JK Rowling is more than a lightning rod for controversy but the Harry Potter series is a literary masterpiece

JK Rowling is more than a lightning rod for controversy. She’s an author whose books belong in the canon of English literature. Photo / Supplied

OPINION:

During the first blossoming of Harry Potter mania in the late 1990s and early 2000s, some literary critics were distraught. Writing in the Wall Street Journal in July 2000, the month that the fourth book was published, Harold Bloom lamented that JK Rowling’s writing “makes no demands upon her readers... Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better”.

In the Independent, in the same year, Philip Hensher derided the Harry Potter books as “written in a way which is designed to be seductively readable”, as if proper books should instead attempt to fend off the reader with a big stick. “The world of these books is thin and unsatisfactory,” he pronounced. “It does them no favours at all to talk about them in terms of literary classics.”

Weeks earlier, writing in The Observer, Anthony Holden had fretted that children were reading Harry Potter instead of Seamus Heaney’s “far more exciting” new translation of Beowulf. He worried about the impact of Rowling’s books on “the literary taste of millions of potential young readers”.

(The Telegraph, incidentally, saw it differently: in 1997, critic Dinah Hall called the first volume, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, “a terrific book... With its perfect blend of fantasy and down-to-earth characters, this is the ideal antidote to a glut of grim social-realist fiction.”)

Despite his detractors, Harry Potter has not gone away. Twenty-six years after the first book was published, Warner Bros, the studio behind the box-office-conquering Harry Potter films, has announced that it is developing a major new television series for Max (formerly HBO Max) that will be “a faithful adaptation of the iconic books”. JK Rowling is attached to the series as executive producer – a striking statement of support from the studio, given that the author has been subjected to repeated attempts to halt her career from those determined to paint her as the world’s most notorious transphobe.

Immortality calls: Ron, Harry and Hermione in the 2001 film Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Photo / Supplied

The series is just the latest of many projects to spring from Rowling’s original story and characters: the spin-off Fantastic Beasts film series may have had mixed success, but Hogwarts Legacy, a role-playing videogame released this year from Warner Bros and based on what the company calls Rowling’s “extraordinary body of writing”, sold more than 12million units in its first two weeks alone, representing sales in excess of US$850 million (NZ$1.3 billion), more than double what the company anticipated.

There is, it’s clear, still an enormous amount of money sloshing around the Potterverse. But the lucrative spin-offs and adaptations can only succeed because of the power of Rowling’s original texts. Those books have accumulated sales of more than 600 million copies worldwide in 85 languages. Humanity has clocked up more than one billion hours listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks; the first book in the series was still Audible’s most downloaded title in 2022. Perhaps most tellingly, last year, the four most borrowed children’s books from British libraries were all Harry Potters; the remaining three in Rowling’s series also featured in the top 25.

I was eight years old when the first book was ­published, stayed up all night to finish it, and have grown up with the series. In a fact that may blow the minds of Bloom (RIP), Holden and Hensher, I have also read one or two other books over the years (even Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, though admittedly not until after I’d fallen in love with the original text during my English degree at Cambridge).

Why read Harry Potter, the traditional critical argument goes, when you could read The Chronicles of Narnia, The Dark Is Rising or A Wizard of Earthsea? Well, I’ve read those, too, and they’re all wonderful. But Harry Potter is better. It’s the fun­niest, the saddest, the most alive. Rowling’s writing is full of people that seem real, even as they’re turning a teacup into a gerbil. She has Dickens’s knack for character, Stephen King’s feel for spookiness, PG Wodehouse’s sense of the absurd, and Shakespeare’s magpie eye for sparkling treasures gathered from elsewhere.

Harry Potter boxed set. Photo / Supplied

Is it ridiculous to compare Harry Potter with the best literature ever written in English? Not at all, because Rowling’s stories have become part of a global cultural consciousness. Their influence isn’t just a brief 1990s craze doomed to be forgotten – like my primary school’s weird fortnight-long obsession with stickers depicting the Spice Girls. In the years since the books first appeared, countless other works of fiction have been trumpeted as “the next Harry Potter” before sinking into oblivion. Only the original boy wizard still casts a spell.

So, yes, the time has come to talk about the Harry Potter books as literary classics.

Academics have, over the past 10 years, begun to pay closer attention. Dr Beatrice Groves of the University of Oxford, among others, has provided a foun­dation of scholarship on Rowling’s literary heritage and merit.

In her 2017 book, Literary Allusion in Harry Potter, Groves writes that the series “trains its readers in an attentive, literary mode of reading that is nourishing in and of itself, but it also leads Harry Potter’s readers out into some of the greatest works of the Western canon”. She points out that Rowling is fond of leaving a trail of subtle references to other novels, with character names lifted from The Mayor of Casterbridge (Dumbledore and Hagrid), Treasure Island (Professor Trelawney), and Mansfield Park (Filch’s malevolent cat, Mrs Norris).

Other references are smuggled in as jokes. Hagrid’s aggressive three-headed dog, bearing a close resemblance to Cerberus but renamed Fluffy, was acquired when Hagrid “bought him off a Greek chappie I met in the pub”. One of the ­Weasley twins’ practical-joke products is ­Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder, presum­ably imported from the same region as a ­certain PBear.

Harry Potter mania: JK Rowling meeting young fans in 2007. Photo / Getty Images

One of the most profound sequences in the books is the backstory for Harry’s nemesis, Lord Voldemort. In her youth, Voldemort’s mother, an impoverished witch, falls in love with a handsome, arrogant, non-magical aristocrat. She tricks him with a love potion and then, pregnant with his child, and perhaps believing that his love is now sincere, withdraws the potion. His eyes opened, he is disgusted, and rejects her. Heartbroken, she gives birth, then, seeking neither magical nor medical help, dies. There are traces here of Adam Bede, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Far from the Madding Crowd.

Rowling has said that her favourite novel is Jane Austen’s Emma, a book she has read “at least 20 times”. When I read Emma as a teenager (only the once, so far), I was tickled to have spotted a stylistic antecedent for Rowling’s blend of quick humour and nifty plotting, not to mention a thoroughly annoying, know-it-all yet loveable central female character. Emma Woodhouse and Hermione Granger must, surely, be long-lost cousins.

Ultimately, Rowling’s magical world is a complex metaphor for real human abilities, particularly the power of words and stories, to change the world around us. She develops this thesis through a uniquely playful and distinctive British setting that, as in Shakespeare, weaves together allusion and influence so naturally that it feels as though it’s grown organically out of the literature of these islands. Rowling takes what has come before her, and makes something new.

In her books, words are magic spells. The metaphor for reading is obvious, but Rowling adds her own shading and definition. Most of the ­spoken spells derive from Latin (Accio, Nox, Expecto ­Patronum), but the healing spells (Episkey, ­Anapneo) come from Greek, like so much of the Western ­medical tradition.

From the start, the books address difficult themes. Introduced in the first volume, the Mirror of Erised (read it backwards) is a magical object that reflects the viewer not as he really is, but instead shows “the deepest, most desperate desire” of his heart. Faced with the image of what he wants more than anything, the viewer is in danger of becoming ­transfixed, unable to turn away from the mirror and face reality.

The Harry Potter series follows characters from childhood to adulthood. Photo / Supplied

Rowling’s writing develops and deepens through the series of seven books, published over 10 years, from the short and lively early volumes written in obscurity to the later, meatier tomes released at midnight to queues of breathless fans. As the child characters get older, the books become longer, the language and ideas growing more nuanced, death seeping ever more inevitably into everything. To read the series in order is to read a writer growing in confidence and power as she expands the borders of the fantasy world she has constructed.

And what a world it is. Where Tolkien was a master of invented languages, Rowling is a master of invented systems. She has devised a whole team sport and league structure in Quidditch. There is an education system complete with exams; a political system and wizarding governing body; an economic system with its own shops and banks, and a fully operational currency of knuts, sickles and galleons. And then there’s the system of magic itself, which has a coherent internal logic where magical problems can have magical solutions, but the ultimate human problems – love and death – can’t ever be solved by magic alone.

The greatest of Rowling’s achievements, however, is to follow her central group of characters right the way through from childhood to adulthood in a bildungs­roman that engages closely with, at first, how it feels to be a child, and then, gradually, painfully, how to bear adult responsibilities. This is where she parts ways with her closest peers in children’s fantasy literature, J R R Tolkien and CS Lewis. Just as Rowling builds a literary bridge between youth and adulthood, Harry Potter marks a significant shift onwards from the ­children’s literature of the previous century.

This isn’t to say that the Harry Potter books are flawless. Even Rowling’s staunchest defenders acknowledge that she can be guilty of carelessness, particularly in her intention to cast a diverse world.

For example, so cringingly inappropriate is the name of Harry’s first girlfriend, Cho Chang – a mixture of Korean and Chinese surnames – that, in Chinese editions of the books, it is deftly altered to Zhang Qiu, an actual name that would be rendered in English as Autumn Chang. More accusations of clumsiness were levelled at Rowling when the actress Noma Dumezweni, who is black, was cast in the stage production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child as Hermione, a character who had previously only ever been shown as white. This attempt to ­retrofit diversity into the story only drew more ­attention to the original lack of it. How differently might a young black Hermione experience this world? The books don’t tell us, and it remains to be seen how the new television series will deal with the question.

Self-made cultural titan: Harry Potter author JK Rowling. Photo / AP

Beyond the legitimate literary criticism, Rowling has weathered several waves of unjustified attack, first from the harrumphing reviewers who somehow managed to read her books without reading them at all, and then a further wave of rage from those who disagree with her beyond the books, taking issue with her politics (she is pro-Labour but anti-Corbyn, and is a critic of Nicola Sturgeon) or her stance on women’s rights and the much-alleged transphobia.

But if you go looking for anything transphobic that Rowling has said, you’re going to return empty-handed. In November last year, the journalist EJ Rosetta was asked by an editor to write an article called “20 Transphobic JK Rowling Quotes We’re Done With”. After 12 weeks of research, she gave up, saying: “I’ve not found a single truly transphobic message.”

Rowling herself has said that, by the time she started writing about gender, she was already on her “fourth or fifth” cancellation, experiences documented in The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, the recent interview podcast series from Megan Phelps-Roper. Could there be a knee-jerk suspicion of Rowling’s success, and a desire to see this glamorous, clever, super-rich, self-made cultural titan put back where she came from, back to the life of a single mother on benefits having fled an abusive marriage to find refuge in a freezing Edinburgh tenement? Is there an underlying indignation that a woman in such a position could have produced something that might actually have significant cultural worth? Can’t we keep the work, but dump the woman behind it?

Of course not. In truth, the books could only have been written by Rowling, an author who really understands, and deeply cares about, young people and the difficulty of growing up. I’ve always thought it crucial in the books that (spoiler alert) after Professor Dumbledore dies, he leaves behind in his will not a series of clear ­instructions to be carried out, but a book of stories, one of them a reworking of Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale as a parable about how to face death. Reading that book is what enables Harry, Ron and Hermione to determine how to continue their own story. This, in the end, is what Rowling offers her readers, too: a story about how to make our own difficult decisions. Or, to borrow Dumbledore’s words, how to choose “between what is right and what is easy”.

Harry Potter may now be the face of a bankable ­franchise – but nobody ever loved a franchise. The story that started it all is what matters. The world of Harry Potter isn’t just a commodity that sells, but a story that is loved because – admit it! – it is really good. And you can’t cancel a good story. Merlin’s beard, it’ll outlive us all.