Harry Potter, is it all just hype?
Created | Updated Jun 27, 2003
There seems to be no way of escaping Harry Potter at the moment. Everywhere you turn his face seems to be staring down at you. From the cover of books and computer games, from film posters and lego sets, from dolls and diaries. The films have broken all box office records and the author J.K.Rowling is the only person ever to have held the top five places on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time. The newest book Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix has broken every sales record the world over. He is simply every where you turn.
The problem is that while there are a lot of people who love Harry there are also a lot of people who see the media frenzy around the release of the fifth book and the second film, Harry Potter and Chamber of Secrets, and think that the entire phenomenon is just clever marketing. Even many unapologetic fan of the series have to admit that the marketing around these events can be percieved as too much. There are many people who hadn't already read the books who found the media frenzy so off putting that they say that they will never watch the films or read the books.
As with everything else, as a thing gets popular it's detractors get more and more vocal. In the US and the UK there are schools that have banned Harry Potter from classrooms and libraries because they believe that it encourages an interest in the occult. A culture minister in Germany argued that he is evil on the eve of the release of the first film, Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone (UK).
So what is Harry Potter? The work of the devil, an over hyped piece of rubbish, or simply a good story?
The author would answer the latter. It's detractors should remember that, although there was a huge marketing push around the release of the fourth and fifth books and the films, there was almost no hype around the release of the first two and they made their way into the bestseller lists through word of mouth alone. To those that claim that he is evil I would simply ask if they have read the books. One of the strongest themes throughout them is the struggle between good and evil and it is always clear which is which. If you see no problems with your children reading Grim's Fairy Tales or The Hobbit or even Narnia then how you can have problems with Harry Potter?
Harry Potter is an old fashioned children's tale which mixes the real world with the fantasy world very cleverly. In each book there are things that you recognise but each is changed just enough that the fantasy is obvious. In many ways the veiled references remind me of 'The Matrix'. Whereas Neo and his friends referred to Alice in Wonderland, Oz and Plato, Harry and his friends include veiled references to the 1001 Nights, Arthurian Legend and The Hobbit. You can also tell that J.K.Rowling loves the english language. Her puns are particuarly good. A favourite of many is 'Diagon Alley', the name of the wizard's shopping street in London.
The books are designed to grow with their readers. As Harry gets older the books get longer and the plots get darker and more complicated. The presence of evil becomes ever more oppressing and scary, which makes sense if you think about it. As Harry grows the things that scare him grow too. In the first books the things that are meant to be scary are the things that would scare an eleven year old child. By book number five Harry is fifteen and his fears are much more adult.
All in all, despite the impressions to the contrary that you might have gained from the press, the Harry Potter books are good books. They are similar in style and quality to Rosemary Sutciff's 'The Eagle of the Ninth' and Susan Coopers Dark is Rising books. Hopefully they will continue to be seen being read on airplanes by business men and in the park by school kids.
