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Then there is that class of tales to which Harry belongs, which I would
characterize as looking-glass novels. A perfectly ordinary young person goes
through the looking glass or into the wardrobe or down the rabbit hole, and
suddenly they’re in a world they, like us, have never inhabited. It works for
grown-up tales, also, and has since at least Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
(1726). Lewis Carroll took us along with Alice into an incomprehensible world
in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass
(1872), where cats disappear but their smiles linger, where there are White
Rabbits and Red Queens and Mad Hatters giving tea parties. When the Pevensie
children stumble through the back of the old wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe, the first book of The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956), they
encounter an enchanted world in which a lion can be king and an evil White
Witch can freeze the world into perpetual winter. Like Alice, the Pevensies are
perfectly ordinary children, no more remarkable than any other. They simply
happen upon a world not of their making and in which they can barely
understand the events, the rules, or the logic. Sounds rather like a description of
childhood, doesn’t it?
This, then, is Harry Potter. Yes, he turns out to have remarkable powers, but
he knows nothing about them. Unlike all of his Hogwarts schoolmates, he has no
experience of witchcraft when he goes and knows nothing of that world. When
he unwittingly causes bad things to happen to his richly deserving cousin Dudley
Dursley or when he can talk to a serpent, he is as surprised as anyone and has no
explanation he can offer to others or himself. What Harry has known in his first
eleven years are cruelty, loneliness, failure, isolation, and bad treatment at the
hands of others. Aside from being an orphan forced to sleep in a cupboard under
the stairs, he is in every way perfectly normal. His normality is the thing that
most drives Professor Snape crazy about him. Snape complains that he is not
tremendously bright, that he doesn’t work hard, cuts corners, breaks rules, and
that in general, it’s just not fair for someone so average to be the chosen one.
Snape’s right. The world isn’t fair, even the magical world, and Harry is normal.
It’s the world he encounters that is not. Naturally enough, he brings a good deal
of mistrust, anger, and confusion with him, and what is of major interest is how
he deals with his personal issues. I wouldn’t say the magical elements are
window dressing, since they are the major focus, and readers may not have
picked up the novels without them. But the real problems Harry encounters—
aside from, you know, nearly getting killed and having his soul sucked out and
such—are ordinary school problems: rivalries, bullies, girls and what to do about
them, friendships, envy, loneliness, homework, and exams. If you went to
school, as I assume everyone reading these words did, and you didn’t deal with
these, you just weren’t paying attention. That mix—a normal person put into
extraordinary circumstances—has captured readers since before there were
readers, since the crowd in the palace was listening to the poet sing The Odyssey.
Odysseus is the least remarkable of the Greek heroes below Troy, no astounding
size or abilities, only a clever mind and a determination not to die. And a bit of
luck, which in ancient Greece is portrayed as the favor of the goddess Athena.
It’s the adventures on the way home, Calypso and Circe and the Cyclops and the
trip to the Underworld, that are remarkable. Right there, I believe, is the key to
Harry’s success: luck, pluck, a quick mind, and a sense of when to strike and
what to do. It seems to have worked.
Works for hobbits, too. What is Frodo Baggins if not a representative of the
little guy? Literally. Think about it. Here is a book, three books actually, with no
shortage of heroes, and none of them is the focal character. Why not Gandalf the
Grey, the wizard with wisdom? Why not Gimli the Dwarf or Legolas the Elf?
Why, especially, not Aragorn, the once and future king? He seems custom-made
for the part. He even has a love interest, unlike Frodo. In an older age this would
be an epic poem and Aragorn would be the hero, no ifs, ands, or buts. Achilles
gets his own epic, Odysseus his, Aeneas his, so why not Aragorn? Well, that’s
just it, isn’t it? This is not an epic poem; it’s a novel. Novels aren’t about heroes.
They’re about us. The novel is a literary form that arose at the same time as the
middle class in Europe, those people of small business and property who were
neither peasant nor aristocrat, and it has always treated of the middle class. Both
lyric and epic poetry grew out of a time that was elitist, a time that believed in
the innate right of royalty to rule and the rest of us to amount to not very much.