by Alison Lurie
Though it was composed in English by an author living in Britain, Haroun and the Sea of Stories is also in several ways a modern classic of Indian literature. Many of the characters speak a language that, though odd to Western ears, is typical of the English spoken in India. Suchismita Sen, in a perceptive analysis of the book, remarks that some of the dialogue in Haroun “resembles the English used by Indian newspapers during the nineteenth century, the language that was commonly called Babu English.” It is characterized by the use of formal or official speech in conversation, even in crisis situations. Thus when the bus driver Mr. Butt begins to go faster and faster, causing his passengers “to hoot and howl with excitement and fear,”15 his response sounds partly like a provincial newspaper and partly like an official proclamation:
“See here this bend, what a tight one!” Mr. Butt sang out. “Here, two weeks ago, occurred a major disaster. Bus plunged into gully, all persons killed, sixty-seventy lives minimum. God! Too sad! If you desire I can stop for taking of photographs.
“Yes, stop, stop,” the passengers begged (anything to make him slow down), but Mr. Butt went even faster instead. “Too late,” he yodeled gaily. “Already it is far behind. Requests must be more promptly made if I am to comply.”16
In spite of all the dangers they face, in the end, of course, Haroun and his magical companions defeat Khattam-Shud and restore the Sea of Stories to health. As a reward, Haroun is given a single wish; what he asks for is that his native city may cease to be sad and may remember its name, which turns out to be Kahani (“Story”). His mother returns, and his father, Rashid, is again able to tell his wonderful tales.
Though Haroun and the Sea of Stories is sure to be enjoyed by children, it also contains pleasures for adults who might be reading the book aloud or even (why not?) to themselves. The well-known complication of the Stith Thompson index to Indo-European folktales is gently mocked when Haroun drinks from the Ocean of Story and finds himself in the middle of a variant of a classic tale type:
What Haroun was experiencing, though he didn’t know it, was Princess Rescue Story Number s/1011/ZHT/420/41®xi.17
There is also a Shadow Warrior who can only speak in gestures, but coughs, “Gogogol . . . Kafkafka.”18 The extremely foolish and incompetent prince and the ugly princess of Gup recall Thackeray’s burlesque fairy tale, The Rose and the Ring, but they may also remind some readers of the problems of the British royal family. (“After all,” says one of Haroun’s companions, “it’s not as if we really let our crowned heads do anything very important around here.”)19 Another nod to the adult reader appears in the remark of the Floating Gardener that one of the ill effects of the poisoning of the Sea of Stories is that
Certain popular romances have become just long lists of shopping expeditions. Children’s stories also. For instance, there is an outbreak of talking helicopter anecdotes.20
Rushdie also pays tribute to the stories and films he loved as a child. Many of his episodes and characters recall the Arabian Nights tales, and the Plentimaw Fish (“there really are Plentimaw Fish in the Sea”) who talk in rhymed doggerel are named Goopy and Bagda, after the comic heroes of Satyajit Ray Ray’s popular film for children, Goopy Gyne and Bagha Byne (1969).
If there is one encouraging conclusion to be drawn from the problems of Salman Rushdie, it is that literature has power—so much power that it is dreaded by dictators. A single storyteller like Rashid is more dangerous to a tyrant than an army. “What starts with stories ends with spying,” says Khattam-Shud. “Stories make trouble.”21 So they do; that is one reason we need them.
As Matt Wolf says in his review of the London National Theater Production of Haroun, “we suppress stories at great cost to ourselves, as Rushdie of all people well knows. Inasmuch as we are the stories we tell, any attempt to close those stories off itself constitutes a murder, . . .”22
It is Salman Rushdie’s good fortune, ours, and our children’s that in spite of everything he has not been silenced. He has survived the death threats of his own Khattam-Shud, and the Sea of Stories from which he drew this entertaining and moving book has not been poisoned, but continues to flow as clear and brilliant as ever.
THE PERILS OF HARRY POTTER
LIKE many famous children’s authors, J. K. (Joanne) Rowling, author of the brilliant and phenomenally successful Harry Potter books, remains in close touch with her own childhood. “I really can, with no difficulty at all, think myself back to 11 years old,” she has told Time magazine.1 Rowling is also clearly on the side of children. She has created a world in which her young hero and his friends have special abilities, while conventional adults are either clueless or cruel or both. Her heroes’ secret power takes traditional folktale forms (flying brooms, ghosts, transformation, speaking animals, spells, and potions). But it can also be seen as a metaphor for the special powers of childhood: imagination, creativity, and especially humor—as well as being exciting, her books are often very funny.
The Harry Potter stories belong to an ongoing tradition of Anglo-American fantasy that begins with Tolkien and T. H. White, and has been continued splendidly by writers like Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Philip Pullman, and Diana Wynne Jones. (Jones’s excellent Charmed Life, like the Potter books, takes place in a school for juvenile witches and wizards located in an enchanted castle.) What sets Rowling’s books apart from their predecessors is partly a lighthearted fertility of invention that recalls L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. Even more important is the fact that hers, like Baum’s, is a fully imagined world, to which she has a deep, ongoing commitment. For six years, even before she began the first book in the series, Rowling was imagining and elaborating its fantasy universe. She has already planned seven Harry Potter novels, one for each year Harry will spend at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, an institution that seems to be located (like J. K. Rowling herself) somewhere in Scotland.
Harry, Rowling’s hero, is a natural-born wizard, but at first he doesn’t know it. When we meet him he is ten years old and in the classic Cinderlad situation: a poor, lonely orphan, despised and abused. Harry lives with his deeply unpleasant aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, in a country that much resembles Britain in the 1960s or 1970s, before the Internet, digital phones, and interactive video.
The Dursleys live in a village called Little Whinging (a joke that American readers may not get: we would call such a place Little Whining) and, like most of their neighbors, are Muggles—people who have no magic powers. They hate the very mention of the supernatural, and refuse to give Harry any information about his dead parents. (“They were weirdos, no denying it, and the world’s better off without them in my opinion,” Uncle Vernon declares.)2 Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia are as cruel to Harry as any fairy-tale stepparent: they feed him poorly and clothe him shabbily; they make him sleep in a dark, spider-infested cupboard under the stairs; and they destroy his mail. Even worse is their son, Dudley, a spoiled, overweight, greedy bully who, with the help of his large and hateful friends, makes Harry’s school and home life actively miserable.
From the point of view of an imaginative child, the world is full of Muggles: people who don’t understand you, make stupid rules, and want nothing to do with the unexpected or the unseen. Harry’s story also embodies the common childhood fantasy that the dreary adults and siblings you live with are not your real family; that you have more exciting parents, and are somehow special and gifted. Harry has an outward manifestation of his gift: a scar in the shape of a lightning bolt on his forehead, the sign that even as a baby he could not be killed by the evil offstage Dark Wizard Voldemort, whose very name most people fear to utter.
As in many folktales, you can often tell a character’s character from his or her name, and “Voldemort” neatly combines the ideas of theft, mold, and death. Harry Potter, on the other hand, has a name that suggests not only craftsmanship but both English literature—Shakespeare’s Prince Hal and Harry Hotspur, the brave, charming, impulsive heroes of Henry IV�
��and Beatrix Potter, who created that other charming and impulsive classic hero, Peter Rabbit.
At the start of each story Harry Potter is living in exile at the Dursleys’. But presently, with the help of magic, he is rescued and enters an alternate world in which imagination and adventurousness are rewarded. A comic cockney giant named Hagrid introduces him to a parallel magical Britain, one entrance to which is through the back door of a scruffy London pub called The Leaky Cauldron. After a shopping trip in which Harry visits a bank run by goblins and purchases unusual school supplies, including “one plain pointed hat (black) for day wear”3 and the Standard Book of Spells (Grade 1), he takes a special train to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from Track Nine and Three-Quarters at King’s Cross Station—a train and track that are invisible to Muggles.
Hogwarts School, it turns out, is located in a huge ancient castle, well equipped with towers, dungeons, ghosts, secret passages, and enchanted paintings and mirrors. The subjects taught there include Divination, Defense Against the Dark Arts, and Care of Magical Creatures. But in other ways Hogwarts resembles a classic English boarding school—one that, in keeping with the times, is coed and multiracial. There are four houses, which compete intensely in the school sport of Quidditch, a sort of combination cricket, soccer, and hockey played on flying broomsticks, in which Harry turns out to excel. The teachers wear black gowns and dine at a head table, and there are prefects and a Head Boy and a Head Girl.
Just as in many American schools, however, the student population is roughly divided into jocks, brains, nice guys, and dangerous Goths. Harry and his two best friends are in the jock house, Gryffindor, where, according to tradition, “dwell the brave at heart.” Ravenclaw House emphasizes “wit and learning,” while the kids in Hufflepuff are described as “just and loyal . . . And unafraid of toil.” The bad characters live in Slytherin House, where they “use any means / to achieve their ends.”4
Even before he arrives at Hogwarts, Harry acquires an enemy in Slytherin House, the mean, snobbish, unscrupulous Draco Malfoy, whose name translates readily into “Dragon Bad-Faith.” Like Cousin Dudley in the Muggle world, Draco has a couple of goons (these are named Crabbe and Goyle) to back up his constant sneering and bullying. As a hero and local sports star, Harry also attracts fans; naturally modest, he finds their intense admiration and constant attention as embarrassing as J. K. Rowling reportedly does.
But Harry has more serious problems. The plot of each book essentially centers on the attempts of dark forces to destroy him. As is customary in modern fantasies, from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to Star Wars, lurking in the background is an evil, powerful figure (almost always male) who wants to rule the world.5 Often these characters have something in common with Milton’s rebel angels: at first they seem impressive and even glamorous. There is something admirable in their desire for knowledge and power, whereas their followers, motivated mainly by fear, greed, and revenge, are wholly repulsive.
Harry, of course, always escapes his enemies, but this gets harder with each book. Rowling has said that as time passes the stories will turn darker. “There will be deaths,” she has informed Time magazine.6 Already in volumes 3 and 4 it is not so easy to tell which side anyone is on. Characters who at first seem friends may be foes, or vice versa; and good but weak people may be seduced into doing evil because of their own fear or folly. In the third volume, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, for instance, a scruffy but harmless-looking pet rat called Scabbers turns out to be a wicked wizard who, even in human form, has a pointed nose and small, watery eyes.
Rowling describes her characters with a psychological subtlety rare in children’s books and even in much adult fiction. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets a ragged, oppressed house-elf named Dobby is constantly torn between loyalty to his evil masters and his wish to save Harry’s life. Whenever he is on the edge of revealing their plots, Dobby hits himself over the head with the nearest blunt object, repeating “Bad Dobby!”
Another attraction of the Potter books is that the good characters are not perfect. Harry excels at Quidditch, but he is only an average student, unlike his friend Hermione, who studies for the fun of it and is a bit of a prig. Hagrid, the lovable giant gamekeeper, has a weakness for dangerous magic creatures: he sees his vicious pet dragon and the huge spiders that live in the Forbidden Forest as cute and cuddly. The British, of course, are fanatic animal-lovers; and it may be that this is Rowling’s comment on the peculiar or even dangerous but beloved pets that visitors to England sometimes encounter.
Though Rowling’s child heroes are imperfect, they are usually smarter and braver than adults. Some of the nicest teachers at Hogwarts, though friendly and knowledgeable, often don’t have a clue as to what’s going on around them. Others are weak and incompetent, or complete phonies like the handsome media-intoxicated Professor Lockhart, who claims to have performed the magical exploits of other, less photogenic wizards. A few have even sold out to the Dark Powers or their representatives.
The headmaster of Hogwarts, the elderly silver-haired Professor Dumbledore (like Tolkien’s Gandalf, whom he much resembles), maintains a kind of benign detachment from events except in moments of great crisis. A. O. Scott, writing in the online magazine Slate, has perceptively remarked that “Dumbledore’s benevolent but strict theology, involving the operations of free will in a supernaturally determined world, is classically Miltonian.”7
The appeal of the Harry Potter books, to judge by the flood of reviews and essays that greeted their appearance, is wide and varied. They can be enjoyed, for instance, as the celebration of a preindustrial world: Hogwarts Castle is lit by torches and heated by fires, and mail is carried by owls of different sizes, including tiny little scops owls (“Local Deliveries Only”). As with most first-rate children’s books, there is something here for everyone. Pico Iyer, in The New York Times Book Review, sees the stories as only half-fantastic accounts of life in an English public school (in his case, Eton), “designed to train the elite in a system that other mortals cannot follow.” There, as at Hogwarts, he claims, “we were in an alternative reality where none of the usual rules applied.”8 A. O. Scott, on the other hand, thinks that “being a wizard is very much like being gay: you grow up in a hostile world governed by codes and norms that seem nonsensical to you, and you discover at a certain age that there are people like you.”9 (It seems unlikely that Harry Potter is gay; in the third volume he shows romantic interest in an extremely pretty Quidditch player called Cho Chang, and in volume 4 he proudly takes a student called Parvati Patil to the Yule Ball.)
Any wildly successful work of art attracts detractors as well as admirers of all sorts. The most famous liberal scholar of the folktale, Jack Zipes, has called the books overrated, and criticized them for promoting a conventional, patriarchal view of the world.10 On the other hand, in the American South and Midwest, and in Southern California, the sort of conservatives who object to the teaching of evolution and the big bang theory of creation have complained that the stories portray witchcraft in a favorable light. This is not a new idea: from time to time the same accusation has been made against the Oz books, which in some cases have then been removed from schools and libraries along with all other representations of cute or friendly wizards and witches.
In my favorite local bookshop the other day, I saw what at first seemed to be two new Harry Potter books displayed on the counter. One was called Pokemon and Harry Potter, the other Harry Potter and the Bible. But instead of additions to the series, they turned out to be warnings. In the first, by Phil Arms, I read that “the dark occultic nature of Harry Potter . . . is opening the lives and homes of countless millions of parents and children to satanic influences.”11 The second went even further, suggesting that “an unseen spiritual force of darkness”12 may be driving the Potter phenomenon.
According to Richard Abanes, the author of Harry Potter and the Bible, “the Harry Potter series is not morally compatible with Christianit
y.”13 The books are “filled with potentially harmful messages exalting occultism and moral relativism.”14 Abanes is dismayed by the many parallels between the authors of the magical textbooks Harry studies and the names of historical occultists, and hints that J. K. Rowling may be more involved in contemporary witchcraft than she admits. He speaks of “the very tangible possibility that many children will become so enthralled with magic and wizardry that they will seek out the paganism/witchcraft that is available in the real world.”15
Abanes also complains that Harry Potter and his friends are not model children. They break rules, disobey orders, and sometimes conceal their rebellious behavior by lying. Moreover, “they are often rather proud of themselves and their misdeeds.”16 The books contain what he calls “countless examples of behavior that Christian parents would deem less than admirable, not to mention unbiblical.”17 This is quite true, and is probably one of the reasons for Harry Potter’s popularity with kids; it is also in the great tradition of children’s literature. Tom Sawyer and his friends drink, smoke tobacco, swear, and play truant from school. In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy refuses to do housework for the Wicked Witch of the West, and Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden disobeys and deceives adults, finding her way not only into the forbidden garden but into the room of her invalid cousin Colin, whose existence has been concealed from her. Books like these do not present their child characters as perfect and obedient, but as curious, independent, and enterprising.
As an antidote to Harry Potter, Richard Abanes proposes the works of Tolkien and especially C. S. Lewis. If the antidote is to be effective, however, it may have to be taken soon: a recent article in The New York Times announced that “the Lewis estate and its publishers have started shaping a marketing makeover.” They have “developed a discreet strategy to avoid direct links to the Christian imagery and theology that suffused the Narnia novels and inspired Lewis.”18
