A World of Wizards

...Good as they are, though, it is not easy to explain Rowling's stupendous popularity...

...As with all the very best children's books, Rowling's are almost as much a pleasure for adults as for children—a fact that, among other things, can't do the sales figures any harm...

...He had the savvy to understand just how well his proven genius for the macabre was likely to go down with a generation of children far more attuned to the violent and grotesque than their parents had been...

...Harry Potter lives in an anonymous English suburb with his Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia Dursley and their rotten son Dudley...

...Witty, ironic and self-referential, J.K...

...he sleeps in a cupboard under the stairs, dines on the obese Dudley's leftovers and is forced to wear his baggiest, grottiest handme-downs...

...She is certainly no better than her great predecessors in dealing with ordinary kids caught up amid magical goings-on—writers such as L. Frank Baum, Mary Norton, E. Nesbit, and C.S...

...in fact, it is rather old-fashioned...

...Harry, good-hearted yet impetuous and naïve, is much like Tom Brown, while Ron is a dead ringer for Tom's bosom friend Harry East...

...None of these authors, though, has ever knocked the adult blockbusters off the shelves...

...One pair of protective gloves (dragon hide or similar) "4...

...Around Easter, one of our number will leave us forever...

...There, with his best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, he jockeys for position within the school hierarchy, plays a key position on the quidditch team (quidditch being the wizard's answer to cricket) and has a series of thrilling, funny and sometimes terrifying adventures...

...It is simply another name for the unimaginative, the pedestrian and the mediocre—in short, for the grown-up...

...Entirely unknown until the publication of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in Britain two years ago, Rowling has now put out the third novel in the series, Hany Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Scholastic, 436 pp., $19.95...

...The prototype is Tom Brown's School Days, the 1857Thomas Hughes classic that tells of the adventures and misadventures of a fictional youth at the real Rugby School with its real headmaster, the legendary Dr...

...Rowling's work is less calculating and less commercial...

...But what makes them appealing is that they manage alongside this contemporary knowingness to maintain all the wholesome and innocent appeal of their predecessors...

...and to a second shop bearing the sign, "Eeylops Owl Emporium—Tawny, Screech, Barn, Brown, and Snowy...

...Thomas Arnold...

...We also laugh along with one of Harry's wizard friends who, when walking through Muggle London, is amused by the unfamiliar sight of a parking meter: "See that, Harry...

...Things change for Harry on his 11th birthday...

...After procuring the necessary items, Harry proceeds to "Ollivanders: Makers of Fine Wands since 382 B.C...

...Three sets of plain work robes (black) "2...

...I myself will lose my voice...

...The imaginary school amounts to an idealized version of the reader's own imperfect one, a place where a chivalric code of honor, loyalty and fairness always triumphs...

...As a treat he continues on to the candy store, where he chooses Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans...

...If the Harry Potter series amounts to almost a parody of the genre, it is one inspired by affection rather than the urge to mock...

...We understand, for instance, why Ron, who comes from an ancient wizarding family, is vaguely ashamed to mention his distant cousin the accountant...

...They are held by a charming and unpretentious children's series about a young wizard named Harry Potter, the creation of J. (for Joanne) K. Rowling, a single mother living in Edinburgh...

...The first 50 pages or so of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone are awkward in exposition and undistinguished in voice, with the dreadful Dursleys merely a flat imitation of the grotesques that throng Dahl's pages (viz...

...Lewis' classic Narnia series is practically a required item in the bookshelves of well-heeled children on both sides of the Atlantic...

...The Hogwarts headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, while disconcertingly eccentric as befits an elderly wizard, is every bit as wise and benevolent as Dr...

...Rowling would certainly have known them well as a child...

...The Muggles' world comprises only half of the real world, and the less interesting half at that...

...Hermione is the classic swot, always maddeningly at the top of her class in spells and arithmancy, (rather than in French and biology...

...One winter cloak (black, silver fastenings) Please note that all pupils' clothes should carry name tags...

...The narrative gains assurance as it goes on, however, and by the time Harry arrives at a wizards shopping neighborhood that is hidden deep within London to buy the required Hogwarts textbooks and school supplies, Rowling has assumed control...

...Nesbit, the late Victorian Englishwoman whose sublime fantasies include Five Children and it and The Phoenix and the Carpet, has yet to be surpassed for style, suspense and wit...

...One plain pointed hat (black) for day wear "3...

...Tom Brown's schoolboy villain Flashman, like so many of his ilk the most colorful character in his story, finds a worthy successor in Harry Potter's arch-rival Draco Malfoy...

...The appeal of these tales is obvious: The fictional school provides an enclosed world with its own rules and standards...

...All the best children's authors have been adept at creating a world in which their young characters can move freely, with the minimum of adult intervention...

...Students may also bring an owl OR a cat OR a toad...

...All the other familiar types are present, too, with a witty and knowing twist...

...we shall progress to the crystal ball—if we have finished with fire omens, that is...

...The only success that sets any kind of precedent for Rowling's is that of Roald Dahl, who has dominated the juvenile fiction lists for the past 20 years, especially in England...

...the horrible parents in Matilda, or any number of characters in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory...

...Arnold himself...

...He receives an invitation to attend the Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, where it is revealed that, like his parents before him, he is a wizard...

...Every flavor, he discovers, means exactly that, for as well as the ordinary sorts like lemon and strawberry there are curry, sardine, and even vomit-flavored ones...

...And so, during the school year at least, Harry leaves his Muggle foster family and heads off to the fantastic Hogwarts School, the Eton or Rugby of the magical world...

...Professor Snape, the Potions master, is more than just the mean, unfair teacher we all remember from our own school days...

...But when Dahl, who died in 1990, began writing children's fiction he was already a famous author...

...The athletic scenes at Hogwarts (never mind that quidditch is played on broomsticks) are as integral to the story—and just as boring, by the way—as Tom Brown's travails on the playing fields of Rugby...

...He is the Cinderella of the household...

...Rowling starts her series a little shakily...

...Rowling has stated her belief that young people enjoy reading about fictional children who—as is not generally the case in real life—have a large measure of control over their own destiny...

...Rowling is at her best with this sort of tomfoolery, and before long the reader gets so caught up in the spirit of it as to begin, like Harry, to see wizard ways as sensible and those of Muggles as absurd...

...Unfortunately, classes will be disrupted in February by a nasty bout of flu...

...Firstyear students will require: "1...

...Professor McGonagall is the standard tough but fair old broad, except that she can, when necessary, transform herself into a cat with spectacle-shaped markings around her eyes...

...Here, for instance, is Sybill Trelawney, Professor of Divination, briefing the students on what they can expect from her class: "In the second term...

...As I write, the top three slots on the New York Times best-seller list are not occupied by Frank McCourt or Roddy Doyle, nor even by crowd-pleasers like Danielle Steel or Tom Clancy...

...Uniform," Harry reads from Hogwarts' standard list...

...The Harry Potter books faithfully follow the tradition as set out in Tom Brown's Schooldays...

...There is the same juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary in the Hogwarts classrooms...

...he is so extremely mean and unfair that we can never be sure he hasn't given in to the ever-present Dark Forces and joined up with Voldemort...

...The beauty of it is, of course, that no self-respecting child reader will ever think of himself as a Muggle...

...His parents, according to the Dursleys, were killed in an automobile accident when he was a baby and his forehead still bears a lightning-shaped scar from the impact...

...The Dursleys are mere Muggles (that is, ordinary folk like you and I...

...Hughes inspired a long list of disciples, including some female ones like Angela Brazil and, later, Enid Blyton, whose hearty, hockey-playing heroines were wildly popular in England from the 1930s through the 1970s and continue to have their share of readers even to this day...

...Rowling's books are the first postmodern school stories...

...Her triumph is the more remarkable for having been achieved without benefit of marketing blitzes, toy tie-ins or movie deals...

...Lewis...

...The reader can enjoy a certain measure of drama and even danger while resting assured that right will, in the end, prevail...

...Over a long series the schoolchildren become as familiar as one's own friends, and a lot more reliable...

...Although it has never really caught on in this country, where only a small percentage of children attend boarding school, in England it has had a large following for over a century...

...Indeed, this is one of the key delights of that perennially popular British geme, the school story...

...Things these Muggles dream up, eh...

...Another entirely magical society has always coexisted with it, one in which Harry's parents were killed, not by a car, but by the evil Voldemort, a being so terrifying that he is generally referred to as "He-who-cannot-be-named...