Categoria: 1998

Harry Potter vai a Hollywood – fazendo da escritora uma milionária

Tradução: Pituh 2
Revisão: {patylda}
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Walker, Andrew. “Harry Potter is off to Hollywood – writer a Millionairess,” The Scotsman, October 9, 1998

IT WILL undoubtedly be Harry Potter’s biggest adventure yet.

The fictional hero of an Edinburgh children’s author has already made short work of John Grisham, Jeffrey Archer and Terry Pratchett in the bestsellers’ lists and is set to take on Hollywood.

Joanne Rowling’s negotiations with Warner Brothers have resulted in the film rights for the two hugely popular Harry Potter books, written in a coffee shop, being bought for a seven-figure sum.

A screenwriter is being recruited to adapt the novels into a live-action production.

Last night, Rowling, a single mother, said of her own fairy-tale rise to literary – and now movie – success: “This is beyond my wildest expectations.

I am stunned and delight-ed.”

The tales of the 11-year-old orphan boy with the powers of a wizard have caught the public imagination. More than 200,000 copies of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets have been sold in the UK.

Its publisher, Bloomsbury, has produced an adult-style edition to appeal to the growing number of Harry’s grown-up followers.

The author, who writes under the name JK Rowling, created her hero while sitting in Edinburgh coffee bars as her baby daughter slept in a pushchair at her side.

Rowling, 33, a former teacher, began writing to pass the time when she moved to the capital after her marriage broke up.

She said: “I am in a kind of stunned relief. The talks went on for months and months and at some stages I thought it would never happen.

“It will be a incredible experience to see in real life what I have seen inside my mind. It will be quite disorientating, but wonderful.

“The whole thing has gone beyond my wildest expectations as my life’s ambition was just to support myself. I only thought about books and if there had never been a film, I would have been happy.

“I think Warner Bros will do a good job and be true to the character. Other children’s films they have produced helped sway me.”

David Heyman, of Heyday Films, the production partner with Warner Bros which has bought the options, said Harry Potter’s unique appeal was the key to the deal.

He said: “These are really family adventures in the truest sense, with stories and writing than can be appreciated by readers of all ages.

“I know adults who bought the book initially for their children to take on holiday – it ended up ripped apart because so many people wanted to read it. Although the books are aimed at the nine to11 age range, there is something a wee bit special here that goes far beyond that.

“It will be a live-action film and I hope the part of Harry Potter will be an attractive one for young actors.”

Mr Heyman said he was still unsure if he would make a single film from the two books or begin a cinematic adventure series. Rowling has said there will be seven Harry Potter adventures.

Lorenzo di Bonaventura, president of Warner Bros’ worldwide theatrical production, said: “These books have a terrific following in Great Britain and America, where Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone has just been released.

“We look forward to seeing Heyday Films’ adaptation of this material for the screen, where it can be embraced by fans on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Rowling’s third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, will be published next summer. She is about to embark on a US tour and a website has been set up to allow readers an insight into how future books are developing.

The GBP 100,000 advance for Rowling’s first novel put her ahead of another bestselling author, John Grisham, whose debut book The Firm, cost his publisher GBP 70,000.

Copyright 1998 The Scotsman Publications Ltd.

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Harry Potter encantou uma nação

Tradução: Kaede Shirakawa
Revisão: Adriana Snape
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de Bertodano, Helena. “Harry Potter Charms a Nation.” Eletronic Telegraph, 25 July 1998.

[Joanne Rowling, creator of the fictional schoolboy wizard, is being talked of as the next C. S. Lewis. Her tales for children, like Lewis’s, have a dark, adult streak to them. Where does it come from?]

PERHAPS Joanne Rowling has become too immersed in her own fantasy world. In her Harry Potter children’s books, there is a wonderful substance called Floo powder, a pinch of which will transport her characters around the country in seconds. But in real life, things do not run so smoothly.

We have agreed to meet at ten at her publishers, Bloomsbury, in Soho Square. At eleven, a thin young woman with long flame-red hair bursts through the door, distraught and dishevelled. “I’m so sorry. I’m just really really sorry,” she keeps saying, shaking like a leaf and looking as though she might cry.

With a strong coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, she slowly calms down but cannot stop apologising. “It did cross my mind in the taxi that some Floo powder would have been hugely handy,” she says, half-laughing through her agitation.

A long and complicated explanation tumbles out: the hotel refused to let her check out, having lost her name in the computer, and then, having found her name, insisted that her prepaid bill had not been settled. “I was halfway here in the taxi and I was so upset by being so late for you, and then I realised I didn’t have my purse. So I just burst into tears.”

Her profuse apologies show that there is no risk of her becoming a prima donna. Yet in the past year, her life has changed immeasurably. From being a single mother struggling on benefit in a poky flat in Edinburgh, she has become a bestselling novelist. Her latest book, [Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets], published this month, has gone straight to the top of the general bestseller list, outselling Jeffrey Archer and John Grisham.

When her first novel, [Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone], was published last year, Rowling became a literary sensation. The novel won the Smarties Prize – the children’s equivalent of the Booker – and sold 70,000 copies in Britain. It was sold to eight other countries, netting a $100,000 advance for the American edition, a huge sum for a first novel, almost unheard-of for a children’s novel.

But what is most unusual is that her books are enjoyed by adults, too. When I express scepticism to her publisher, saying that it is no wonder it is top of the adult list as adults would buy it for children, I am handed a batch of letters that make it clear that this is not the case. Mary Dickson from Glasgow has written to Bloomsbury asking to join the Harry Potter Fan Club adding, “P.S. I am 60 years young”, while John Roberts from Bristol, who describes himself as “a child at heart – an adult in body” wants to know if a film is in the pipeline.

The answer is yes. The word is that she is about to sign a six-figure Hollywood deal. Rowling concedes that there is some basis to the rumours, but says she cannot confirm anything because she has yet to sign the papers.

Such is the excitement about Joanne Rowling that she is being compared to C. S. Lewis and Roald Dahl, who also achieved the rare trick of delighting both children and adults. The secret seems to be that her target audience consists of one person: herself. “People have said the humour is very adult, but I do think they underestimate children. Certainly, some of the kids I’ve met have got every joke and even if they haven’t, it doesn’t actually matter. It annoys me that people think you have to dumb down for children.”

Rowling, who is 32, says that she is very flattered to think that adults enjoy the books as much as children. A friend of hers recently told her of a man on a train, furtively reading a copy behind his newspaper. “I’ve had letters from entire families saying there have been squabbles at bedtime because the mother wanted to finish reading the chapter and then took it away and read the whole thing herself.”

The stories centre on Harry, an orphan who lives with his cruel uncle and aunt before discovering that he is a wizard and enrolling at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Here, equipped with his broom and magic wand, he receives lessons in Potions, Herbology and Quidditch, an airborne form of football. Meanwhile, with his friends Ron and Hermione, he has to combat the forces of evil by fighting snakes, three-headed dogs and the school bully Draco Malfoy.

If all this sounds too childish for words, it should be added that the books are marked by an inventive wit and vivid characterisation. And there are undercurrents to the adventures, a sense of morality that is subtle and emotions that run deep. After reading the first in the series, it is no surprise to hear Rowling say that when her mother died, aged 45, of multiple sclerosis, she changed the book to reflect her own grief.

In one chapter Harry looks into a magic mirror which allows the viewer to see what their heart most desires, and finds his dead parents waving at him. “He had a powerful kind of ache inside him, half joy, half terrible sadness,” writes Rowling.

“I was conscious that when I looked in the mirror, I would see exactly what Harry saw. But it was only when I’d written it that I fully realised where it had all come from. It is an enormous regret to me that my mother never knew about any of this, second only to the fact that she never met my daughter.”

The moral point becomes clear towards the end of each book. “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities,” says Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster, in the denouement of the second book. Rowling admits that the moral drive is important to her, but stresses that it is not contrived. “The morals tend to come quite naturally, often as I approach the end I realise what I’ve been writing about. But I don’t think my books are preachy – Harry breaks rules quite routinely.”

For those who cannot wait for the sequels (to be published at the rate of one a year for the next five years – until Harry leaves school), a fan club web site has just been set up with additional snippets of information and stories. The fan receives a certificate proclaiming him or her “an honorary pupil of Hogwarts, a personal friend of Harry Potter’s, a fierce opponent of the dark side and a thoroughly good egg”. The school’s motto Drago Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus – Never Tickle a Sleeping Dragon – appears under the official crest.

When we leave the office to find a nearby café, Rowling is nearly bowled over by two young children. “Jo, Jo!” they cry, running up to her to hug her legs. “Come shopping with us,” they plead. They are the daughters of one of the Bloomsbury editors and she promises to accompany them to Hamley’s in the afternoon.

As a child herself, growing up in Chepstow, Joanne and her younger sister, Di, read avidly. “My most vivid memory of childhood is my father sitting and reading [Wind in the Willows ]to me. I had measles at the time, very badly, but I don’t remember that; I just remember the book.”

She loved C. S. Lewis and E. Nesbit, but was not such a fan of Roald Dahl. As for the Enid Blyton books, Rowling says she read them all, but was never tempted to go back to them, whereas she would read and re-read Lewis. “Even now, if I was in a room with one of the Narnia books I would pick it up like a shot and re-read it.”

Rowling went to her local comprehensive, where she was “a snotty, swotty little kid and very insecure”. Hermione, a character in her books, is closely modelled on herself. “She is a caricature of me: I was neither as bright nor as annoying as Hermione. At least, I hope I wasn’t, because I would have deserved drowning at birth. But she, like me, lightens up. As I went through my teens, things actually got better. I began to realise that there was more to me than just someone who got everything right.”

Apart from a couple of blips in her life, she says the upward curve has continued ever since. “I’m someone who’s definitely got happier as they’ve got older. I feel more and more comfortable with myself and I’ve always had this feeling that in my forties, I will finally hit serenity. I really hope it’s true because I could do with a bit of serenity. I definitely wouldn’t go back and do childhood again. I don’t look back on it as a phase of blissful happiness at all.”

So it is ironic that she should end up writing primarily for children. She says she did not plan it that way, it just happened. After leaving Exeter University, where she read French and Classics, she started work as a teacher but daydreamed about becoming a writer.

One day, stuck on a delayed train for four hours between Manchester and London, she dreamt up a boy called Harry Potter. That was in 1990. It took her six years to write the book. In the meantime she went to teach in Portugal, married a Portuguese TV journalist, had her daughter, Jessica, divorced her husband and returned to Britain when Jessica was just three months old.

She went to live in Edinburgh to be near her sister, Di. “I was at rock bottom. I arrived back in Britain about a month before John Major made his infamous ‘single parents are the root of society’s ills’ speech. I was fighting very hard to keep my head above the water and I thought it was a despicable thing to say, victimising people who are already incredibly vulnerable. Most of them have no escape route. I was very lucky, I was a graduate and I had some very sellable skills so it didn’t last for long.”

Rowling’s sudden penury made her realise that it was “back-against-the-wall time” and she decided to finish her Harry Potter book. She could not face her cold and miserable flat, so she would walk the streets of Edinburgh, pushing Jessica in a buggy until she fell asleep, and would then rush into a café and write for two hours, the baby sleeping next to her. “I reached a point where diffidence was a luxury I couldn’t afford any more. I thought, ‘What is the worst that could happen?’ Every publishing company in Britain could turn me down: big deal.”

She typed out two manuscripts – she could not afford to photocopy it – and sent them to two agents in London whom she had picked out of a yearbook in the local library. Christopher Little wrote back immediately, accepting the manuscript. “I could not believe it. I read the letter eight times.”

Now Joanne and Jessica, who is nearly five, live in a house in the centre of Edinburgh. “The main thing is this profound feeling of relief. I no longer have the constant worry of whether she will outgrow a pair of shoes before I’ve got the money for the next pair. Until you’ve actually been there, you’ve no idea how soul-destroying it is to have no money. It is a complete loss of self-esteem.”

She has a few close friends, who stuck by her during the hard times. “I really know who my friends are because there was a period when there was absolutely no kudos in being my friend. People really helped me – I’m not talking about money, I’m talking about just being there when I was miserable.”

Since her success, a couple of fairweather friends have crawled back out of the woodwork. “I didn’t pick up the phone. I just thought, ‘Don’t now decide that I was a fantastically interesting person all along, when for a year I wasn’t interesting at all.’ ”

Nowadays, she says, she could not be happier. “I have what I always wanted and amazingly it completely lives up to my expectations. All I wanted to do was to write and to make some money out of it. And I have a dream child in Jessica. My life is very fulfilled: I don’t look around and think, ‘Now let’s get Mr Perfect in.’ If Mr Perfect came along no one would be happier than me, but it’s not the top priority.”

Although she says it will feel like a “bereavement” when she finishes the Harry Potter series, she is determined that once he leaves school that will be the end. “There will be no Harry Potter’s midlife crisis or Harry Potter as an old wizard.”

She might even turn her hand to “adult” novels but is adamant that she does not see that as a pinnacle of achievement. “I think it’s wrong to think of adult books as ‘real literature’. Real literature can be for people of nine and that’s what I’m trying to write.”

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Da moça no café à escritora de sucesso

Tradução: Denebola Black
Revisão: Adriana Snape
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Johnson, Syrie. “From cafe girl to hit writer.” The Evening Standard (London), 10 July 1998.

Joanna Rowling’s success is even more of a fairytale than the children’s books she produces. She’s gone from living on income support and writing in cafes to a six-figure American deal and a place at the top of the bestseller list. SYRIE JOHNSON hears her amazing story.

ONE thing is for certain about Delia Smith and Jeffrey Archer. They sell. So does Joanne Rowlings. In fact, last week her latest hardback outsold Delia’s and Jeffrey’s. Yet Joanne’s book is a tale peopled with ghosts with names like Nearly Headless Nick.

Rowlings writes for children (her new book is entitled Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) and she’s on the verge of signing an estimated six-figure Hollywood deal. Her own story – the tale of a former penniless single mother who had to go without food in order to provide for her baby daughter – is as improbable as those she writes.

You’d think Rowlings would have settled for an autobiography: a poor, young woman arrives alone in a strange city, Edinburgh, fighting with depression after the death of her mother, with her three-month-old baby daughter in tow. She survives on income support, pacing the streets till baby Jessica falls asleep.

Or, as Rowling pitches it: “Eccentric woman dashes into cafes every day, one arm on the buggy, hair everywhere, slings a pile of A4 papers down, orders espresso after espresso and writes madly. At night, back in her grotty bedsit after Jessica falls asleep, she writes a bit more. Without writing, she’d go stark, raving mad.”

Yet, from these beginnings, she wrote her first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which sold 70,000 copies, earned her £100,000 from the American rights, and was sold to eight other countries.

Writing, for her, has other rewards, less pecuniary.

“This woman came sprinting up to me,” she recalls, “and said: ‘My son’s nine, he’s very severely dyslexic, we’ve taken him to every specialist and he’s never read a book in his life. But I read him three chapters of Harry Potter, went into his bedroom next morning and found him curled up with it. It’s the first book he’s ever read’.”

Though she may appear an amazing overnight success, Rowling’s recognition has been a long time coming. She’s been writing in secret since she was five, when as “a swotty little git with National Health spectacles” she wrote for five years about a rabbit called Rabbit who got measles.

After graduating from Exeter with a degree in French and Classics, she went to work in Amnesty International – still writing secretly. “Then I temped for years – I’ve left a trail of undeleted stories on word processors across England.”

Rowling continued with her writing when she decided to teach English in Portugal, falling in love with, and marrying, a Portuguese TV journalist – the marriage lasted three years.

She moved to Edinburgh, but this time, couldn’t find job. “I had no desire to remain on benefits but I couldn’t get any child care for Jessica in order to work,” she explains. “It’s the most soul destroying thing. There were nights when, though Jessica ate, I didn’t. Everything had gone wrong – with the exception of my daughter. But while I was still writing I didn’t feel like I had completely lost my identity. It’s a very weird feeling to suddenly have no answer to the question, ‘What do you do?’ I was completely devalued – complete loss of self-esteem.”

THE idea for Harry Potter came to Rowling on a delayed train from Manchester to London seven years ago. Unusually, she was without pen and paper, so was stuck for four hours with the big idea and nothing to write it on. “I’d never thought of writing for children before,” she explains, “But then I didn’t write this thinking of children, I wrote it for me.”

In her story, an orphan called Harry lives with his sadistic and suburban uncle and aunt until he’s 11, when he’s rescued by owls and taken to a wizardry school peopled by ghosts and a drunken gamekeeper called Habrid [sic]. (Rowling’s only preference when the film is made is that Habrid be played by Robbie Coltrane. “He should be flattered,” she says.) The hard work was not over when she’d finished the manuscript. “I didn’t have enough money to photocopy it, or buy a word processor, so I had to type out the 80,000 words twice. My ex-neighbours will remember me fondly as the woman who made loud banging noises at one in the morning, which was me slamming the typewriter on the table trying to get it to work again.

“Then, in 1995, I went to the library and looked up some names of agents,” she continues. “The second one I wrote to said yes. It was the best letter of my life. I read it eight times. He said there was an auction going on and someone was going to ring me with a six-figure deal. And now, by a very convoluted route, I ‘ve ended up with the life I’ve always wanted – making a living out of writing. It’s such a relief, it’s almost like coming out.”

Rowling has five more books plotted already. “I could write a guide of Edinburgh cafes for very poor people,” she laughs. “A cafe called Nicolson’s became my favourite place and often gave me free coffees and let me use their telephone. I’ve been back to a couple of cafes and they’ve said, ‘Oh we know what you do now. We just thought you were very strange’.”

The cafes who tolerated her now have their rewards.

These days, not only does Rowling give them constant publicity, but she can also now afford to order food.

And she’s begun to bring in a tourist trade. Yesterday a waiter informed her that a child had forced his parents to eat at Nicolson’s. Why? Because “that lady wrote Harry Potter here”.

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Simplesmente loucos por Harry

Tradução: Naty Granger
Revisão: {patylda}
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Lockerbie, Catherine. “Just Wild About Harry,” The Scotsman, July 9, 1998
CONSIDER the following curious picture. The rotund businessmen of the local Rotary Club earnestly discuss the relative merits, not of their Rovers, but of their racy new models of broomstick. The football terraces are forsaken in favour of Quidditch – an airborne wizardly game of terrifying speed and skill.

Cool twenty-somethings out clubbing sport lightning flashes on their foreheads – not in belated tribute to Ziggy Stardust, but in emulation of a bespectacled little boy by the name of Harry Potter.

Such a cultural shift may seem a mite unlikely. It is, however, hardly less likely than the scarcely credible story of a first children’s novel by an unknown author so seizing the imagination of the reading public that it knocks Jeffrey Archer and John Grisham off the top of the bestsellers list.

The rise and rise of Harry Potter has by now been well documented.

Single mother JK Rowling famously created her orphan hero while scribbling in Edinburgh cafes as her baby slept in her pushchair alongside. The first novel, Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone, published last year by Bloomsbury, attracted attention and advances hardly dreamed of for a first children’s book. It sold superbly, won the Smarties Prize and entered playground lore.

The ordinary small boy who soon discovers he is a wizard, and is packed off to the highly unorthodox Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry has been embraced by the nation’s children with joyous passion. (This in itself is an utterly heartening indication that books alone can still excite the media -bombarded young.)

The eyebrow-raising new evidence is that the passion is shared by adults. The second novel, Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets, has leapt to the top of the hardback bestseller lists, overtaking adult works with all the elan of a gracefully speeding broomstick. Certainly, young readers have been clamouring for the next instalment of Harry’s funny, scary, magical life. Certainly, it is the book which will keep the beloved offspring quiet for substantial segments of the summer holidays. Yet adults, not all of them teachers or parents avidly curious to learn what has so enthralled their children, are it seems almost equally allured by Harry’s escapades at Hogwarts.

This is as it should be. The great children’s books have always transcended petty boundaries of age. Many classics, indeed, from Gulliver’s Travels to Round The World In 80 Days, were never written for children in the first place, and have merely been bowdlerised, abridged and prettified for the impressionable young. The appeal of Harry Potter to adults, however, works powerfully against a prevailing cultural norm in which children’s works are seen as lesser in every way: less mature, less profound, less worthy of informed adult interest, respect and enjoyment.

Lindsey Fraser, the chief executive of Scottish Book Trust, comments: “The perceived wisdom is that children’s books are things to teach you to read and that you grow out of. Most adults don’t usually touch them with a barge-pole.”

Clearly, the humour, excitement and endlessly inventive fantasy of Harry Potter have touched resonant chords in older readers.

A happy concatenation of circumstances has catapulted our hero out of the pleasant ghetto in which children’s books customarily languish. The news stories which accompanied Rowling’s debut and dizzying advances; the enthusiasm of buyers in bookshops, displaying the book at the front of shops as well as in the cosy children’s corners at the back; and the irreplaceable marketing tool of excited word of mouth have all contributed to young Harry flying daringly into wider consciousness.

Rosamund Walker, the sales and marketing manager at Bloomsbury, tirelessly proselytises for the books well beyond the call of duty.

“All of us loved the book passionately for itself. I personally am almost pathetically obsessed with it. All my friends, in their mid-twenties, have read it, and they’re all going to join the fan club. It’s a real cult thing.”

Responding to this surge of interest, and to the arid climate in which reading children’s books may be seen as terminally uncool (pace the Teletubbies and an acid-generation edition of The Adventures of Dougal of Magic Roundabout fame), Bloomsbury plans shortly to bring out an adult edition of the books, with a less specifically child-like cover.

It has happened before that a book ostensibly for children has effortlessly danced over age delineations. Lord Of The Rings, after all, is pored over by children and gleaming-eyed grown-ups alike. The powerfully mythic novels of Alan Garner nourish the starving imaginations of young and old. It is notable that neither Tolkein nor Garner ever considered they were writing for children in the first place. Nor did either author anticipate that fantasy, or the inclusion of magical creatures and child protagonists, are swiftly labelled the sole preserve of children – the same oddly arid stereotyping which saw the dark and bloody fables of the Brothers Grimm repackaged as suitable fare for sweet babies in the nursery.

Joanne Rowling, too, did not at any point consciously write for children. (This alone marks her out as a true and proper writer.

Real artists rarely have specifically defined target audiences in mind.)

“It struck me as patronising to try to write for children – the tone was all wrong. So I just wrote for me. I think the response from children proves that you don’t need to pitch things too low – I’m vindicated in not dumbing down.”

Citing the humour, tight plotting and more complex issues which the book contains as appealing more directly to adults, she welcomes the breadth of readership for what was once her own, obsessively visualised private world. “The sole ambition I had for these books was that as many people as possible would read them.”

As in all the best children’s stories, Joanne Rowling’s most dearly held wish appears to be coming spectacularly true.

Copyright 1998 The Scotsman Publications Ltd.

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Travessura com um atrativo mágico

Tradução: *annieb*
Revisão: {patylda}
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Lockerbie, Catherine. “Mischief with a Magical Allure,” The Scotsman, June 27, 1998

HOW, precisely, do some heroes leap into children’s hearts, while others languish in the outer, adult darkness? Harry Potter, boy wizard, has zipped faster than a speeding broomstick into the affections of young readers.

His first appearance, and happy bound into the first rank of literary stardom, have been well documented. Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling’s debut, last year attracted dizzying praise and advances, won the Smarties Award and caused very large numbers of children indeed to adopt an esoteric vocabulary of Muggles and Hufflepuffs. Playgrounds resound to the sound of Quidditch – an airborne wizardly game featuring some very snazzy aerobatics. Children play at Harry Potter: the ultimate compliment.

This, the much-anticipated sequel – there will be seven in all – is already selling in silly numbers and scarcely in the shops yet. In the first book, we learned that Harry Potter is very far from an ordinary boy, despite his cheery, apparent normality. A lightning mark on his forehead reveals his identity and destiny.

The dark and evil Lord Voldemort killed Harry’s parents when he was still a baby; but all his darkness failed against the boy. Hence, Harry Potter is a legendary name in the world of wizards and witches – a parallel universe which Rowling creates with immense wit and inventiveness alongside the dullard world of the Muggles, or non-magical folk.

That same contrast, the ghastly suburbia of Harry’s aunt and uncle and truly revolting cousin Dudley set against the gorgeous, chaotic scariness of the magical world, also illuminates this second book.

Dudley’s world is one of business deals and boringness. Harry’s world, once he has escaped, is one where cars can fly, where pixies can run amok in a classroom, where mandrake roots reveal themselves as ugly squealing babies as they are tenderly replanted.

This is the world of Hog- warts’ School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the boarding establishment where lessons are in wand use and potion-making rather than algebra and English, where peevish ghosts wander the corridors and personal owls deliver the post.

In this instalment of the life of Harry, strange attacks on the student wizards indicate that the fabled chamber of secrets has been opened; and there will be fine, funny and terrifying adventures with snakes, spiders and some very bad baddies indeed before modest, brave, determined, slightly bamboozled Harry wins through.

It might all be thought to be endearingly old-fashioned. These kids may say “cool” and compare latest makes of broomstick as if they were the trendiest trainers.

The setting, however, Hogwarts School, is Enid Blyton meets Mervyn Peake – a sort of jolly japes in Gormenghast. These books are not particularly contemporary, they are not particularly topical, the Spice Girls feature nowhere within them, they are not on the television (yet – they cry out for small and large screens to seize their fabulously visual characters and settings); and children love them, passionately and hungrily.

Let us ponder, then, Harry Potter and what children actually want from books. It’s clear that they don’t want didacticism or dullness; they don’t want to be pandered to or patronised. They do want some or all of the following: a rich, complete and exciting world in which to immerse themselves; heaps of magic for the days when yet more books about dating or football begin to pall; a brilliant storyline, hooking and holding fast; plenty of jokes and twists and turns and a bit of rudeness and a bit of goodness.

For, even if they absolutely don’t want moralising, they do want a large and generous sense of the moral. Rules may be broken, people may do daft, bad things, but children need to know that they too have the courage and wit and bigness of heart to ward off adversity. In the only line even remotely resembling a message here, Albus Dumbledore, great wizard and head of Hogwarts, says to Harry who has been fretting about his own potential to be a dark, rather than good, wizard: “It is our choices, Harry, that truly show what we are, far more than our abilities.”

Harry is special, and Everychild too. Those who have yet to meet him should make his acquaintance now.

The sheer buoyant zest of Joanne Rowling’s storytelling should seduce even the sternest Muggles.

* A Harry Potter fan club will be launched on 2 July. You will be required to state which wand hand you use, which Quidditch position you play in and which magical creatures you own. More information from: Harry Potter Fan Club, Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 38 Soho Square, London W1V 5DF.
* JK Rowling will be reading on 2 July in Waterstones, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, at 11am; and in Dillons, St Vincent Street, Glasgow, at 3pm. On 3 July she will be in Edinburgh, in Waterstone’s West End at 7pm. She will also be appearing at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August.

Copyright 1998 The Scotsman Publications Ltd.

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