Page 8, 21st July 2000
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Counter Culture
Leonie Caldecott
AT NINE-O-CLOCK on Saturday July 8, 2000 the house was silent. Then the lobby door opened, and something hit the mat inside. Seconds later, there was a thundering of feet upon the stairs, accompanied by shrieks of excitement as our three children threw themselves on the parcel that had just flown through the doors "It's here, it's here!" It took me a day or two to lay my hands on the contents of the parcel. Each of my two elder daughters took about 24 hours to read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which runs to 636 pages.
Later, I heard other parents juke about how that was the weekend to get on with the I)IY. The pied-piper effect ofJ K Rowling's immensely successful stories reminded me of the '60s song: "There's a kind of hush, all over the world..."
But I suppose pied pipers, inevitably, raise questions about where children are being disappeared to. I have written about the Harry Potter phenomenon in these pages before (if you don't know who or what Harry Potter is by now, go to the back of the class and shred newts).
After reading the new tome, which is twice as long and five times as scary as the last one, I still feel that Joanne Rowling's creation is basically benign. It is certainly not the ease that the books, as asserted by American fundamentalists, are intrinsically anti-Christian. There may be a cultura.1 problem here, a sort of Salem mentality, as distinct from more venerable folk traditions in Europe.
But the point is that Rowling has posited a strongly moral universe in her description of Harry's time at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The very evil which ressurges so strongly in the latest volume is in some way a sign of this. I say this in the full knowledge that she is writing about, if not a post-Christian, at least a merely subliminally Christian world. For a devout Catholic, Christ knocks repeatedly at the connumdrum Rowling describes. However, she is an astute observer of human behaviour, and depicts the kind of moral struggles that children everywhere grapple with. The results of sin are very clearly shown, whether in revolting physical phenomena that only magic (on a par with Eustace and the dragon in The Voyage of the Dawntreader)
could produce, or in the psychological suffering which it causes.
One of the greatest delights of the books, is the tongue-in-cheek satire on the world at large. The latest one sends up football hooliganism, teenage political correctness, pompous civil servants and ill-advised politicians, EU-style standardisation (in this case cauldron thickness), and best of all, voyeuristic journalists with a cavalier attitude towards truth. "Curiosity is not a sin" (sic!) says the wise old headmaster Albas Dumbledore. "But we should exercise caution with our curiosity... yes, indeed..." Here lies the difference between Harry's attempt to understand the background to present events which concern him closely, and the sin of curiosirar, or what Augustine calls "concupiscence of the eyes". Harry, asked to keep a secret of information he stumbles across about another boy, keeps his word faithfully. Rita Skeeter, with her crocodile handbag and her quick-quotes quill, has a disastrous effect on all those whose personal lives she purports to investigate in the "public interest".
The Harry Potter books are in the great tradition which stretches from Jennings to the Chalet School. But they differ from their older counterparts in one crucial area, which perhaps marks them out as signs of their time. For whilst the earlier schoolchildren always seemed to be the same indeterminate age, Harry Potter and his friends are shown growing up. The series started when Harry was eleven, and will end when he leaves school seven years later. As we know, these days most children do not wait until they leave school to face adult issues (alas). Yet I wonder if this may not eventually pose a slight problem for the sheer nuige of ages that lap up the books as though there were no tomorrow.
Meanwhile, all I can say is that a pagan who calls the arch-enemy of all that makes life worth living "Voldemort", can't be a million miles away from a Pontiff who sums up the ills of the modem world with the term "culture of death".
So watch this space: the ultimate quidditch match is not over.
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