The Hindu Business Line : The Harry Potter phenomenon

LONG BEFORE THE buzz dies down, and the cash registers stop ringing from the sale of millions of copies of Harry Potter adventures, there is enough in the phenomenon already for marketing pundits to reflect on the question: What is the secret of the worldwide affection for J. K. Rowling's world of wizardry? How did she tap into the hearts and minds across generations? Tales of imaginary children's worlds are as old as humanity. From Aesop downwards, story-tellers have spoken directly to the wide-eyed child in all of us. But the scale and reach of Harry Potter leaves the others standing. There have always been writers of historical, science fictional and heroic tales who transport us out of our immediate milieus. There are craftsmen churning out the workmanlike airport bookstall fiction and children's books but Rowling seems to have chanced upon a formula that transcends the two readerships.

Imagine the setting: Britain's capital celebrates the award of the Olympics to it, welcomes heads of the most powerful states to discuss helping the wretched of the earth, and then takes the horror of the London Underground terrorist bombs. Yet, in the same week, men and women line up in the wee hours outside high street bookstalls for a chance to buy their wards a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth book in this extraordinary series. One recalls an interesting explanation offered by a great novelist of the 1950s angry young men, Kingsley Amis, on the James Bond phenomenon that made Britain an icon at that time. Amis said that people would not have mindlessly swallowed the incredible feats of Bond's fantasy world just to get away from the grey, everyday commuter-land. The trick was that Ian Fleming managed to mix the mundane with the farcical and fanciful — and made Bond's world a land of recognisable brands and creature comforts and human foibles so that he was no impossible outsider but a plausible spy-next-door. The incredible fantasy land of gadgets, fast-cars and women, thrilled the young and old of that age but could not be resisted easily because the locale and setting was familiar. For, sheer exotica alone does not appeal to a wide audience, as one can see in the case of science fiction, which is still an acquired taste for most. A combination of the familiar and the fabulous is a very subtle way of establishing verisimilitude.

In the Harry Potter phenomenon, although half a century on, a complete parallel world is created, with characters and roles which school-going children can easily relate to, thus making the Potter books perhaps wholesome and yet sufficiently different from the usual run of children's books. Rowling can also justifiably claim to have single-handedly reversed the declining reading habit. A generation brought up on mobile games and violent toys is now willing to sit down and read stories, and huge tomes at that. Children in countries like India, who learn English as a foreign language, can benefit even more.

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