MY SON TYCHO can remember thinking he was the only child in the world who had heard of Harry Potter. He read my review copy of
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone over the summer of 1997, and went to school in September bursting to share this magical new world with friends. No one knew what he was talking about.
How different can things get? The mad scramble for copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at the publishers’ offices on Friday night delayed the arrival of ours until 2am, at which point Tycho, 13, immediately started reading, taking a nap around 5am and a rest mid-afternoon. By midnight on Saturday he had finished the book: and this time so had thousands of other teenagers. “As good as the other books,” was Tycho’s laconic verdict. “A few surprises. Dumbledore promises to ‘tell Harry everything’ at the end, but he doesn’t tell him that much. The person who dies” — Rowling claims to have wept over this scene — “is one of the four I had thought most likely.” Tycho’s friend Pip, 14, whose mother performed the ultimate parental sacrifice — she left a party early to queue at a WH Smith’s in her evening dress on Friday night — was reading all Saturday. By Sunday lunch he was on page 390 and reckoned it was “brilliant”. Tycho’s classmate Tom, 12, still on page 100, was less impressed: “But things usually get better when Harry gets to Hogwarts,” he said hopefully. My daughter Edith, 11, agrees with Tom that the opening is slow — by page 76 she had already spotted two fairly serious plot defects. “J. K. Rowling is trying too hard to write an older teenage book,” she judges.
One of the many gifts Harry Potter has given us is to teach our children the old-fashioned virtue of anticipation. Forget instant gratification: for three long years our children have waited for this book, and the countdown has been a large part of the fun. The challenge now is to exercise enough self-discipline to avoid knowing how this book ends, and in particular to avoid discovering which major character it is who dies. If I were Sybill Trelawney, the fraudulent Hogwarts divination teacher, I would confidently predict that this week many hapless teenagers’ names will be furiously deleted from their best friends’ mobile phone memories, because they committed the crime of revealing the ending.
Our neighbour Maud, 14, is highly miffed. Her pre-ordered copy was parachuted into our street by a special Royal Mail delivery at 7am on Saturday: her homework was out of the way, she had the whole weekend sussed. Then on Saturday night she went to a party and the worst happened. She overheard a boy revealing the ending. “I am really, really annoyed. It wasn’t the guy’s fault, I just overheard him discussing the character who dies — now I know, and I’m only on page 243! And I’ve been so good about not peeking to the end.”
The best way to delay the inevitable, of course, is to stay at home. The Kellys, of Tewksbury in Gloucestershire, bought four copies — one for each of their four children. Three were delivered by Amazon before 7am, the fourth was purchased at a local bookshop. “So far the PlayStation hasn’t been on all weekend, and neither has the television, which is a first in this household,” says mum Fiona. A rare absence of bickering contributed to the general hush. “In that sense, having a book each really paid off.”
Her two youngest children, Eleanor, nine, and Hamish, eight, read aloud to each other on reclining chairs in the garden. Tom, 11, chose to reject Rowling so that he could continue reading his current Anthony Horowitz. But Liam, 13, immersed himself from the start, breaking off only to confirm it as “even better than the first four. I’m so glad it is 766 pages, because it means it is going to last for ages. Because I’m nearly Harry’s age I sort of know what he is going through. He is definitely more moody, but you can’t blame him for shouting and losing his temper when you know the secret that Ron and Hermione keep from him.”
Five years ago, before she got big, J. K. Rowling had lunch with me at my home. As we talked, and as Jo smoked several furtive cigarettes when her four-year-old daughter wasn’t watching, she threw me a gold nugget: an important little fact concerning the denouement of the whole Harry Potter story — a crucial plot point, to be honest. Then she took a taxi back to Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross, never to be seen in Shepherd’s Bush again.
I have kept my fist tight round that nugget, and five years on JK’s is a very different world. She is, literally, fabulously rich; her wealth is the stuff of stories, in every sense. My life, too, is still the stuff of stories, insofar as I am still sent dozens of children’s books to read every week. Many of them are far better written than Jo’s, though few have what I call her “child-sense” and narrative drive. But even the best writers, perhaps especially the best, would concede that the whole children’s books business has been changed for ever, and for the better, by Harry Potter.
So I still hug my precious secret to my chest, not only because, as JK herself would say, it would “spoil the story”, but because it is the least I can do for a woman who makes my teenage son want to stay up late to start reading a 768-page book. The invention of Harry Potter Weekend has made reading cool — and for that there can be no adequate thanks.
SARAH JOHNSON
It's all rather hit and myth
THERE are no surprises in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. What? How can that be? Three years of waiting, three years of black-cloaked secrecy, a $100 million lawsuit against the New York Daily News? Wasn’t it all about surprises?
Let me qualify. There is no sense of surprise about Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; none at all. No series of books can have the kind of mass appeal that the Potter books do without one plain fact being true: every one must be, in essence, exactly like the one that came before. Readers of these books don’t want to be surprised. They want to be comforted, they want to feel safe.
Don’t mistake me: there is nothing wrong with that. The wonder of the novel is that it is a form almost infinitely flexible. The books we take to our hearts are not necessarily the best books: our favourite books speak to us in a deep and mysterious way, to the very core of our beings. This was clearly seen in the range of the BBC’s Big Read Top 100 — on which list, of course, were all four previous Harry Potter books.
