The miraculous wroth of Harry Potter

Is reading the Harry Potter books like taking a run at a brick wall?

J. K. Rowling's failure to impress literary critics doesn’t matter. She has created useful spaces and emanations. In her castle-school are many rooms, and in those rooms are many serviceable personas. My children’s generation, with the exception of a few hoity-toity young people, have inhabited Hogwarts.

When I was nine in Abingdon I remember visits to libraries in winter, watching Czechoslovakian adaptations of Hans Christian Anderson's Snow Queen and my mother reading ‘The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe’ to me.

The best part of the book is when Lucy has pushed her way through old fur coats (smelling of mothballs) and her feet begin to crunch snow. Fern branches brush against her cheeks and here she is; in a forest clearing at night. And there it is, twenty yards away, a lamp post more ancient and hardier than the iron pillar in the Qutab Minar. With words, C. S. Lewis has sculpted a pure emotional space.

Before awakening and self awareness, we are still part of the waft of existence. A little older, we understand emotion as matter; animate and inanimate. Objects, people, the changing sky, food, animals and plants are all manufactured from an emotional substrate. Illumined consciousness and the the light of Ain Soth. Light so strongly alive that it beats and chatters. Messages heard in flicks and drips.

‘Full steam ahead and damn the plot, characterisation, prose and careful and original exploration of themes.’ Is the relatively inchoate cry of a Lewis, a Rowling.

Master masons of the literary genre fail to understand the importance of having something to say, but without being able to say it properly. There are colours: hues, tones, tints, and shades, loopy, self-enclosed and as hard to depict as the taste of cold milk. Sensations as empty of metaphor as popular science explanations of the behaviour of electrons.

‘Write with like a wrathful tiger,’ was the essence of Tor’s suggestion to my daughter, ‘don’t plod behind heavy horses.’ 

Lewis’s use of the New Testament allegory made his magic less trivial than E. Nesbit’s. But he certainly borrowed from her. Four children travelling through time and space. Mother is very sick in E. Nesbit’s book the railway children and there is no penicillin. Jack Lewis’s mother was sick and died. My own mother was sick in Paris and there was penicillin. In the Magician’s nephew Christ – Aslan saves Digory’s mother with a magic apple.

C. S Lewis came up with an image, as Lewis Carroll must have. His id easing-opening, lyrical, telling stories to Alice and her sisters, floating on a boat on a river. Or was it a lake. Reading Alice is like drinking something sweet. Eating something dry. Expanding, contracting. He writes as as sick-gulpingly, in some ways, as Charles Kingsley in The Water Babies, and you can the smell the dirty nappies. But Lewis's prose is rescued by wit. Rescued by the weft and woof of its emotion too. Rescued by, let’s use a new word, it's wrothfulness.

And so we come to Harry Potter. It is J. K. Rowling’s wroth that saves him, not the love of his good mother. And Harry Potter is Cartesian and gratuitous. The books exist and therefore you have to deal with them.

The kernel of Rowling’s ‘oeuvre’ was the reflection that she, Rowling, was like Susan and that she had grown up and that she didn’t see what was wrong with being interested in boys and wearing make up. Harry Potter began after C. S. Lewis’s Last Battle. The image is an unaccidented steam train pelting through the countryside, heading towards a school of magic, with students on board.

But there is no problem with malaria or a lack of penicillin in Harry Potter’s world. J. K Rowling puts pen to paper and without effort she is my generation writing for our children. She's a magpie stealing and re-using shiny bits of culture.

The Harry Potter books are composed of a derivative, achingly lazy mulch of cultural references honestly written into an extraordinarily boring and incompetent narrative. And yet, still, J. K. Rowling has written like a tiger in wrath. Like C. S. Lewis, her prose is execrable, her cultural references a ragbag, but she has wroth which, miraculously expands into a great  mansion, inhabited by the spirits of many children.