The Hindu : Here comes Harry

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jun 21, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

Here comes Harry

FOR MILLIONS OF children and adults around the world, this morning will ring in the witching hour. After a gap of a seemingly interminable three years, copies of the fifth book in the Harry Potter series — The Order of the Phoenix — will go up for sale amidst a breathless rush of excitement and an enthusiasm that borders on mania. The release of Harry Potter V resembles a globally coordinated maximum-security high-precision operation more than the release of a best-selling novel. Books transported with armed guards, severe restrictions against prematurely leaking contents and strict codes imposed on distributors and bookshops regarding release. Perhaps, nothing reflects the impatient hunger and craving for the novel than the theft of a vanload of finished copies in Britain. A daring literary heist, the only possible rationale of which could have been the hope or presumption that people would pay large premiums to lay their hands on copies of `The Order of the Phoenix' four days before official release.

For once, the numbers justify the hype. And they are truly staggering. In the United States, 8.5 million copies of the novel are being put out in the initial run, over 3 million more than `Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire', the fourth book in the series. Internet retailer Amazon says it has received more than a million advance orders, setting the stage for `The Order of the Phoenix' to become the largest selling item in e-commerce history. J. K. Rowling's first four books have already sold more than 200 million copies, but it is important to keep in mind that Potter Inc. is much more than a bookselling enterprise. It includes cinema, the two released films having already grossed $ 1.8 billion, and a slew of licensing agreements that cover video games, soft toys, T-shirts and even quirky merchandise that find a place in her novels such as earwax-flavoured jelly beans!

`The Order of the Phoenix' is expected to do exactly what the previous Rowling novels have done — spark a renewed interest in the earlier books in the series and add to the increasing royalties of this writer, who once lived on the dole but is now richer than the Queen of England. The series is progressive, with each novel not merely taking up where the other left off, but growing in depth and complexity and aimed at appealing to older children. Ms. Rowling's `The Goblet of Fire' suggested that the seven-part fantasy series had arrived at an intermediate stage, and that further novels would be darker, more nuanced and riddled with moral complexities. The indications are that, in more ways than one, `The Order of the Phoenix' could be the Harry Potter-comes-of-age novel.

Mass popularity inevitably attracts critics and Ms. Rowling has had her share of them, being rubbished for her allegedly indifferent prose, her supposedly predictable characters and the ostensibly conventional narrative structure of her novels. But what such critics often ignore is her remarkable ability to speak directly to children and understand their inner world. Ms. Rowling's genius does not lie merely in the fact that she has authored the best-selling children's series ever written. It lies in her astonishing ability to make children hang on to every little twist in her plot, recall the smallest and seemingly most inconsequential of details and read and re-read her novels in such a way that they remain firmly imprinted in their minds. Before Ms. Rowling, it would have been impossible to imagine a ten-year-old wading through an 896-page novel (the length of `The Order of the Phoenix'). But her most enduring contributions are that she has invigorated the entire market for children's writing and strengthened its status as an independent and worthwhile fictional genre. Writers such as Iva Ibbotson, Eoin Colfer and the hugely talented Philip Pullman (whose `The Amber Spyglass' was recently long-listed by the Booker Prize judges) owe no literary debt to Ms. Rowling. But they ought to be grateful to her for raising the status of children's fiction and for providing the spark — in this age of video games, television and other such distractions — that has made more and more children read.

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