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.

It's Witchcraft

J. K. Rowling: Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone

J. K. Rowling: Harry Potter And The Chamber of Secrets

J.K. Rowling : Harry Potter And The Prisoner of Azkaban

National Review, October 11, 1999

IT’S enough to make you choke on your fava beans. In bookstore new-fiction aisles, this was meant to be the summer of Hannibal Lecter: aesthete. Renaissance scholar, and serial killer. Instead he has had to share the limelight with Harry Potter, the schoolboy hero of a series of British children's books. The second of these, The Chamber of Secrets, was released in the U.S. at about the same time as Thomas Harris's Hannibal. On September 19, more than three months later, it was Number Three on the New York Times bestseller list, five places ahead of the unfortunate Dr. Lecter. The same week, the first Harry Potter (The Sorcerer’s Stone), which has been on the list for the better part of a year, came in at Number Two. That's pretty good for works of very English fantasy, and astonishing for books aimed at children. To add to the cannibal's misery, the most recent Harry Potter, The Prisoner of Azkaban, has now arrived in America, released early by its U.S. publishers as a result of the large number of copies of the British edition that were making their way across the Atlantic. Probably by broomstick. For the Harry Potter books are about witches and wizards. In the finest tradition of children's stories, Harry is an 11-year- old orphan being brought up under appalling conditions by grotesque relatives. But, as always in these tales, our hero discovers that be has another, greater destiny. To find his future Arthur pulled a sword out of a stone. Young Potter just receives letters, hundreds of them, delivered by owls. Harry Potter, it turns out, is a wizard, and he is required to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Not least because he has an enemy, Voldemort (the splendidly chosen names are one of the strengths of these books), a great wizard who has gone over, as George Lucas would recognize, to the dark side. Voldemort was responsible for the deaths of Harry's parents and wants to finish off the son. It Harry is to survive, he will need all the training he can get in the magical arts. The books (there will eventually be one for each of the seven years Harry is due to spend at Hogwarts) detail his adventures at the school and the intensifying struggle with the forces of the wicked Voldemort.

So far, so good, but this is unexceptional stuff, not enough to explain why so many people are wild about Harry. Part of the answer, of course, lies in skillful marketing, not only of the novels but their author. And why not? Hers is a story almost as magical as Harry's.

J. K. Rowling was a divorced single mother on welfare at the time she wrote The Sorcerer's Stone, mainly, it is said, in an Edinbugh cafe (her apartment was too cold). A Kinko's Cinderella, she couldn't even afford to photocopy her manuscript. She typed it out twice on, naturally, a battered old typewriter. In interviews she comes across as a pleasant sort, the only worrying note coming when she describes her books as "moral."

Moral? In the sanctimonious world of contemporary children's literature, that's a frightening word, all too often a synonym for "politically correct." Rowling does her best to oblige. Minority characters are carefully included in a saga that is otherwise inescapably Anglo-Saxon. Unusually for an English boarding school, Hogwarts is coeducational. Its principal sport, the enjoyably savage Quidditch (a sort of aerial hockey), can be played by both sexes. Harry's boarding house includes girls on its team; Their unpleasant opponents at Slytherin House do not.

It's no surprise, therefore, when Rowling reveals leftish social prejudices all too typical of the British intelligentsia. Harry's main rival at the school, nasty Draco Malfoy is—two strikes—both rich and aristocratic. Meanwhile, the dysfunctional Dursleys, Harry's ghastly family, are a caricature of the vicious bourgeoisie that would have delighted Vyshinsky. They are contrasted with the poor-but-happy Weasleys, a wizard household that befriends Harry. Old man Dursley is a brutish capitalist, director of a company that makes drills. The Bob Cratchit-like Mr. Weasley, on the other hand, is a good government type, a noble, underpaid bureaucrat at the Ministry of Magic.

But by the standards of our irritating era this is mild. Neither Harry nor any of his circle appears to have two mommies, inner-city malaise is confined to the sinister folk in Knockturn Alley, and no one hugs a Whomping Willow tree (if would hit back). The Potter phenomenon is, in fact, reassuring. The lad's no pinko. There is plenty here for the more traditionally minded, and tradition sells, it would seem. Part of the appeal of these books is that they offer fantasy, but within a reassuring structure. There are rules.

Hogwarts School is strict, and its exams are tough. Strip away the contemporary trimmings, and the reader is left with a rather old-fashioned English boarding-school tale, even down to the feasts. Harry "had never seen so many things be liked to eat on one table: roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, fries, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup, and for some strange reason, peppermint humbugs." This is not a school for our tofu times.

Nor is it for wimps. There are plenty of challenges for Harry, almost none of which can be resolved by "counseling." Undaunted, he tries to do the Right Thing. This is a boy who sticks by his friends, and they stick by him. There is evil and betrayal, but by the final page, the bad guys are generally in disarray. Children still like a happy ending and a hero to cheer for. And who better than Harry? He is no comic-book savage. Laudably enough, he wants to avenge his parents, but he doesn't want to lose his humanity (if that's the word for a wizard) in so doing.

And Rowling does not lose sight of her principal objective, which is to tell a good story well. The writing is vivid and of high quality—it has to be to hold a child's attention for over 300 pages (books in R. L. Stine's bestselling Goosebumps series are around 150 pages each). The lesson of Harry Potter is that well-crafted, intelligent stories can indeed flourish in the marketplace—if the gatekeepers of our contemporary culture give them a chance. Tellingly, a British publisher that rejected The Sorcerer's Stone did so because it was "too literary."

If this is another way of saying that the author doesn't patronize her readers, it is true. Unlike many writers of children's books, she doesn't talk down to her audience. She is not, however, writing for their parents. Harry's adult fans (so many in the U.K. that the British publisher produced an edition with a more "grown- up" cover to allow them to read it in public) need to get a grip. Comparisons between Harry Potter and the immortals of children's literature should also be treated with care. The greatest of the classics retain their appeal over the years. They are more than a craze. With the much-hyped Harry it is still too early to say, although the signs are good that Hogwarts will stand the test of time. But what's the hurry? We don't yet know how the saga will end. Voldemort still lives.