The Magic Of Harry Potter

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A child who has not experienced personal trauma but has witnessed social strife is Magda Anastasijevic, 8, who lives in Serbia. Thanks to the international sanctions put in place after Serbia's war in Kosovo, the Harry Potter books have only just begun to appear in translation. But Magda's father knows English and has read all four Harry Potters aloud to her, simultaneously translating the original into Serbian. "I like Harry Potter because he never gives up," she says, "even though sometimes his best friends are against him." She knows that Lord Voldemort, the archvillain in the Potter books, is a bad guy, and she believes the same of deposed Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic. This provokes some literary criticism and political analysis: "They were totally different because you can see right away that Voldemort is evil. Milosevic was always pretending he was a nice, good man."

Or how about a child facing nothing scarier than the process of growing up, which can, some adults may dimly remember, seem very scary indeed? Greta Hagen-Richardson, 12, lives in Chicago and proudly says she has read each Harry Potter book many times--15, 11, 22 and 24, in order of publication, by her count. "When I first read them," she says, "I thought, 'The characters really relate to you--they're kids. They have bullies and bad teachers.' It's helped me understand something--people, maybe my friends, my teachers. It's influenced me to read more."

Multiply such testimonials--each heartfelt, each slightly different according to the circumstances of the speaker--by millions, and Rowling's effect on the world around us becomes, just barely, imaginable. And it's not only young people who love the Harry Potter books; they have been eagerly adopted by uncounted adults and have prompted serious academic attention. Vance Smith, an assistant professor of English at Princeton University who is spending this year as a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein's old bailiwick, has just delivered a lecture called "Harry Potter and This Ever-Changing Medieval World" to an alumni seminar. He praises, among other things, Rowling's clever use of Latin and her "important and rigorous medieval agenda."

Not since Charles Dickens has a novelist writing in English achieved Rowling's command over a whole society--young and not so young, of modest means and with money to flambe--and the Dickens analogy quickly outlives its usefulness. None of his novels were simultaneous best sellers in dozens of languages; the 19th century world was a markedly slower place than our own. And Dickens' audience had none of the distractions that beguile Rowling's readers: no radio, films, recorded music, TV, video and computer games, the Internet. For years, literary culture has been portrayed as gasping on life support, sustained only by old-fogey teachers and hidebound school curricula. The death of the author was surely at hand. And then along came Rowling.