Harry Skywalker?

>> Will Harry Potter's world withstand the dark forces of marketing?

by JULIET WATERS

I discovered the magic of Harry Potter about a year and a half ago when my Moroccan landlady asked me to teach her 10-year-old son English while his regular tutor was on sabbatical. Bored with the exercise books we were using, I brought a review copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

I figured I would try to develop his language skills the same way I'd developed mine, through frustration with the slowness of my mother's reading of Anne of Green Gables. I learned by finishing books on my own. Later, I would learn from skimming the adult paperbacks lying around the house that were a lot racier than anything I'd been forbidden on TV. I learned early that TV and movies were too controllable by parents and censors. But the quiet, subversive world that could be accessed by reading was always my own.

We only made it halfway through the first Harry Potter book before my student's regular English teacher returned, but I found out later that not only had he finished the book, but he was now bugging his mother to go out and buy the other ones. So, no matter what the hype, or the predictable backlash against the hype surrounding the Potter phenomenon, my pro-Potter argument will always be this: if a 10-year-old boy with a very rudimentary English vocabulary can be drawn into Harry's world, there's obviously something more magnetic than marketing going on there.

Subversion and satire

I still have my criticisms of J.K Rowling's series. The Potter books don't bring back the same dark, scary complexity that I remember from the Roald Dahl or C.S. Lewis books I loved. And for all the charm of Harry's world, I find him and his pals a little dull in the personality department.

But what Harry lacks in complexity as a person is made up for by the quirky, wonderful detail that Rowling creates in the world of Hogwarts Academy. It's a world where children are transported from a technology-dependent universe, increasingly controlled by their parents. And what the Rowling books might lack in classic literary merit, they make up for in the charming subversion and satire of contemporary global media. Hogwarts will always be relatively free of the kind crass capitalism that turns kids into fat, spoiled Dudley Dursleys.

One might be tempted to bring up the recent high-gear marketing campaign surrounding the latest Harry Potter as proof that the series is increasingly tainted by commercialism. But the midnight bookstore openings don't really seem to be about orchestrating a feeding frenzy.

At 9 a.m. Saturday morning at Chapters, one of the stores that didn't open at midnight, business was leisurely and there were plenty of copies of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire available. The effect of the midnight openings was more about creating that special parallel universe for kids, which Rowlings has so brilliantly mastered.

Expanding universe

The latest Harry Potter seems also to be devoted to expanding and developing this parallel universe. Less plot driven than the previous three books, the first 150 pages of Goblet deals almost solely with Harry's journey to see the International Quidditch World Cup.

The next section is taken up by a tri-wizard competition that will introduce us to two other European wizard academies, Beauxbatons and Durmstrang. Each has their history and their part in the epic of forces that seem to be leading towards a European-scale wizard war.

And yes, someone dies, but who is not so important as the shift in mood that this death creates. Slowly Harry is outgrowing his innocent self-contained world, and with guidance from his godfather/mentor Sirius, as well as the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody and headmaster Dumbledore, he seems to be headed more and more towards George Lucas land.

In some ways, this is good. The books could use a bit more black and a bit less goofiness. But in some ways a sombreness has descended that threatens to remove some of the satire. The question that hangs at the end of this book, and will no doubt create an even bigger buying frenzy for the next one, is whether or not Potter is on the road towards becoming Harry Skywalker.

Last weekend on 60 Minutes, J.K. Rowling pleaded humorously with parents not to buy any action figures that might result from her film deal with Warner Brothers. But how much control she can maintain over the magic she has created will be, for me, the biggest suspense of this series. :

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling. Raincoast, hc, 636pp, $35 ($24.50 at Chapters)