J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999)
I must have been the last person to join the Harry Potter bandwagon. There was an occasion on which I was riding a pushbike from Sydney to Melbourne because I was writing a biography of the road that links Australia’s two largest cities. I use the word ‘pushbike’ advisedly: I spent just as much time pushing as biking. For part of the trip I was on my own and on one of those days I managed to find a room in an insalubrious hotel in the Southern Highlands. There was plenty of noise in the bar near my room but it made no difference. I slept like the proverbial.
In the middle of the night, I woke and wondered where I was. There were shadows on the walls around me and a metal contraption pinning me to the bed. I realised this was the pushbike. I pushed it off me and turned on my little radio. Two pundits were discussing a wonderful new book for younger readers. They had clearly enjoyed Harry Potter but, being academics, were guarding their emotions with impregnable terms such as ‘paradigm’ and ‘emotional demographics’. Anyway, it sounded like a book about a boarding school. Who would want to read that? I had worked in a boarding school. Apparently there was magic involved. Well, I had never seen much magic in the boarding school where I worked, although I had once walked in on a midnight séance in the Year 9 dormitory. The boys were trying to get in touch with the late Jimi Hendrix for some advice on the band they were forming.
I was sure such a silly book would have very limited appeal.
As so often, I had to eat my words. At least that’s better than eating boarding-school food.
~
Before I knew it, my life was crowded with young people. Harry Potter became a welcome part of the time when our kids were little. We had Harry Potter parties and referred to ourselves as Muggles (the Potter word for ordinary humans) and spent a king’s ransom on Harry Potter Lego, some of which, including the Knight Bus, now sits at the back of my teenage son’s cupboard. For three years, I could rely on spending Christmas Day assembling the latest Lego megabox. I, too, grew up with Lego and counted the days until birthdays when another set would arrive. In those days, however, you had to figure out what to make with the pieces. I still have the little Lego motor I received for my tenth birthday. It could power trains and make lights shine; in its day, it was a true wonder. It is still in its box and, to my children, it is a curious antique.
We laughed about the idea of Muggle Quidditch and laughed again when we heard it was included as a demonstration sport at the London Olympics. I loved those days. They were, indeed, magic. When I started working at a large secondary school, my older son, Benedict, gave me a Lego figure of Dumbledore. My daughter, Clare, gave me one of Hagrid. Jacob, a boy of dreams, gave me a magic wand. Twelve years later, those three things are all still safely near my desk, although sometimes I wonder where the wild imagining behind the gifts has gone to hide. I hope one day it will return to free them from the dreariness of our Muggle muddle and soul-sapping computer games.
The Harry Potter stories were both innocent and sophisticated. For nights on end, when our three children shared the same room, Jenny would read from one of the steadily increasing number of books and the kids would urge her to keep going just for one more page, just till the end of the chapter. Sometimes Jenny could hardly stay awake but the kids, who’d been desperate for sleep an hour before, would be now wide-eyed, dreading the moment when it was time for prayers and the land of nod.
Above all, I can remember a car trip from our former home back to Melbourne, a distance of more than six hundred kilometres. We were not looking forward to the journey as the kids were grumpy travellers but we had Stephen Fry on CD reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third book in the series and possibly my favourite.
My life has been wonderfully enriched by talking books: I love being read to. If I have to face a mountain of ironing on a Sunday afternoon, I will actually relish the task if I have an unabridged recording of something vast by Dickens on my iPod. I will take the long way home in the car to have a few more paragraphs of Jane Eyre (see Chapter 29) or lines of The Canterbury Tales (see Chapter 35). When I went to Africa with a group of young people, I uploaded War and Peace (see Chapter 26). It not only helped kill the time on long flights, especially when, travelling on the cheapest ticket, I was squashed in the middle seat, but there were times when the book helped me get a bit of distance from some of the pain we encountered in the poverty of Kenya and Tanzania. Talking books are a great way to rediscover a book you thought you knew: the reader will cast an entirely new light on familiar words.
I will never forget the last four hundred and fifty kilometres of our journey home with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The whole way, the kids did not want to stop for the toilet. They did not even want to stop for junk food.
When we finally reached our house, they all remained in the car until the end of the disc we were on. They had been utterly transfixed. By now, I was thoroughly jealous of the author.
I was slowly being won over to the idea of Harry Potter as Literature. I was a diehard Tolkien fan and admired the way his sentences unfurled into the middle distance. J. K. Rowling’s sentences are more likely to have a scarcely perceptible smile playing about them. I was fascinated by the Tolkien story, of a musty gentleman in love with language. His translation of the Book of Jonah in The Jerusalem Bible is joyous and wise. He was an academic who volunteered as a signaller for the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers and was behind the lines on the first day of the Somme in July 1916. The weeks he spent in the inhuman catastrophe of the Western Front were the seedbed for an extraordinary epic about the contest between havoc and order, destruction and hope. He was lucky to have suffered trench fever and have been sent back to England.
He was unwell for the next three years but during that time he invented a number of Elvish languages, such as Quenya and Sindarin. It was a time in which others began to lose confidence in what language might do. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was among their leading lights. But Tolkien rowed against the cultural tide and from his faith in language came faith in a huge narrative that might explain life in all its complexity.
Rowling (born 1965) is also a writer of courageous vision. At the time she was working on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first book of the series, she was a single mother. Her marriage had broken up and her bank account was notably lacking in Galleons. Her mother died of multiple sclerosis as Rowling was writing. She suffered depression and a sense of disorientation. Nobody wanted to publish her book. I imagine that the daily grind was plenty for her to contend with. Yet she created a narrative that, like Tolkien’s, embraces an understanding of the whole of life, not just her corner of it. All the incidents of the stories fall under an overarching sense of right and wrong, and the significance of moral choices. There is a central character, Voldemort, who embodies evil. He is known as the one whose name may not be spoken. Rowling is drawing upon centuries of human grappling with the elusive banality of evil (see Chapter 14).
The Harry Potter books are part of a tradition of writing for younger readers in which teenagers are separated from parental protection and constraint: they must assume responsibility for their world much sooner than they might otherwise be expected to do so. Robert Muchamore’s Cherub series, John Marsden’s Tomorrow series and even C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are just a few examples.
Hogwarts, the school at the heart of the Harry Potter world, also has a rich understanding of the nature of education. Adults, with all their flaws, have a crucial role. Teaching there is both experiential and theoretical. It includes plenty of material with an ancient pedigree. It honours arcane traditions which require humility and perseverance to master. Everyone knows that what they are doing is really important; there is a complex relationship between teachers and their subject matter. You could create an entire course in education out of the approach to teaching of a list of characters that work at Hogwarts.
I’ve often wondered what school was like for J. K. Rowling. The series tends to focus as much on teaching as learning. Education happens in the context of a relationship. It is not about downloading material from a website and submitting assessment online. At Hogwarts, the students are treated with warmth, affection and respect. They are also significantly challenged. But the world and the expectations of their learning is not simply built around them. They are being led into the wisdom of their ancestors. It is a fantastic model of education. One of the proudest moments of my career was when some of my students started referring to me as Dumbledore. I didn’t deserve the honour and the nickname didn’t stick for long.
There is wisdom and satire in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Ron Weasley’s inability to cope with a phone (which he calls a ‘fellytone’, prompting Hermione to urge him to take ‘Muggles studies next year’) leads him to resort to owl post, with which he is more comfortable. The story includes Boggarts, beings that present themselves in the form of your worst fear. Professor Lupin, who teaches ‘defence against the dark arts’, explains that ‘the thing that really finished a Boggart is laughter.’ You imagine your fear in some hilarious outfit and then, with ‘force of mind’, say the spell to get rid of them, which is the word ‘riddikulus’. The idea of getting young readers, not to mention older ones, to mock their fears is terrific. So too is Professor Lupin’s advice in dealing with Dementors. A Dementor resembles a kind of mental illness, such as depression: ‘They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope and happiness out of the air around them…Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you.’
The prison in this world, Azkaban, has no walls because prisoners are ‘all trapped inside their own heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought’.
We all need to learn skills in dealing with the Dementors in our lives. The world of Hogwarts may be invented, but it is not escapist.
~
When Benedict, my son, was thirteen and starting his second year of high school, we were invited to a ‘father and son evening’ where everybody was asked to bring an object they treasured and which they could chat about with each other, invoking the very happy memories that Dementors can’t stand. I brought some photos. Benedict brought a paperback copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets that we had walked up to the local bookshop together to buy on a sunny Sunday afternoon, six and a half years earlier. I had written in the book for him. It took us back to a time when I was still ‘daddy’ rather than ‘dad’ and our fears seemed ridiculous.