The Trouble With Harry

G.P. Taylor: Shadowmancer; Wormwood

National Review, December 30, 2004

FOR those of us who like to believe, however tentatively, in human progress, the notion that there are 21st-century Americans who think that the brave, benign—and fictional—Harry Potter can be used as a recruitment officer for the occult is profoundly depressing. And yet there are surprisingly many who fear just that. For year after year now, different school districts across the country have faced complaints whenever the hero of Hogwarts rides his Nimbus 2000 broomstick onto the curriculum or into the library. But the Lord, or the market, works in mysterious ways and those so harried by the thought of Harry have recently found, well, a savior in the shape of a former policeman and roadie for the Sex Pistols, the Reverend G. P. Taylor, the vicar of Cloughton, a small town in the north of England. He’s the author of two bestselling children’s books (both, like Harry Potter, with a surprisingly strong crossover readership among adults), Shadowmancer and Wormwood, novels of deviltry, danger, and intrigue where the ultimate hero is neither wizard nor witch, but God.

Funnily enough, it was that disreputable Master Potter who prompted the parson to pick up his pen. As Taylor explained in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, he lectures on the occult and the New Age and, during the course of one talk, he was discussing “the dangers of Harry Potter and all that sort of stuff.” At the end of the evening, a woman suggested that he write a book. It was a sign! Within nine months, Taylor had completed Shadowmancer, and after the now-traditional round of rejections (ask Harry Potter’s creator, J. K. Rowling), he published it himself, selling his motorcycle to provide the necessary cash. Word-of-mouth did the rest.

Subsequently, Faber & Faber, a major U.K. publisher, bought the rights to Taylor’s epic, and the rest is history. Shadowmancer spent 15 weeks at the top of the British book charts, and its successor, Wormwood, was also a hit. A Shadowmancer movie is planned and multi-book contracts have been signed on both sides of the Atlantic (the reverend’s writings have also found a large audience in America).

It’s a great story: Taylor’s success makes for an inspirational and possibly miraculous tale. Miraculous? Well, how else to explain that books quite so bad have sold quite so well? Linked chapters in a saga that is (Lord, help us) planned to stretch over many more volumes, Shadowmancer and Wormwood are both set in (to give Taylor his due) a vividly described 18th-century England, a place of squalor, poverty, and oppression, far more Gin Lane than Beer Street. They are an account of two rounds in the eternal battle between the Creator (here called Riathamus, a Latin form of an ancient British word meaning “king of kings”) and You Know Who. The first revolves around the struggle for a sacred relic and—the Reverend Taylor’s psychiatrist can make of this what he will—a wicked vicar’s lust for world domination; the second deals with the coming of a comet that may be the deeply unpleasant “Wormwood” prophesied in one of the Book of Revelation’s gloomier passages.

With such a dramatic background, it’s remarkable that Taylor’s books fail to enthrall; yet somehow they do. The plotting is all over the place, much of the writing is clunky (Iron Maiden meets the Sermon on the Mount) and the ill-defined, but vast, cast of characters and creatures that flit in and out of the narrative will bewilder many of the books’ younger readers—and, trust me, some of the older ones too. Thulak? Seloth? Dunamez? Diakka? Varrigal? Glashan? Life’s too short as it is.

But do Shadowmancer and Wormwood even succeed in fulfilling the spiritual task that Taylor, a devout and obviously sincere man, has set out for them? From these books and numerous interviews that he has given, it’s fairly clear that Taylor wanted to show that the fight against evil must be seen as religious (if not, claims Taylor, necessarily Christian, although his work is filled with Christian imagery). He also set out to deliver the clear message that the occult is far from being a harmless parlor game. It’s no surprise that it’s an angel, not a wizard, who is on hand to help Taylor’s heroes in their adventures, and magic, oh dear, that’s a no-no.

We see this in the middle of one dramatic scene, when Raphah, the young Ethiopian (in a nod to the pieties of multiculturalism, Taylor has boasted that he got “sick of little Harry Potter being a nice little white Anglo-Saxon Protestant”) who is one of the heroes of Shadowmancer, angrily confronts a woman and her faith in the Tarot:

“Do you really believe in the power of those picture cards? There is a far greater law than the one that controls the roll of the dice or the turn of a card . . . each one of you is taken in by what you hear. You’re quick to believe in spirits when it’s really someone banging on the side of the bed. None of you will turn to the one who can truly set you free.”

Fine, but this blunt lecture is a long way from, say, the subtler allegory that is C. S. Lewis’s Narnia, stories written by a man whose Christianity was no less muscular than that of the Reverend Taylor. Other than for those who are already cheering from their pews, the way Taylor punctuates his narrative with sermonettes and preachy nuggets is likely to be more annoying than convincing. In this respect, ironically, he is reminiscent of another best-selling British children’s writer, the gifted but irritating Philip Pullman, whose initially promising His Dark Materials trilogy ultimately dissolved into a dreary atheist rant.

That Taylor dislikes the occult, there’s no doubt. Unfortunately, he sees it not as it is, a conjuring-trick creed of cretins and the credulous, but as something that is genuinely powerful—all too real, and all too dangerous. He’s on the record as believing in ghosts (one of his houses was, he has said, haunted) and has presided over a few exorcisms in his time; earlier, in his wild, and somewhat regretted, youth, he experimented with tarot cards, séances, and Ouija boards.

These beliefs, when linked with Taylor’s violent, lurid, Heavy Metal aesthetic (this vicar puts the Goth in Golgotha), mean that his writing may invest the dark side, even if it always ultimately loses, with rather more seductive force than he may have intended. Here is how the angel Abram describes Hezrin, one of Wormwood’s more sinister demons:

“She is a collector of angels and any other trinket that takes her fancy. I have known her for an eternity, century to century, Paris and Rome, Constantinople and Babylon. The thing with [her] is that she never changes, always those same deep, beautiful eyes that capture the soul—and hands that will tear out your heart.”

Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Narnia anymore.