Success Story

A writer who puts one cliche into a book manages to produce pulp fiction. A writer who uses a dozen can produce a classic. And a writer who includes them all — well, only Homer has ever managed that. Something very interesting begins to happen in literature when the standard, hackneyed old tropes and figures are jumbled up together and allowed to start pushing and shoving among themselves.

The publishing event of 1999 has been the appearance this fall of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third installment of the British author J. K. Rowling’s promised seven-volume saga of the adventures of a bespectacled boy at a wizard-training school in England. It is, in fact, the publishing event of the decade. On a visit last week to a Washington bookstore, Joanne Rowling sold and signed nine hundred copies of the novel in a single sitting. The book has not just topped the bestseller lists, but dominated them. It’s sold almost a million copies in just a few weeks, at one point out-selling the second-best-selling novel by an astonishing margin of seven to one. It’s called back onto both the hardback and the paperback top-ten lists its predecessors, the 1997 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and the 1998 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. And for two weeks, Rowling had the nearly unbelievable distinction of the top three bestselling hardback novels in America and the top two paperbacks.

Part of the reason for Rowling’s triumph is the success that follows from success. The huge sales in 1997 of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain were proof that there still exists in America a hunger for middlebrow fiction — and for the shared topic of conversation that is the main benefit of a middlebrow literary culture. The trashy bestsellerdom of the lowbrow may be shared, but it gives us nothing to talk about. The glossy unbestsellerdom of the highbrow may give us something to talk about, but it isn’t shared. Once a middlebrow book reaches a certain number of readers, however, it begins to feed upon its success to gain ever higher success — for its sharedness has become its most important feature.

And then, too, the Harry Potter books are children’s fiction, and the one thing that’s stronger than the manifest desire of middlebrow adults in America to have shared literary references is their hunger to have their children have shared literary references. You can feel good about buying it for your kids, and you can read it yourself in an evening and talk about it around the office coffee machine with the other parents for the next two weeks.

But the deeper reason for the success of Harry Potter is Rowling’s willingness to pour into the cauldron of her books the tropes and figures of nearly every genre of children’s fiction and let them stew together. As the saga opens in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, a thin eleven-year-old boy with round glasses and a scar shaped like a lightning bolt on his forehead is living in Little Whinging, in the London suburbs, with his respectability-obsessed aunt and uncle and their fat son Dudley.

From the first sentence, even moderately unread children will know just where in literature they are: “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” (Roald Dahl’s Matilda, isn’t it?)

The Dursleys have been stuck with Harry ever since his parents died when he was one year old, but — for reasons they never make clear to Harry — they don’t like it, and they have spent the last ten years trying to bludgeon out of him some fault that the poor orphan doesn’t know he has: “Harry was used to spiders,” Rowling introduces the boy, “because the cupboard under the stairs was full of them, and that was where he slept.” (Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, anyone?)

But things are about to change in Harry Potter’s life. It turns out that hidden in the byways and secret places of England’s green and pleasant land is a parallel world that has gone on unnoticed all this time. (Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, yes?) It is a strange and marvelous world of magicians and magical creatures who cannot be perceived by the ordinary, unchosen folk. (Wasn’t that P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins?)

It’s this world of magic in which Harry travels (Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies) by passing through a magic portal (C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) at Platform Nine and Three-Quarters in London’s King’s Cross Station (well, I don’t know, maybe E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children), after receiving a mysterious letter inviting him to attend the “Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry; Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster” (a touch of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz) that frightens the Dursleys and briefly makes them treat Harry better (Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Little Princess).

As it turns out, in this new world, the insignificant Harry suddenly discovers himself to be a significant figure (T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone). His parents had been battling the Dark Lord Voldemort (Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time), and Harry is famous among witches and wizards, for he survived as an infant the attack that killed his parents — and in surviving, somehow destroyed Voldemort’s power. So off he goes to the Hogwarts boarding school (Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays), where he forms a mischievous triumvirate of new friends (Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co.) and discovers an enormous talent for the “basketball on broomsticks” school game of Quidditch (P. G. Wodehouse’s Mike and Psmith). But in each book he must face the horror of Voldemort’s threat to return to power (J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings), and the series promises to follow Harry Potter through his seven years of schooling, as he ages from eleven to eighteen (Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series).

Along the way in the three Harry Potter volumes Rowling has produced so far, we encounter a huge cast of stock figures. There’s the poor but happy Weasley family — straight out of Margaret Sidney’s Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. There’s Neville, the little boy for whom everything goes wrong — from Lucretia P. Hale’s The Peterkin Papers. There’s Hermione, the smart girl surrounded by uncomprehending boys — borrowed out of Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins. There’s Hagrid, the loveable giant; and Malfoy, the evil-natured rich boy; and Snape, the jealous teacher; and Percy, the pompous prefect — and on and on they roll past, each more familiar than the last.

The result is entirely enjoyable. Rowling may lack the perfect diction of A. A. Milne and Lewis Carroll, but she still has a great deal of fun with words: the invented slang (Muggles for non-magical people), the pseudo-Latin spells (Petrificus Totalus!), the almost meaningful place names (Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw, the four houses that make up Hogwarts school), and the proper names that tell the reader from the start just which cliche their holders are going to fill (the fat, unpleasant boy, Dudley Dursley; the suspected betrayer of Harry’s parents, Sirius Black).

Rowling may lack as well the inventiveness of Mark Twain or Robert Louis Stevenson — her first two books have essentially the same plot, and only with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban do we get a variation. But she knows how to keep her stories moving, just as she knows how to set in them her little touches of comic observation and sometimes quite frightening terror. But, best of all, she knows how to fill her stories with all the most standard, hackneyed, old tropes and figures — and then how to get out of the way to let them perform their magic.