Wild About Harry

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY JACQUES BARBEY

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That is why so many people both young and naive and older and jaded have surrendered to the illusions set forth in Harry Potter's fictional world. They want to believe the unbelievable, and Rowling makes it easy and great good fun for them to do so. How pleasant to be persuaded that an orphan named Harry Potter, who has lived for 10 years with the Dursleys, his cruel aunt and uncle and their hateful son Dudley, in a faceless English suburb--specifically 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging--learns shortly after his 11th birthday that he is really a wizard. What's more, he is famous throughout the wizard world; although his parents were murdered by the evil Lord Voldemort (so feared that he is referred to only as "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named"), the infant Harry survived the attack with a lightning-bolt-shaped scar on his forehead.

Every event in the Potter books follows seamlessly from his initial self-discovery. Harry may be a skinny kid with glasses, green eyes and an unruly shock of black hair, but he also harbors uncertain potentialities. Did he thwart Voldemort's assault because of innate goodness or because he carries, even as an infant, a strain of evil more powerful than that of the Dark Wizard's? This question will remind some of the Star Wars films and the tangled destinies of Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. But once such comparisons begin, they can lead in many directions.

Harry's shuttling between two worlds is also reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's Alice, L. Frank Baum's Dorothy in her journey to Oz, and the time-traveling earth children who keep reappearing in C. S. Lewis' seven-volume The Chronicles of Narnia. Like them, Harry is young enough both to adapt to altered realities and to observe them with a minimum of preconceptions. Also, the sorcerer's stone in the first Harry Potter book bears an obvious kinship with the all-powerful ring pursued in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

But Rowling's indebtedness to classical fantasy literature should not overshadow the liberties she takes with the form. Most notably, her wizard world is not at all remote from daily realities. It takes a cyclone to transport Dorothy to Oz. In contrast, Harry can walk a few steps through a London pub near Charing Cross Road and enter Diagon Alley, a wizard shopping bazaar, where he and his classmates meet late each summer to buy school supplies. And getting from there to Hogwarts is a snap; Harry and his friends go to King's Cross Station and board the Hogwarts Express, which departs early every September from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters.

It isn't necessary to have finished the first two Harry Potters before beginning The Prisoner of Azkaban, but it's a good idea just the same. Reading the books in proper order conveys a comforting sense of familiarity. Yep, the crenelated towers of Hogwarts look just the same as they did last year. And why not? The school is more than 1,000 years old. The academic and athletic competitions among the four Hogwarts residence houses--Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw--remain as spirited as before. All the students are still mad about Quidditch, a hectic sport involving six goals, four moving balls and two seven-member teams careering 50 ft. or more above ground on flying broomsticks. Harry is the star player for the Gryffindor squad.

Such unchanging details make Rowling's innovations in each book seem particularly dramatic. This time out, for example, third-year students with signed permission slips from a parent or guardian are allowed periodic visits to Hogsmeade, a nearby village known as "the only entirely non-Muggle settlement in Britain." Naturally, Harry's vile Uncle Vernon refuses to sign anything relating to Hogwarts, so Harry faces the prospect of missing the fun or finding a way around the rules. And Harry meets another little problem: a dangerous killer has escaped from the wizard prison of Azkaban and is reportedly on his way to Hogwarts for the purpose of murdering Harry.

He has survived a serious threat to his life in each of the first two books, but this time Harry may be overmatched. The Azkaban prison guards, horrid hooded apparitions called dementors, have been summoned to Hogwarts to protect Harry, but he keeps fainting whenever a dementor comes near him. A sympathetic professor tells Harry why dementors merit fear: "They breed in the darkest, filthiest places, they create decay and despair, they drain peace, hope and happiness out of any human who comes too close to them... Even Muggles feel their presence, though they can't see them. Get too near a dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. You'll be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life."