The Hindu : Opinion / Editorials : BEYOND HARRY POTTER

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Thursday, Dec 30, 2004

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

BEYOND HARRY POTTER

IT WILL BE six long, lingering months before it casts a spell on readers. But the penultimate novel of J.K. Rowling's seven-part series has notched up a staggering number of advance orders within hours of her publishers setting a release date (July 16) for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. So much so the novel has already topped the bestseller list of amazon.com, the world's largest internet retailer of books, surging ahead of breathless page-turners such as Michael Crichton's State of Fear and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. The feverish interest in Harry Potter VI, which will hit the bookshelves two years after the fifth novel in the series (The Order of the Phoenix), is yet another manifestation of the extraordinary phenomenon that is J.K. Rowling. Her Harry Potter novels have sold more than 250 million copies worldwide, have been published in more than 200 countries, and have been translated in over 60 languages ranging from ancient Greek to Hindi. A struggling single mother when she began writing the first book, she is now the world's wealthiest writer having single-handedly created a multi-million dollar industry in publishing, films, and merchandise.

Rowling's imaginative world — populated by keen young wizards, endearingly eccentric ghosts, preposterously fantastic beasts, enigmatically sinister villains, and achingly boring human beings ("muggles") — is hard to resist. Children and adults alike have delighted in the travails of Harry Potter as he battles against the powerful Lord Voldemort in stories that draw a subtle line between good and evil, light and darkness, magic and mayhem. Her originality and her prose may be open to discussion but it would be a mistake to assess Rowling merely in literary terms. Her achievement lies in the fact that in these distracting times dominated by television, cartoons and computer games, she has stoked, particularly among children, a passion for reading. Rowling has also been the principal catalyst for the burgeoning interest in crossover fiction — the go-between genre that appeals to children and adults alike.

By definition, crossover fiction has a potentially larger market. Books that possess a broad appeal naturally excite publishers, but popular enthusiasm for such novels has resulted in the spawning of talented new writers who have successfully tapped into this genre. In 2001, the prodigiously gifted Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass — the final part of his deftly woven dark materials trilogy — was long-listed for the Booker Prize. It failed to make the short list, but the very fact it was considered signalled that crossover fiction was beginning to be viewed with new and more attentive eyes. Early this year, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night-Time — a stark and refreshingly original story about an autistic teenager — won the Whitbread Book Of The Year award, leaving behind heavyweight contenders such as D.B.C. Pierre's Vernon God Little, winner of the 2003 Booker Prize. Crossover fiction is a new term, not a new phenomenon. Can Lewis Carroll, whose works appealed across age barriers, be considered an early exponent of this genre? In the early 20th century, J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis used fabulism to acquire a diverse fan following. And in 1990, Salman Rushdie published Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which, although somewhat neglected, remains the wittiest and most luminous crossover novel written in recent times. Rowling has had no fictional influence on the new breed of crossover writers, which includes Philip Pullman, Eoin Colfer, Zizou Corder and Georgia Byng. But she has helped create a greater interest and a larger market for them. Thus her impact goes well beyond that of her nerdy but lovable wizard boy.

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