Prescient words. In fact, amend that to audacious words. For a writer struggling to publish her first book detailing an as yet unimagined world, Joanne Kathleen Rowling could well have inserted this line into the first chapter as much to boost her own morale as to ensure narrative unity. But as it turned out, every child, and everyone who has ever òf40óbeen a child, now knows Harry's name. And how. this past fortnight of ODing on J.K. Rowling's tales of wizardry tells in equal part the story of a prematurely declared classic and of a reading world eagerly awaiting fresh tidings from a parallel universe.There are two ways of viewing the ritual that crescendoed on July 8, when Rowling's fourth Harry Potter offering - òf40óHarry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Bloomsbury, Rs 550) - was finally made available to us Muggles (Rowlingese for nonmagical humans). Reams of newsprint and precious primetime hours on television have been devoted to reportage on the magnitude of the marketing miracle this entailed. The unprecedented 5.3 million first print run, the 9,000 Federal Express trucks inducted in the US to despatch 250,000 pre-ordered copies of the book at amazon.com, the 30 million copies in 31 languages Rowling's first three adventures have already sold, the minute lessons Hollywood should imbibe if it wants to achieve the impossible and sustain interest in a third sequel, the manner in which the òf40óNew York Times announced a separate bestsellers list for children after the first four slots on its regular listing were occupied by Potter books (three hardbacks, and one repeated inpaperback).The cynics are understandably cynical. With a highly offensive and patronising throwaway line about Rowling at least getting kids to read, they voice worries about literature being held hostage to publishing gimmicks. A Madonna single or a Rowling book, it's the same difference, they sigh - it's the inexorable march towards standardisation, food first, coffee next, and finally the arts. The Harry Potter series is derivative, they sneer, a little bit of Tolkien, a little bit of C.S. Lewis and a whole lot of hype.Others would disagree. They view it as an ancient ceremony reinvented. As the world breathlessly awaited the dawn of July 8, it was akin to the faithful wending their way to a virtual fireside at the appointed hour to catch up with a developing saga from their favourite storyteller and sometime oracle. And as they emerge from the afterglow of that encounter with witches and trolls, elves and evil dark lords, they acknowledge another of Rowling's prophecies: "Some old witch had a book that you could not stop reading. You just had to do everything one-handed." òf40óGoblet of Fire may not be the first of her books to have laid claim to this distinction, but halfway into a leisurely reread, it can be safely said that its claim is by far the strongest.So, why are the Harry Potter books so popular? And what does our enchantment say about us? After all, these are times when an average reader spends 16 minutes a day on books and when the shelf life of a book has famously been estimated to be between that of milk and yoghurt. Why then does òf40óGoblet of Fire seem far too short at 636 pages - to millions of children and even more adults alike?I think there is only one answer: Rowling's books, especially her latest, are brimming with imagination. It is a narrative responsibility writers of fiction have failed to heed in recent times. Many another book has failed to capture hearts not because the marketing impetus was lacking but because keenly desired flights of imagination never materialised.It is not Rowling's school setting that wholly accounts for her fame, what with the cozy little world it creates in this almost anarchic world where the mapping of the human genome is redefining the essence of humanness and where cyberspace is blurring the lines between Here and There. And her fortune can definitely not be explained away by the Good versus Evil confrontations that regularly involve Potter. The little wizard's periodic triumphs over Voldemort, the Dark Lord, may be predictable, but in the process more good folk die than bad. Indeed, in òf40óGoblet of Fire death is a constant motif and events only prove that "decent people are so easy to manipulate".No, Rowling's success has to be seen against modern fiction, for children and for adults, being so securely circumscribed by what òf40óis that what òf40ócould be is never speculated. As C.S. Lewis, creator of the Narnia series, explained, "Lay the fairy tale side by side with the school story. we long to go through the looking glass, to reach fairy land. We also long to be the immensely popular and successful schoolboy or schoolgirl." Between these two longings there is a qualitative difference. In accordance with his thesis that a book is as good as the reading it invites, Lewis argued that stories that cater to the craving for magic are healthy for the soul and imagination; whereas books that cater to the desire for personal glory leave readers "divinely discontented".Therein lies a clue to why the Hogwarts saga seems to have more fans amongst adults than amongst children. The emotional need to be divinely contented hardly withers with age. Rowling almost acknowledges this as such inòf40ó Goblet of Fire, with its distinctly adultish innuendos and its decided emphasis on death and lurking evil. And yet. In this book, the writer seems to have finally given free rein to her imagination and comes up with some innovations like a Pensieve (a container into which one can siphon off one's excess thoughts for future reference) and Muggle-Repelling Charms. (Rowling has at last cleared the mystery over whether her wizard universe is entirely separate like Narnia. It is not, wizards merely sprinkle their favoured habitats with these charms so that every time Muggles approach them, they remember some urgent task and dash away.)And so, having hazarded reasons for the popularity of Potter's exploits, it is perhaps time to loop back to queries about what this says about us. It says an awful lot, all of it good. It speaks of the power of the human imagination and of our capacity, amidst chatter about genetic underclasses and dehumanising technology, to recognise it.
