friends grow up, and as the world of wizardy reveals itself as one where light and dark really do battle it out. In the seventh book, Hogwarts itself is the scene for a battle something like the final battle of Pelennor Fields in Tolkien. Character is destiny, as Harry grows in strength, comes to trust Dumbledore after all and realise how subtly interconnected he is with his arch‐enemy Voldemort. In fact, it is only through not fighting that Harry stands a chance of surviving.

The series starts then with predictable clichés – little boy, nasty family, strong protectors and the rest – and builds up compellingly – over seven books that are not short reads by any stretch of the imagination – into a battle for the universe, for human choices and values. Astonishing really when you think of the social realism that has grown up in children's books (with writers like Needle and Mark, Ashley and Leeson), of how school stories seem to have been left on the shelf with Buckeridge, and of how much fantasy (and allegory) we have had from Narnia and other alternative creations.

Eccleshare opens up a number of critical ideas that are always worth asking, above all of very popular children's books (similar questions were asked, in their time, of Henty and then of Enid Blyton). Harry Potter books tell a good story, they look at things from young reader's point of view, they draw on archetypes of good and evil and quests and transform lots of fantasy and narrative clichés into something else – a series of stories (no bad thing in itself) where readers simply have to know what happens next. She combines “conventionality with traditionalism” and so makes a suitable case for treatment by Olympian critics keen to detect sources, devise theories and distrust commercialism. I hope Eccleshare rewrites the book now that the Harry Potter series is complete. We also need to know where Bloomsbury goes from here.