Nina Bawden: The Witch's Daughter (1963)

Edition: Faber, 2008
Review number: 1472

This is the second book I have read from Faber's "Faber Finds" series of reprints, and the second which has been a revelation. Nina Bawden is not a writer who is entirely unfamiliar to me; I am sure that I read some of her books as a child, but no titles spring to mind unprompted. I definitely hadn't read The Witch's Daughter before.

The story is aimed at young readers of around ten or eleven, and is set on the fictional Scottish island of Skua. Two girls are central to the tale. The first, Perdita, is native to the island but is an outsider to the community because she is the orphaned daughter of a reputed witch, and spends her time running wild on the island, having never been to school. The other, Janey, is a visitor to the island, with her family; she too is separated from those around her, because she is blind.

Even today, I cannot think of another children's book which has as unusual a pair of characters at its centre. In 1963, it must have had a huge impact to its readers. Just think about what would have been popular books at the time for children of about this age to read, especially from the "classic" children's authors. Enid Blyton, Anthony Buckeridge, C.S. Lewis, Arthur Ransome, E. Nesbit, Richmal Crompton... All these writers feature children from upper middle class backgrounds (Crompton's Just William perhaps slightly less "upper" than the others), almost all attending private schools. The actual plot of The Witch's Daughter - the discovery of stolen treasure, and the children, unable to convince adults of its reality, trying to outwit the thieves themselves - could be from any one of Enid Blyton's popular adventure series - The Famous Five, or The Secret Seven, for example. Whether or not Bawden deliberately set out to counterbalance these stories, she succeeds in doing so, without preaching.

To any receptive child, The Witch's Daughter will have a lot to say about what it means to be different from those around us, and how even those who are dismissed from consideration in society have the ability to have adventures and do amazing things. Whether this Faber Finds edition is one which will appeal to children is another thing. In the midst of colourful, bright, and illustrated children's books, this is plain and has a only a couple of illustrations, and also has very small print: Faber seem to be aiming it at adults who remember the book from their own childhood, by using the standard packaging from the imprint. Perhaps they might read the book to their own children - I would definitely recommend it to parents whose children are the right age. My rating: 9/10.

Revisiting Harry Potter

With the final film out, and the imminent arrival of the Pottermore website, it seems to be time to re-read the Harry Potter books. Whatever else they are, they are the publishing phenomenon of our time. The later books, and later the films, created an immense amount of excitement when they first appeared. Words used in the series such as "muggle" seem to have entered the language. The series starts out as a fairly standard children's school story about trainee wizards, a plot thread used by many writers before Rowling (Jill Murphy's Worst Witch and Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci are two older series which immediately spring to mind).

What is it which makes them so popular? Will they continue to be so popular, or will Rowling be forgotten in fifty years' time - will she be Charles Dickens or Marie Corelli as far as posterity is concerned? Do the stories reward re-reading?

Note before reading, that this post contains spoilers to every book in the series. At this time, it seems reasonable to do this, given that the final sentence of the whole saga appears in the Wikipedia article on The Deathly Hallows.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)


Originally reviewed 2000.

The first book in the series sets the scene for the rest of the series. It is aimed at the youngest readers, and is perhaps most likely to be considered childish by older people. The plot takes the reader through Harry's discovery that he is a wizard, and a famous one too, through his first year at Hogwarts school, culminating with his first encounter with Voldemort's plots after his initial attack on Harry as a baby.

While still finding The Philosopher's Stone enjoyable, I tended to notice some more aspects of this novel which I think could have been better. The wizarding world may be deliberately less technologically advanced than the muggle one, but much about the muggle world still seems old fashioned than its nineties setting would suggest; the general feel is perhaps more seventies - the time of Rowlings' own childhood. The only more modern items in the story are the videos and computer games of Dudley Dursley, but they play little part; even Vernon Dursley's job is in the sort of heavy industry which hardly exists in post-Thatcherite Britain. The setting is mainly 1991, before widespread public use of the Internet, before DVDs; perhaps I have been forgetting how different life was before these things.

There are fairly obvious plot holes. Why do none of the teachers at Harry's primary school notice what must have been a fairly apparent case of problems at home? Why does Dumbledore move the stone from a secure location like a bank to a school (however heavily warded) where one of the teachers is tasked by Voldemort to find just such an item, and put it behind protective screens devised by the teachers which turn out to be beatable by three eleven year old children (not to mention a task requiring the capture of flying keys where a flying broom has conveniently been left for the use of anyone wishing to use one), for example? Indeed, why are the tasks apparently specifically designed to play to the strengths of the three central characters? Why is there not better vetting of the teachers? Vicious ones like Snape or simply incompetent ones like Binns might well appear in any school, but how did Quirrell get through - surely someone might have suspected that what happened to him over the summer had some serious consequences for his ability to teach and what he might be wanting to do? (This is an issue which is perhaps more acute in the later novels, particularly in The Goblet of Fire where an imposter fools Dumbledore into thinking that he is a man whom the headmaster knows personally.)

I also feel that the first couple of chapters are not the best way to start the novel. They act as a prologue, but the story would surely grab the reader more immediately if it started with Harry in his cupboard on the day that the first letter arrives. As it is, about half the novel is completed before he even arrives at Hogwarts, and the second half concentrates on the first few days at Hogwarts and then skips over most of the year until the final confrontation with Quirrell/Voldemort.

There are problems with the world building, too. The school seems to have a large number of Muggle-born children, but very little attention is paid to helping them understand the differences between the world in which they grew up and wizarding culture. Some aspects of magic, mainly ancient charms such as that which protects platform 9 3/4, or the commonplace animated photographs, seem hugely more sophisticated than others. Quidditch is a stupid game, pretty clearly a literary invention rather than something which is actually played. Most sports can be boiled down to a single sentence describing their basics: football (soccer) and similar sports such as hockey and basketball are about trying to score goals by putting the ball in the opposition's goal/hoop, cricket is about defending the wicket from the ball (or trying to hit it with the ball, depending on which side the players are on). But Quidditch seems to consist of two games played simultaneously, the seekers' search for the snitch and the rest of the players trying to score goals rather like polo, with the scoring biased extremely heavily in favour of the former, even though the snitch is too small for the spectators to see.

Humour is always going to be less effective the second time around. Indeed, I'm not entirely sure I'd classify humour as a major part of the novel as I did in 2000, let alone of the progressively darker sequels. There are amusing touches, mainly details of the magical culture, such as Bott's Every Flavour Beans, but much of it seems childish (Dumbledore's speech at the welcome banquet, for example), and it gives the impression that some of the world building is done just for the sake of humour rather than being integrated into the background and the plot of the novel. Though I suppose that to many people in the real world, particularly children, sweets are just there, and not subject to analysis.

Despite all this, The Philosopher's Stone continues to be enjoyable to read, and forms a pretty good introduction to the rest of the series. I'd rate it now at 7/10.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998)


Originally reviewed 2000

I originally thought, reading one pretty much after the other for the first time, that The Chamber of Secrets was less amusing than The Philosopher's Stone. Now, however, I find the opposite to be true; clearly, the humour in The Chamber of Secrets survives re-reading better.

The plot covers the second year at Hogwarts for Harry, during which something is attacking students, and putting threatening messages on the walls about the Chamber of Secrets, hidden somewhere inside Hogwarts castle by one of its founders. He has particular problems with a house elf named Dobby - the first to appear in the series - who attempts to dissuade him from returning to Hogwarts and has various schemes which are supposed to be to keep Harry safe but which do not please the boy at all.

Some of the early parts of The Philosopher's Stone seem a little experimental: the characters of Dumbledore and McGonagall are not perhaps fully formed in the parts which precede Harry's arrival at Hogwarts, and are slightly different to their later selves. By this second novel in the series, things are more finalised and Rowling more confident as a writer, which means that The Chamber of Secrets holds together better.

In fact, The Chamber of Secrets seems to me now to be one of the best books in the whole series. The plot is less far fetched than that of The Philosopher's Stone - the explanation for the Chamber of Secrets is more believable than that behind the presence of the stone in the school. Additionally, it provides some information about the background of series villain Lord Voldemort which is made much more interesting to read than that in The Half-Blood Prince later on.

I'd rate The Chamber of Secrets now at 8/10.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999)


Originally reviewed 2000

This now seems to me to be the best of the whole series. It has a wider scope than the first two instalments, but still retains a concision missing from this point onwards, with The Goblet of Fire being as long as the first three books put together, and the final three novels as long or longer.

I suspect that two characters introduced in The Prisoner of Azkaban, Remus Lupin and Sirius Black, are for many fans favourites among the large cast of Harry Potter supporting characters. They also have huge meaning for Harry himself, as the closest friends of the parents he never knew. One of the big difficulties in fiction is how to pass information needed by the reader; Remus and Sirius provide something of a masterclass in how it should be done, integrated into the plot and seeming naturally part of the narrative. Unfortunately, this is a lesson she seems to have completely forgotten by the time she wrote The Half-Blood Prince.

But Harry's discoveries about his parents do not all bring him delight. Throughout the novel, Hogwarts school is surrounded by Dementors, to protect the children from an attack by Sirius, escaped prisoner thought to be a vicious murderer out to get Harry. As is now well known, these are monsters used as guards in the wizarding prisoner of Azkaban, who feed on happy thoughts (they are, in fact, a rather allegorical representation of the effects of depression). Harry turns out to be be particularly susceptible to them, as their presence takes him back to a pre-conscious memory of the day on which his mother and father were killed.

On the first reading, the big surprise is clearly meant to be the revelation that Sirius Black is not the mass murderer he is thought to be, nor the betrayer of Harry's parents, but someone who has been falsely imprisoned for years. This of course is no longer a surprise on re-reading the book (nor probably will it be a shock to new first-time readers). The ingenuity of the ending, where a lot of minor plot strands (such as the mystery of why Hermione is able to take as many subjects as she does) come together, is no longer a surprise either, though it is still to a point interesting to pick out the various strands expertly woven into the story by Rowling to prepare for it.

The Prisoner of Azkaban would make little sense on its own, but ids definitely still a series high point, the moment where everything comes together as a writer for J.K. Rowling, before the huge success of the series seems to have blunted her edge.

I'd rate The Prisoner of Azkaban now at 9/10.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000)

Originally reviewed 2001

The fourth Harry Potter novel is something of a sudden change of gear for the series. It is much longer than the earlier novels, though shorter than those which follow. It is darker, starting with a killing and ending in an attack on Harry from which he barely escapes with his life as his companion is contemptuously killed with the command "Kill the spare" from Harry's enemy Lord Voldemort. And teenage sexuality starts to plan an important part in proceedings.

The story proper begins with the Quidditch World Cup, held in Britian over the summer holidays. The Weasleys have tickets to a match and invite Harry and Hermione to join them, but the even is ruined by an attack by Voldemort's death eaters on the Muggles at the campsite used for the crowds. The main plot of the novel is about the Triwizard Tournament, a most unusual competition between three champions, each representing one of the premier schools of magic in Europe. The tournament has been dormant for centuries because of the death toll, but it is revived at this moment for the sake of encouraging friendship among the schools; an extremely foolish thing to have done (sporting rivalry hardly ever leads to closer relationships between groups of opposing fans). The champions are chosen by a magical artefact, the eponymous Goblet, and Harry's name is chosen as an extra champion through a subterfuge, even though he is under the legal age to compete. This is effectively an attempt on his life, as the tasks the champions face would be pretty dangerous even for an adult wizard. . Naturally, few believe that Harry was innocent and didn't himself find a way to enter his name despite the charms in place to enforce the age limit, the assumption being that a celebrity will always embrace new opportunities for fame. Fame and its drawbacks are series themes, but this is the novel in which they are most prominent, probably as a reflection of some of Rowling's own experiences, particularly with the way that the press mis-reports Harry's activities, and the ethics-free zone which is reporter Rita Skeeter.

It seems to be a bit strange in terms of overall planning for the series to include the World Cup and the Triwizard Tournament in the same novel, but Rowling handles potential similarities quite well so that The Goblet of Fire does not appear to be too tediously sport related.

The longer story gives Rowling the space to be more expansive, which works quite well in the main. There are, however, a fair number of paragraphs, and even a couple of chapters, which could be cut completely without really being missed - The Weighing of the Wands, for example, adds minimally to the background, nothing constructive to the plot development, and nothing significant to the characterisation. Generally, Rowling uses the extra words to establish a stronger sense of atmosphere, which is one reason why The Goblet of Fire and the other later novels in the series come across as darker in tone. Before I re-read the novel, my memory suggested that the Quidditch World Cup was covered in a long-winded, hugely tedious manner over a hundred or so pages, but this isn't the case at all: the World Cup just takes a couple of chapters.

All in all, I feel that The Goblet of Fire is a below average entry for the series, but I am at something of a loss to explain why. There are holes in the plots of all of the books, but here it does in places seem particularly implausible.  For example, the explanation given by Dumbledore about why Harry has to compete once his name has been drawn out of the goblet is rather unconvincing, since a magical artefact which has been so easily tricked into including his entry should not be difficult to trick again - particularly in a world with polyjuice and other tricks for hiding a wizard's identity. There would surely be some sort of safeguard built in, for example, if a chosen champion fell and broke their leg before the start of the first task, making them unable to compete through no fault of their own. More importantly, why was Dumbledore unable to detect changes in a friend of his who is being played by someone else magically transformed in appearance - it should be just about for Barty Crouch to play Moody in front of someone who knows him better. Moody himself advocated the use of questions with answers only known to the questioner and the person seeking to establish their identity as a test; why doesn't Dumbledore do that? Come to that, after the similar problem with Quirrell in Harry's first year, why aren't there charms around Hogwarts to make such an impersonation impossible? (The need to use a compromised teacher twice in the series suggests a certain poverty in Rowlings' imagination, too.)

I really quite liked this entry in the series a decade ago - my review was based on an all night reading session to finish the novel in one sitting. Other people also liked it: The Goblet of Fire was the only Harry Potter book to win a Hugo award. But on more careful re-reading ten years later, it doesn't really stand up so well. My rating now: 6/10.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003)


Originally reviewed 2003

I was rather disappointed with The Order of the Phoenix first time round, but unlike The Goblet of Fire, I have warmed to it since and now think it rather better than its predecessor.

The plot is similar to the other novels, with more mature themes than the earlier books. Harry is still having to spend the summer holidays with the Dursleys, and is extremely cross about it, particularly because the letters he receives from his friends are uninformative. Then things start to happen - a Dementor attack targets his cousin Dudley, and Harry saves him with the Patronus spell, only to be summoned to a hearing for underage magic. He then discovers that the magical press has been portraying him and Dumbledore as deranged for believing in the return of Lord Voldemort over the summer: the Ministry of Magic wants to deny that this has happened to help Cornelius Fudge stay in power as minister.

Then, when the school year starts, the Ministry is interfering at Hogwarts, enforcing the appointment of nightmare teacher and Ministry official Dolores Umbridge as Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher. Naturally, she persecutes Harry especially, and his lack of control of his temper gives her the excuse to, for example, ban him from playing his beloved Quidditch for life. At the same time, he has visions of the actions of Lord Voldemort, and lessons from Professor Snape in a method to prevent this are utterly unsuccessful due to the antipathy between the two of them; eventually, Voldemort is able to take advantage of the connection to get Harry and some of his friends to fall into an ambush at the Ministry of Magic. The battle which follows effectively concludes the book, the death of Harry's godfather Sirius Black putting a damper on Harry's victory.

While Harry's teenage angst is interesting, and presumably likely to appeal to those of a similar age to the boy in the book, it is not treated in great depth. Rowling is no Homer, The Order of the Phoenix no Iliad, and Harry's anger not the wrath of Achilles of which Homer sings with the help of the muse. For a long novel, The Order of the Phoenix has a plot which seems to move quite rapidly, and builds up effectively to the battle in the Ministry; a development which is the most effective of any of the novels in the series. It is easy to get caught up and ignore the problems.

And problems there are. Like the other later Harry Potter novels, The Order of the Phoenix could do with cutting, but less so as it is better structured to fill the length it has than the others. There are (minor) inconsistencies between details here and the background elsewhere. In the Ministry battle, for instance, spells which are fired by both sides but miss their human targets cause damage to the Ministry building and its contents, which is somewhat different to the precision with which spells seem to work in most of the stories. There is the idea that a prophecy can only be retrieved from storage by someone mentioned in it, but when the children start destroying the store to divert Voldemort's followers, the stored prophecies start to recite themselves - it should, presumably be impossible to move them from the shelves even if the shelves are destroyed if the same rules which apply to the prophecy concerning Harry and Voldemort apply to the rest of them.

But in the end the faster moving plot makes this the most gripping of the later novels. My rating now: 8/10.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005)


Originally reviewed 2005

The first four chapters and the last four chapters of The Half-Blood Prince are among the best in the whole Harry Potter series. Each of the first group is different from the others, even though they all involve meetings, encompassing the introduction of the new Minister for Magic to the Muggle Prime Minister, the confrontation between Narcissa Malfoy, Bellatrix Lestrange and Snape, Dumbledore talking to the Dursleys about Harry, and the recruitment of Slughorn as a teacher by Dumbledore and Harry. The last four, with the trip to retrieve a Horcrux and the attack on Hogwarts by Death Eaters which culminates in the death of Dumbledore (an event which I didn't want to reveal in my original review) also show Rowling's quality as a writer of action scenes. The latter is a really good example of a major strength of Rowling's work in Harry Potter: it is full of clues to events in the final book and with ambiguities which will also be drawn on in The Deathly Hallows.

It is a pity that the twenty two chapters in between are so dull. There are some other good bits, but the whole thing sinks under two heavy burdens: the irritation caused by Harry's obsession with Draco, and the dullness of the revelations about Lord Voldemort's early life as revealed to Harry in the special lessons he has with Dumbledore.

Throughout the whole series, the contemptuous dislike between Harry and Draco is a major theme of the stories. In this book their enmity comes to a head, and Harry is paranoid about what he might be up to, with some reason, as it turns out. But it is not really justified by the evidence available to him, as even Hermione and Ron are willing to point out. The extreme nature of Harry and Draco's obsession with each other is surely one reason why homosexual love between them is such a popular theme on fan fiction sites. The purpose of it here is partly to keep the reader guessing what exactly Draco is up to (the second chapter makes it clear that he is indeed up to something), and the continuing tension is meant to develop the characters, something which I did pick up from The Half-Blood Prince the first time around. But on a second read, it all just becomes tiresome adolescent posturing, which may be true to the emotional maturity of sixteen year old boys but which is not interesting to read about.

The imparting of background information is something which is particularly difficult in science fiction and fantasy, where the world being portrayed is unfamiliar to the reader. Rowling has actually been quite good at it up to this point, aided by the common device of a viewpoint character who is also new to the world being described: useful, because they can ask questions without the reader wondering why they needed to when it would be common knowledge. But here there are great dollops of recorded memories of the early years of Lord Voldemort: tedious, unnecessarily lengthy, tales. The reader (and, indeed Harry too) does not need to know every detail of Voldemort's back story to support Dumbledore's suspicion that Voldemort has created Horcruxes, dark magical objects which store parts of his soul and which give him an immortality of sorts (he cannot truly die while any of the Horcruxes are in existence).

This means that The Half-Blood Prince feels the hardest work to read of the whole series, which makes it particularly unrewarding a second time around. I feel that this is the poorest of the novels, and would now rate it at 5/10.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007)


Originally reviewed 2007

When I first read this, back in the summer of 2007, the hype and interest was such that I reviewed the novel when I had only completed the first ten chapters, in order to ensure that I did not include any spoilers in what I wrote: a unique distinction among the over 1400 reviews published here. But now I think it is safe enough to reveal what happens, especially as the ending and the epilogue are quite important influences on my opinions about the book, and, because they give the reader their final impressions, of the series as a whole.

The Deathly Hallows seems very different to the rest of the series. One contributing factor is the setting. The main locations used by the other stories (Privet Drive, the Burrow, and most of all Hogwarts School), appear only in a few chapters each, with most of the rest of the story following Harry, Hermione, and (for most of the time) Ron searching the country for the Horcruxes. Another is character. Dumbledore is of course killed at the end of The Half-Blood Prince, and it is in this book that his absence makes it clear just how important he is to the tone of the other stories. But the difference is also that in The Deathly Hallows, things really become serious; all that has happened before is in a sense just training to prepare Harry for the end of this book. (That isn't to say that the humour is lost entirely, as I noted the first time around.)

The important event which sets the plot in motion is the fall of the Ministry of Magic to Voldemort and his followers. A regime which Rowling clearly models on Nazi Germany is instantly set up, with checks on the "blood status" of witches and wizards, checks that Voldemort himself, with a Muggle father, would fail (a rather over-emphasised irony). This also leads to Harry becoming a wanted fugitive as "Undesirable Number One", and sets him along with Ron and Hermione off on the hunt for the Horcruxes. The hunt forces them to turn up in places which are not good refuges for people on the run - for example, they raid wizarding bank Gringotts after discovering that one of Voldemort's followers stores a Horcrux in her vault there.

The book climaxes - with the climactic battle between Voldemort's followers and his opponents at Hogwarts, coinciding with Harry and his friends arriving to track down the last of the missing Horcruxes (there are two more, but they are not exactly accessible to be destroyed at this point). Harry turning up is the trigger for the arrival of Voldemort's forces. It is as though (at the end of the Lord of the Rings) Frodo arrives at Mount Doom to find that it is actually the location of the Battle of Pelennor Fields. The combination makes the story rather bitty, as the the viewpoint switches between the various groups of fighters and Harry as he approaches a final confrontation with Voldemort. All in all, it's exciting, but by this point there are few surprises - I suspect most readers work out the meaning of the prophecy pretty much as soon as they know the properties of the three Hallows, and this is the key to what happens in this chapter. The direct confrontation may be more visceral, but (although generally I don't feel that Tolkien is a great writer), the Lord of the Rings does it better, giving the impression that the older story is based on a more mature understanding of the nature of evil.

Following this climax, there is the inevitable chapter for tying up loose ends, mostly. Then there is the Epilogue, set nineteen years later. Both of these are naturally anti-climactic, but the Epilogue is more interesting. What it describes is a domestic scene in the household of Harry and Ginny, now married and getting ready to take their second son to Kings' Cross station to catch his first train to Hogwarts. Rowling doesn't use it to tell the reader what happened next to the other characters, other than incidentally - among those we do learn about are Neville, Ron, Hermione, and Draco. We don't know what Harry does for a living, or any of the others except for Neville. But one thing is very clear: Harry has finally managed to get away from his fame as the Boy Who Lived. His children don't even know that he is a celebrity, which is somewhat unlikely - their oldest child James Sirius must surely have been the subject of gossip at Hogwarts. The wizarding world has not forgotten Harry, as is clear from the reaction of the those on Platform 9 3/4 when the family arrives. I know that J.K. Rowling has not precisely been comfortable with the fame that Harry Potter has brought her, and that this has found its way into several books (notably in terms of Harry's portrayal by the media). Personally, I feel that the Epilogue is not terribly interesting, and doesn't add much to the end of the book. Its main purpose is to mark that this is the end, and close off at least some of the fan desire for a sequel, through the final words "The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well." I think that Rowling could have found a more interesting way to make this clear. In the end, the Epilogue detracts from the book and the series as a whole.

Understanding death is the main theme of the book, and has been important through the whole series because of Voldemort's continuing obsession with immortality. This works well as the mainspring of the plot, and Rowling's apparent message, that death at the end of a fulfilled life is to be peaceably accepted (as in the Nunc Dimittis, from the gospel of Luke, used as a prayer in the liturgies of many Christian denominations), marks the light from the dark effectively. So Harry can go to meet Voldemort expecting to die, and then deliberately lose the Resurrection Stone in the forest, as Dumbledore accepted his death at the end of The Half-Blood Prince, using his knowledge to promote the anti-Voldemort agenda.

A fitting end to the series (Epilogue excepted), and one of the better novels. My rating - 8/10.

The Series as a Whole


Like other school stories before this, Harry Potter describes a school year in each instalment; another obvious example for children being the Enid Blyton Malory Towers books. This gives a well defined timespan to each story, but does give the individual plots a degree of predictability, compounded by Rowling's structural plan of ending each book with a climactic battle with Voldemort. The seventh book is a little different, as Harry never actually makes it to the school until the final battle, which takes place there.

Hogwarts is an odd place to find in a series of books published around the turn of the millennium. It is a boarding school, not a type of school which will be familiar to the vast majority of the readers. It is more common in books, though, perhaps because such a school has a built-in isolation which makes it easy to give the story a circumscribed location: while at the school, Harry rarely goes outside the grounds, particularly in the earlier books. The use of the boarding school is extremely old fashioned, giving the story something of the feel of a homage to books from the thirties and forties like Blyton's, or to C.S. Lewis' Narnia stories, featuring children who also board, though the schools play little part in the novels.

The plots of the earlier novels in particular follow effectively the same plan: over the summer Harry is introduced to something he hadn't come across before in the wizarding world, while being unhappy with the Dursleys; then he gets to  school after some minor adventure; school is wonderful but overshadowed by various issues, including Snape and Malfoy; he does something (or has something done to him) which makes him unpopular with the other students; then a final testing adventure at the end of the year closes the book as a climax.

Encapsulating a school year in each book, and making the age group aimed at increase each time (perhaps suitable for readers a year or two younger than Harry if they are good readers for their age), is a good idea when the books were first released, as child fans would have grown a year in between the publication dates. Of course, it doesn't work now that all of them are available, and this is something that parents need to consider: The Deathly Hallows is unlikely to be suitable for a nine or ten year old.

These two aspects of the stories give them a sort of version of two of the three unities: time (a year, rather than a day) and place (though Hogwarts is quite a large and complex scene). Usually, novels do not approach anywhere near a unity of action, tending to focus on one main character's actions, thoughts and emotions, rather than on a single plot line, but unity is also provided here by the concentration on the struggle between Harry and Voldemort.

The three main characters are something of a cliché, too. The hero and his two helpers are common enough in fantasy fiction to be parodied in China Miéville's Un Lun Dun: the chosen one, the clever one, and the funny one. Harry, Hermione, and Ron fit very well into these slots, even though Rowling does try to make them more three dimensional than this.

The length of the later novels is a problem, as it seems to stem from a lack of willingness to cut rather than a need to include all the material, particularly in The Half-Blood Prince, the dullest of the novels. Each of the last few novels would be improved by judicious pruning, of at least fifty pages of material if not more.

What will the new Pottermore website do to J.K. Rowling's reputation as a writer? I have not yet read any of the material it contains, only the reactions of others to it, and it sounds like a collection of more or less finished background material, fleshing out the gaps in the series. This hardly ever works well - The Dune Encyclopedia is a similar sort of collection (different mainly by not being written by the original author), and served only to reduce the stature of Frank Herbert's books. The main problem with this sort of collection is that you need to be really fanatical about the stories to appreciate the details, and even then, you may prefer to use your own imagination to fill in the gaps.

All in all, I would say that the series is good, but not particularly original. The characters are well drawn, but stereotypical. The background is fun, but doesn't give the impression of consistent world building - details seem to be decided on for the purposes of the moment, not to fit into any overall structure. The plot of the series as a whole is very typical fantasy genre, the chosen hero coming of age and fighting the strong evil; but at least there is some grey in the "good" characters. And of course, the writing is quite addictive: first time around, I read several of the books in one sitting, with deleterious affects on my sleep. However, on re-reading, I've felt mystified as to why it has been just so popular; there are any number of better fantasy series around. So I'd bet that Harry Potter will be a minor footnote, barely remembered, in fifty years' time.


Review number: 1430

Yvonne Jerrold: A Case of Wild Justice? (2008)

Published: Troubadour, 2008

The essential idea of A Case of Wild Justice? is fairly simple. It picks on something that has become more and more commonly reported in the UK's national and local papers: an increase in anti-social behaviour in young teenagers, both vandalism and threatening behaviour to adults. Indeed, from some local papers, it would seem that it should be impossible to go out at all without getting hassled. And it certainly seems to residents that the police are helpless, that those responsible are never caught and convicted of any crime (despite the huge numbers of cameras on the British streets today). In the novel, a group of old age pensioners forms, known as the Silver Bees, who booby trap themselves with the intention of taking their tormentors with them if the worst comes to the worst. Not quite suicide bombers (they don't go out of their way to get into situations where they will die) and not quite vigilantes (they don't actively seek to attack the teenage delinquents), the aim is to make delinquents think twice because it is now dangerous to harass pensioners.

I remember going to see the David Mamet play, Oleanna, some years ago in London. The play has two characters, a university lecturer and a student, and concerns accusations of rape made by the student against the lecturer. In this particular production, with David Suchet and Lia Williams, it seemed pretty clear that rape, in the literal sense, did not happen, but in the mind of the student, it had done so in a different sense. During the interval and on the way out at the end of the play, my partner and I were struck at how all the snatches of conversation overheard were about the concept, and not about the play as a play or even the excellent performances (both actors were mesmerising). People did say that it was a good play, but that seemed to be more because they were stimulated by it than by any virtues of the text itself.

A Case of Wild Justice? is a novel with a similar feel to it. As a reviewer, I should really discuss how it is written, but I find myself wanting to talk about the ideas it contains and take issue with some of its positions on its emotive subject. Generally, I was impressed; this is a well-characterised story. However, I do feel that some of what it appears to be trying to do is undermined by the approach it takes.

The story is told from the point of view of one elderly woman, and how she begins to consider becoming a Silver Bee, after hearing about the group and seeing the activities of the children in her village street. The leader of these delinquents is her grandson, a sociopathic individual loathed by all adults except his mother, who thinks he is a perfect angel. A lot of the novel - perhaps actually more than half - is taken up with Hannah's background story, which is given in some detail and makes it clear that the message of the book is not that everything was alright until the current generation of teenagers came along. To me, this is one of the two major problems with the book. It certainly seems that the publisher wants to market the book as a novel about the Silver Bees, but the inclusion of so much of Hannah's life story undermines this theme. The reader wants to get to the bits that they were told the book was about; after all, that is why it was picked up in the first place. I'm not sure how much this is a case of a misleading blurb - a publisher's marketing department picking up the most controversial element of the novel - and how much it is the author becoming interested in the characters and writing a novel about them rather than keeping to the theme.

The second problem is with one of the characters, Hannah's grandson Billy. He is the leader of the local teenage gang, and at the start of the novel is serving a short prison sentence, being released near the end. The problem is his portrayal. I have no general objection to villains being sociopathic, but in this case it surely undermines what Jerrold has to say about the problem of teen violence: not every teenager who vandalises a bus stop or mugs an old lady is a sociopath or influenced by one. My feeling that the way Billy is handled makes it impossible for A Case of Wild Justice? to have a serious point: it effectively makes out that teenage delinquency has no social cause, and so can have no social solution. (Preventing children growing up like Billy would be the only way to stop it.) By not paying attention to what might be causing teenage delinquency in society at large, the issue at the centre of the novel is trivialised.

Despite this, A Case of Wild Justice? is an enjoyable read, well written and with believable characters. After all, it is a novel, not a sociological treatise. To me, Oleanna was not successful as a play; A Case of Wild Justice? succeeds as a novel.

China Miéville: Un Lun Dun (2007)

Published: Macmillan, (2008)

Billed as "the comfort blanket" for "devastated Potter fans", Un Lun Dun is a fantasy novel aimed at older children but with plenty to amuse adult readers. It tells of two normal London schoolgirls' discovery that animals seem to be obsessed with one of them. This leads them to find a way through to UnLondon, where the broken objects from London turn up endowed with a literal new life: broken umbrellas are like large birds, and one of the most endearing characters is a puppy-like milk carton. UnLondon is threatened by "the Smog", a cloud of pollution which has developed an evil mind of its own and which aims to take over the uncity. To the inhabitants of UnLondon, one of the girls, Zanna, is a prophesied champion, the Swazzy, who will lead them to victory over the Smog; but, in the most original touch in the book, Zanna is defeated in her first battle with it, and the UnLondoners turn to a man who can control the unbrellas (as the living, broken umbrellas are called). Zanna, made ill by inhaling Smog, and her companion Deeba return to our world. While Zanna forgets, as most Londoners do when not directly in contact with UnLondon, Deeba continues to be obsessed with the uncity, and when she discovers that things are not what they seem there she seeks to return to warn the inhabitants.

There are digs at Harry Potter here: the prophecies about the Swazzy talk about two companions, the Clever Sidekick and the Funny Sidekick, for example. Rowling has a tendency to use clichéd plot devices of the fantasy genre. For example, there is an element slavish following of accurate prophecy and the necessary tasks that seem like parts of computer game scenarios (you need to complete one to get an item that will enable you to complete the next) in some of the Harry Potter stories. Here, though, such conventions are ignored or satirised: Deeba short circuits this by deciding it makes more sense to go straight for the last one and save time). The idea of battling the Smog in a city of recycled rubbish picks up an environmental theme in fantasy that goes back to Tolkien, of course, but is obviously something likely to interest today's children. The puns and interest in language suggest Jasper Fforde or, perhaps more an influence, Norman Juster (whose book The Phantom Tollbooth may seem a bit dated now, but is one that many fantasy fans my age loved as children). Lewis Carroll is never far away, and Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere is a major influence, of which more later.

I recently listened to the Brakes 2005 album, Give Blood. It's pretty good, but at least part of the pleasure it gives is in recognising who influences which part: Roxy Music, the Clash, Talking Heads, Blur, or any one of the other influential rock musicians of the last thirty five years. Originality aside, this kind of collage needs to be done very well, or it won't come across to the listener as a unified whole. And of course part of the game is to see how close you can come to a copyright suit - copying a style may not be an infringement, but get too close and lawyers will be after you.

In book terms Un Lun Dun is a bit like Give Blood. It's very good, but indebted to a wide range of other writers, as Miéville indeed acknowledges in the afterword. The list is not precisely the same as I have given, but it is fitting that Neil Gaiman is singled out; indeed, his contribution is described not just as an influence present in the author's library but as an active helper. Un Lun Dun has taken the setting from Neverwhere, lightened the tone and added much more humour, to make a novel not just suitable for children but one which will be enjoyed by adults too. The wide ranging references, environmental message and digs at fantasy genre clichés provide interest for aficionados and the innumerable puns will produce laughs and groans from all readers.

Every other novel that I have read by Miéville, I have appreciated the quality without actually enjoying very much. Maybe because it is more accessible, less relentless and less nasty, I really liked Un Lun Dun, despite being well outside the target age range. (That range is about the same as the early Harry Potter novels, by the way.) It will inevitably be compared to Rowling's work (and I've mentioned the connections several times so far...): no new fantasy for children can escape that now. But at least Un Lun Dun seems to have escaped being compared to the dreadful His Dark Materials. One important thing about Miéville and Rowling is that in this book Miéville doesn't appear to have deliberately tried to be the new Rowling, which is probably a reason for the success of the story. The strengths of Miéville's writing are different, but like Rowling, he has produced an enjoyable, amusing fantasy story.

J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007)

Published: Bloomsbury, 2007

This blog entry is not so much a review as a reaction as I read the early chapters (the first ten or so) of the most eagerly anticipated novel of all time. So there are not going to be spoilers for anything later than these chapters. I may return to this post later and add a comment about the later sections of the novel.

Over eleven million copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows were ordered in advance of its release. The only literary events I can think of that rivalled the publication of The Deathly Hallows are the appearances of the serial parts of Dickens' novels in the nineteenth century. While there are obvious differences (Dickens released his novels in a large number of individual parts, rather than Rowling's complete novels making up a series; and Dickens' plots were a lot more predictable in broad outline, so there wasn't speculation about, for example, whether the hero might die). Does the fanaticism mean that Rowling's work last as long as Dickens'? Plenty of old bestsellers have gone completely from the public consciousness - Marie Corelli, for example, was one of the biggest sellers of the early part of the twentieth century, but it would be unusual to see her books even in second hand shops. Will Rowling turn out to be the Corelli or the Dickens of our time?.

All three have social themes in their books which make them more than just escapism, though Rowling's concerns in the Harry Potter books - racism and the rise of Neo-Nazism, and the excesses of the press and its manipulation by government - are more like the social campaigning of Dickens than Corelli's theme of the relationship between spiritualism and Christianity. The first is more explicit from the beginning of The Deathly Hallows, as Voldemort and the Death Eaters are described in ways which show them to be closer to Hitler and his followers than was seen in the earlier novels. Rowling's other major social concern is more modern and is unlikely to have occurred to Corelli at all. Dickens, on the other hand, was extremely upset by attacks on him in American newspapers after he published articles critical of some aspects of life in the United States, just as Rowling has indicated that she feels that press interest in her personal life was unwarranted. So this too is a similarity to Dickens.

Speculation has been rife about how the series will end, and an intensive security operation was (more or less) successful in keeping details from getting out before the release date. Even following this, spoilers have generally (as far as I have seen) been well signposted; it's quite remarkable on today's Internet how polite people who have posted something about the novel have been to those who are yet to read it. The main information that was widely disseminated, revealing that at least two major characters would be killed, came from Rowling herself, and this left a lot open (the ending could have the rest of the cast living happily ever after, or a bloodbath on the scale of a Jacobean revenge tragedy - or anything in between).

More important to me than the issue of what might happen in the novel is whether it would be a satisfactory ending to the series as a whole. I found Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince the least involving novel in the series so far, and I was almost expecting to be disappointed by The Deathly Hallows.

And then I read the first chapter, which describes Voldemort plotting with the Death Eaters. This seemed to confirm my worst fears - dull, predictable, lacking in any kind of atmosphere. One thing it does make clear (even if Rowling's revelations about character deaths hadn't) is that The Deathly Harrows is going to continue with the darkening of the series that's been apparent since the arrival of the Dementors in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

But then, in the second chapter, Rowling seemed to return to her best form. Harry's relationship with the Dursley family is an integral part of the whole series, and has gradually been revealed as more subtle than the bullying and abuse which characterised it at the beginning of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. The chapter also indicates that no matter how dark things become, the humour of the series will still be part of the final volume.

Philip Pullman: The Amber Spyglass (2000)

Edition: Point, 2001
Review number: 1310

As anyone who has read my reviews of the earlier novels in the His Dark Materials trilogy will know, I am not a Philip Pullman fan. I did feel, though, that I should make an effort to get to the end of this series, as so many people rave about it. I had hoped that this would be a more interesting read, and I would finally begin to care what happened to Will and Lyra.

The novel starts with Lyra in a magical sleep in the power of her mother, while Will (and others, who are more sinister) search for her. Lyra asleep is a much more interesting character than Lyra awake, and this section is probably the best written of all three novels. But soon she is wakened, and from that point she and Will are questing through the worlds accessible with the knife (see The Subtle Knife) and the dullness returns, giving me an almost irresistible urge to skip large chunks (I only didn't because I was intending to write this review).

Pullman has frequently and loudly complained about the Christian symbols in C.S. Lewis' Narnia stories. However, the way that Lewis approaches his symbols seems to me to indicate a much greater writer and storyteller, regardless of his religious convictions. He subordinates the external ideas to the demands of his story (for example, the parallels between Aslan and Jesus are less exact than critics would make out). Pullman's ideas, on the other hand, seem far more important than any story-telling, and his symbols are clunky and irritating. They also tend to be pointed out very directly by the author - as when he describes the meaning of the knife towards the end of this novel. I don't really mind what the purpose symbolic objects hold in a work of fiction, as long as they're well done and their meanings contribute to the strengths of the novel. This is not the case here, and they just become intrusive, making the reader unable to ignore the fact that there is some kind of agenda behind what they see on the page.

My basic objection to this entire trilogy is that it is extremely dull. It certainly reads more like the kind of thing adults expect children to like rather than something that will really appeal to most children - a real contrast to Harry Potter. (I've seen lots of adults raving about His Dark Materials - but not one teenage or pre-teen fan.) I'm certainly not intending to read any more Philip Pullman, no matter how wonderful people think his books are.

J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005)

Edition: Bloomsbury, 2005
Review number: 1306

Most of the Harry Potter books so far have begun with tales of the mistreatment of Harry by the Dursleys during the summer holidays, which provide a comic note even as the novels as a whole become darker. The first exception is The Goblet of Fire, which begins a quite chilling scene featuring Voldemore himself. The Half-Blood Prince is the second, and it begins with a very different scene: the introduction of the new Minister of Magic (the incomptencies of Cornelius Fudge having finally led to his replacement) to the British Prime Minister, who is the only Muggle in the country permitted to know about the existence of magic. It is an odd beginning to the novel, especially when you compare it to The Goblet of Fire - what happens in Voldemort's ancestral home is of great importance to the plot, but the scene with the Prime Minister seems only to be used to introduce the new Minister of Magic, who is a comparatively minor character in the novel, before being completely forgotten. Of course, the two of them may turn out to be more important later on - Rowling has proved to be quite good at picking up details later, and there are several examples of the way that she does this in The Half-Blood Prince.

The plot this time is more to do with Dumbledore's attempts to help Harry understand Voldemort's background rather than the machinations of Voldemort attempting to kill Harry - the focus of the earlier stories. A crucial part is played by memory - Harry watches several episodes from Voldemort's early life which are either Dumbledore's own memories or ones he has collected. They do this because Dumbledore is convinced that these memories are key to understanding what has happened to Voldemort since his attack on Harry's parents: why had his failure to kill Harry as well led to his disappearance and a shadowy half-existence?

However, the main theme of the novel is not so much its plot as the evolvution of the relationships between the characters established earlier in the series, as contrasted to the cold calculation that marks out the manipulation that is the only way that Tom Riddle (the young Voldemort) seems to relate to those around him. This novel is in fact a six hundred page exposition of something Dumbledore tells Harry, that the important difference between him and Riddle is the role that love plays in his life, from the sacrifice his parents made of their own lives trying to protect him to the way he works with his friends as contrasted with the subservient obedience Voldemort demands of his Death Eaters. It also plays to one of Rowlings' strengths as a writer, her characters. Harry at sixteen is not the same as Harry at eleven; growing up and his experiences have developed Rowling's central character. By concentrating on relationships, both he and the lesser characters become rounded out; even Draco Malfoy becomes more than an arrogant bully.

A lot of what happens in The Half-Blood Prince fits in with the things I had guessed would occur or was widely predicted by fans, but the one important event I didn't expect at ll (which occurs near the end, so I won't say anything that gives it away) is possibly not what it seems to be on the surface: in the last magical confrontation, think about what Harry is prevented from doing, and what this may mean.


The intention behind The Half-Blood Prince is sufficiently different from the earlier books that it is not easy to compare its quality with the rest of the series. We learn a lot of background, and this is handled very well indeed; so often this sort of thing becomes a boring interlude between the scenes of action. It has a serious tone, which is reasonable considering the events it follows at the end of The Order of the Phoenix, not least in their effects on Harry's own life. The adventures of Harry Potter have been moving in this direction since The Goblet of Fire, and in this book Harry is being prepared, as he, the other charadcters, and the readers all know, for the most serious confrontation he will ever face. In the end, The Half-Blood Prince is much more dependent on its place in the series than the others, and is the only one (so far) that would really suffer from being read out of context.

Philip Pullman: The Subtle Knife (1997)

Edition: Scholastic, 2001
Review number: 1278

The scope of the His Dark Materials trilogy widens in this second novel, which is set in three worlds, including our own. The Subtle Knife also introduces the second of the two protagonists, Will Parry. Like Lyra, he is an independent child, in his case because his father was an explorer lost on an Arctic expedition when he was a baby, and his mother has become barely able to function after years of stress. When he discovers that her paranoid fantasies have a grain of truth, and then accidentally kills a man who attacks them, he has to flee, and ends up in another world where he meets Lyra. He has his own quest, to find his father, but it becomes clear that, for a time at least, their purposes will be parallel and that in some way Will will be key to stopping the forcible removal of the souls of children that motivates Lyra.

While the background remains interesting, the faults of Northern Lights seem magnified here. Will is just as poorly animated a character as Lyra is, and the story really lacks the spark of excitement that would be needed for it to really take off. This is made worse by the splitting of the narrative into two; I can see why the book is organised like this (the purpose of the lesser thread, which is mostly very tedious indeed, is to prepare the ground for a surprise in the other), but it does make the novel drag. I suspect that if this had been the first novel in the trilogy, few children would have bothered to read it. (Mind you, I get the impression that this is a series that adults rave about as a fantastic children's trilogy but not one which is really a great favourite with young readers.)

It is in the latter part of the novel that Pullman's controversial twisting of Christian theology really begins. As it appears here, it is basically a reversal of how orthodox Christianity looks at the universe - the side that a Christian would call good is here about regulation and conformity; while the traditional "fallen angels" want to bring freedom and happiness to humanity. This is hardly a new way to attack the Christian religion, particularly as it is based on an institutionalised version of Christianity that has little to do with what the Bible actually says (and attacking it is really a version of what is known as a "straw man" argument - demolishing a misrepresentation of an opponent's position). Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh has a similar message, and that was written over a century ago as an attack on the hypocrisy of the Victorian church. And yet this trilogy has generally been singled out for praise, as though every book that children could read before Pullman began writing were putting the same point of view as C.S. Lewis (whose Narnia stories are, incidentally, better written and more fun.) Christianity is an irrelevance to the majority of people in the West today - there are far more interesting targets that could be attacked truly controversially, from the cult of celebrity, to cultural imperialism, to the morality of today's capitalism. There is no reason to start fighting our grandparents battles over again.

Considering the amount of praise I have heard heaped on this series, it has proved immensely disappointing. I will probably eventually read The Amber Spyglass, but I'm certainly not holding my breath in anticipation.

Philip Pullman: Northern Lights (1995)

Edition: Scholastic, 1996
Review number: 1262

Harry Potter may have started the current revival in the children's books market, but it is Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (of which this is, of course, the first) which has picked up most of the critical acclaim. Aimed at an older reader than the first Harry Potter stories, this is an imaginative and dark tale of a fantasy world where human beings are accompanied by personal daemons - basically externalised souls - in the form of animals.

Central character Lyra is a young girl brought up (in a neglected kind of way) by the scholars of an Oxford college. When children across Britain begin to go missing, she resolves to save them (after her closest playmate disappears); this decision takes her to fashionable London, a gypsy parliament in the Fens (at Ely under another name), and finally to the Arctic, where the Aurora or Northern Lights play an important part in beginning to resolve the mystery.

Comparison with the Harry Potter stories, particularly the Philosopher's Stone which began that series, is quite a useful way to enumerate some of the praiseworthy and not so praiseworthy aspects of this novel. The first thing that the reader notices about Northern Lights by comparison is that Pullman imagines a far more complex, logically thought out and intricate world, one that is a great deal less like the one in which we live than the one that contains Hogwarts is. Everything we read about seems to have a purpose within the overall scheme of things, while Rowling, at least some of the time, appears to put in details on the spur of the moment. While the Harry Potter books do have a plan - the final chapter of the seventh novel being among the first to be written - many of the background details do not relate to it (what do every flavour beans tell us about how the universe is structured, for example?). Everything here has its place, it all fills out a corner of a master plan. Though this may be in part something Pullman is able to do because he is writing for an older readership, this particular contrast is valid for the later Harry Potter books as well, which are not aimed at such young people.

Pullman's writing is made to seem far deeper and have more to offer on repeated reading by this method. It should be remembered that Rowling's books are meant to be funny, while Pullman wants to deal with big issues.

The feeling that there is more to be gained by repeated reading of His Dark Materials is bolstered by a second difference: the background to Pullman's series is far more imaginative than Happy Potter, which is really just a boarding school story with magic and a villain. The daemons, the cosmology (all the stuff about the Dust), the bears and so on are original ideas; this is not just another post-Tolkien fantasy novel. Pullman wins out on the broad brush aspects of writing a fantasy novel - the general background is far better - but what about the detail? On the character front, the central cast of Rowling's novels all seem to have something individual about them, though sometimes Ron Weasley in particular is a bit of a caricature. It takes a long while here to feel that Lyra has much of a character. His portrayal of her upbringing as a sort of urchin doesn't seem realistic - for that done really well in a book for teenagers, try Leon Garfield's Smith. The characters here seem to be mainly intended as pegs for the background - which is of course a common problem in novels driven by ideas.

Both Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Northern Lights aim to make a big impact in their very first pages, with the outlandish idea of a boy living in a cupboard under the stairs in one and Lyra discovering a plot to poison her uncle in the other. Here Harry Potter wins again, but then it does have one of the most attention grabbing openings in fiction. Harry Potter also continues in much the same vein, and the pace really keeps moving; this is not true of Northern Lights. This is not necessarily a case of one being better than the other, however; it is another difference of emphasis.

The differences between the two series could be summed up as Pullman having more intellectual weight (and it is interesting that most of the reviews I have seen are about the underlying ideas rather than the writing itself), but Rowling being more appealing. It's a matter of mind or heart - each appeals more to the one than the other. Considering that they are the two most successful examples of the current revival of the children's book market, they are remarkably different from each other - especially given that they both fall within the fantasy genre.

J. K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003)

Edition: Bloomsbury, 2003
Review number: 1193

The fifth novel in this phenomenally successful series starts with a big dose of the theme which occurs in several of the others - Harry's feelings of abandonment and loneliness as he spends the summer holidays with the awful Dursleys. This particular year, he is especially cross about it, because the contact he does have with his schoolfiends consists of hints that something exciting is going on but they are unable to tell him what it is.

The tone of the seven hundred plus page novel is set by the early chapters, another similarity with the earlier Harry Potter stories. Harry spends the year angry (he is, after all, an adolescent), trying to deal with things he doesn't understand, and having people keep things from him. There is rather less of the straightforward problem solving or "derring do" than in the earlier books; the whole of The Order of the Phoenix is more sombre and generally less exciting and immediate.

With each new Harry Potter novel, anticipation and expectations have grown in intensity; with The Order of the Phoenix, the extra delay before its publication (a two year gap rather than a single one - though Rowling was at pains to point out that there was no plan to release a novel a year) made this even more the case than before. I was disappointed when I finally read the novel, but found it hard to decide whether it is truly poorer than its fellows, or if the weight of expectation was too much.

There are good points to The Order of the Phoenix. Harry's discovery that his father wasn't perfect is one; Harry and Ron's attempts to understand girls are amusing; the exploits of Fred and George continue to be enjoyable. New character Luna, strange daughter of the editor of a downmarket wizarding tabloid, is an asset. (The series as a whole is full of negative portrayals of the media, a reflection of Rowlings' feelings about her own treatment in the real world, presumably.)

There can be no denying that The Order of the Phoenix failed to live up to my expectations, at least. This is to some extent because of the way that anticipation was fuelled by the release of details from the plot, in particular that someone was going to die. Rowling rather unfairly plays with the knowledge, parading candidates for the role in front of the reader, and I found the part of the plot relating to this a disappointment. It would have worked much better to have the death of a major character as a surprise.

Overall, though, I did end up feeling that The Order of the Phoenix isn't up to the standard set by the earlier novels. If felt too long, and the writing seemed tired, particularly when repeating elements which had already appeared (such as descriptions of lessons). It would be a brave editor who suggests changes to as big a name as Rowling, but the novel would almost certainly have benefited if someone had done so, even though it would have been even more delayed.

Carol Shields: Unless (2002)

Edition: Fourth Estate, 2002
Review number: 1177

I have started several of last year's Booker Prize short-listed novels, but this is the first which I have felt a desire to read more than the first few pages. (I have not yet attempted Yaan Martel's Life of Pi, the winner.) The ones I put aside seemed no more than pale imitations of other writers, notably V.S. Naipaul, while Unless was able to speak to me with a voice of its own almost immediately. This is precisely why I was looking out for the half dozen short listed novels, in the hope of finding something new to enjoy. I read Unless and wrote this review before hearing of Shields' death; it made me feel that I had discovered her only just in time.

Every parent knows that eventually their child will leave them for a life of their own. For Reta Winters, middle aged author and narrator of Unless, the departure of her eldest daughter Norah has been more sudden, unusual and traumatic than most. For Norah has dropped out of life almost entirely, leaving her university course and boyfriend as well as her family to spend her days sitting on a street corner with a sign on her lap bearing the single word "GOODNESS". She won't talk to her family about her reasons for doing this, so they are left to speculate about what has gone wrong (something which comes fairly easily to the rather self-absorbed Reta) and what, if anything, can be done.

Unless is set in Toronto, something which (as Reta at one point remarks) is no longer expected to limit the market for a novel, and I was occasionally reminded of another first person narrative set in the city, Margaret Atwood's Catseye. Though both also share a feminist outlook (for some time Reta is convinced that Norah's withdrawal from the world is caused by a realisation that as a woman she won't ever get as good a deal from the world as an otherwise similar man.) Nevertheless is not as hard-edged as Atwood's writing, though it does have something of a similar air (possibly a consequence of the location and feminist sympathy already mentioned). Something which is different is that Atwood's style has the intention of convincing the reader of the sincerity of the narrator, while Sheilds makes you think that Reta manages to manifest contradictory emotions, as serene and self-observing prose proclaims violent distress and overwhelming concern for another. Nobody, of course, is completely consistent, and the contrast is obviously partly a coping strategy and partly due to guilt over her role in Norah's withdrawal, whatever that might be.

Unless has one feature which is extremely unusual. The headings of the chapters, like the novel's overall title, are single words, all prepositions and conjunctions rather than the nouns and verbs which would usually fill such a role. For me, this has the effect of giving the narrative a wistful note, though I'm not at all sure why this is. The novel generally feels similar to one of my other favourites of recent years, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. Unless is magical to read - and makes me intrigued as to what The Life of Pi must have in order to have persuaded the Booker judges to choose it rather than this novel as the winner.

Richard Adams: Watership Down (1972)

Edition: Puffin, 1974 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1088

There are very few animal stories which have become classics. The examples I can think of are all books originally aimed at children: Beatrix Potter, Black Beauty, The Wind in the Willows, and Watership Down. These are a much loved part of many childhoods, and are frequently still treasured by adults. Even within this small collection, though, Watership Down is unique.

The novel is the story of a small group of rabbits, who leave an established South Downs warren because of a prophecy that it will be destroyed. They set out to create a new warren, for which they need a suitable location and some does to supplement their all male group, but while they travel they face constant danger. These dangers do not all come from human beings or the many predators which think of a rabbit as a good meal. There is the strange warren which has a culture alien to that of most of the species, where a kind of art is developing in response to unusual pressures on the rabbits, kept safe from most dangers and well fed but culled by the local farmer. Then there is the military dictatorship of Efrafa, antagonistic to the idea of the emigration of some of its does despite overcrowding.

Compared to the other stories I've mentioned, Watership Down is aimed at older readers and is now published as a novel for adults rather than children. There is a lot more depth to it than the others; their animals are generally furry human beings, with little attention paid to their actual lifestyles. (Black Beauty is perhaps the next most realistic in these terms, though its picture of the life of the carriage horse is rather romanticised.) Clearly, this kind of novel would be impossible without some kind of anthropomorphism, but Adams weaves this in brilliantly with a lapine culture derived from careful research and enriched by the stories about El-ahrairah, the rabbit folk hero he invented. More blatant anthropomorphisms - the art of Cowslip's warren, the fascist dictatorship of Efrafa - are condemned by the central characters as unnatural.

A common link between these classic animal stories is their celebration of the English countryside. The downs are a beautiful part of southern England, and Adams shows a different side to them as they are depicted on a rabbit sized scale and with occasional reminders that the senses of the animals are of differing sensitivities to our own.

The background is less important than the characterisation, and in this respect Adams is more like Kenneth Grahame than the authors of the other books. He makes the rabbits individuals, particularly Hazel, Bigwig and Fiver. As an adventure story it would be a classic, but adding the resonances of the rabbits' adventures to human culture - making the reader think about the origins of art, or the reasons why totalitarian regimes are accepted - is is one of the great novels of the twentieth century.

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit (1937)

Subtitle: There and Back Again
Edition: Unwin, 1966
Review number: 1032

From the years of obsessive work defining the geography, peoples and history of Middle Earth, Tolkien created a story for his children. It has become one of the most popular and best loved novels of the twentieth century, alongside the sequel, the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Far more accessible than the trilogy (and massively more than The Silmarillion, his other major completed Middle Earth novel), The Hobbit is an excellent introduction to Tolkien even for an adult, and is the one book of his where those things which irritate his detractors are almost entirely absent.

The story is quite well described by Tolkien's rather dismissive subtitle. A hobbit is a creature invented by Tolkien (almost everything else in Middle Earth is derived from sources in folklore), who is basically a type of Englishman the author particularly admired. (I say "man" advisedly; women play small part in Tolkien's writing, and The Hobbit does not have a single female character, except possibly some of the spiders.) While revelling in the comforts of his home, the hobbit Bilbo Baggins proves brave and resourceful when chosen by the wizard Gandalf to accompany thirteen dwarves on a quest to recover the treasure hoarded by the dragon Smaug in the caves under the Lonely Mountain far to the east, a one-time dwarvish stronghold.

Without The Hobbit, it would be easy to accuse Tolkien of lacking a sense of humour. While I do feel that he took his creation of Middle Earth too seriously, this novel is amusing. Even the interpolated poetry, usually rather poor and one of Tolkien's direst legacies to the genre, is not just humourous but self-deprecating - Tolkien was far better at writing verse which seems to be doggerel made up on the spot than at imitating oral tradition epics.

The enormous, obsessively documented background of Middle Earth makes the The Hobbit read like an episode in a larger history. Of course, with the discovery of the ring it is this, and much of the history is made explicit in The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit gains atmosphere from having it, but also by leaving it unexplained. Although a children's book at heart, it is to me Tolkien's most successful novel.

J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000)

Edition: Bloomsbury, 2000
Review number: 972

The fourth Harry Potter novel, about as long as the other three put together, continues to match his increasing age by becoming more adult. A lot of The Goblet of Fire covers what is by now familiar territory; it begins with the summer holidays, and goes on to describe a school year, with elements such as the unpleasant Dursleys and Harry's fluctuating popularity at Hogwarts repeated from earlier novels. The main plot is about a competition between champions of the three schools of magic, in which Harry is entered even though below the age limit by an enemy who put his name in the magic implement which chooses the champion (the goblet of the title) in the name of a non-existent school, hoping to use the opportunity of the contest to harm Harry in the cause of dark wizard Voldemort.

There are some quite subtle differences, part of Harry's growing maturity. For example, his relationship with the Dursley's has been changing ever since he first went to Hogwarts, and now they are almost frightened of him and his friends. The changes which gained most publicity when the novel was first published, the handling of awakening sexuality and the additional seriousness brought by the death of a Hogwarts student, are more obvious, as is the increasing use of the techniques of the horror writer which begins with the introduction of the Dementors in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and which is continued in the chilling first chapter here.

Does the way that the series is developing make the fourth Harry Potter novel better than the first? The fact that it continues to grab the reader all the way through - to the extent that I stayed up all night reading it - is testimony to Rowlings' technical maturity. Like all the best children's books, the series has always included subtleties aimed at adult readers, but I suspect that younger fans are likely to find aspects of The Goblet of Fire offputting. It certainly lacks some of the freshness of The Philosopher's Stone, and is far less humorous and exciting than the other novels. On balance, I probably enjoyed it less than its predecessors but admire it as an achievement, even if I wouldn't go so far as to say that it was as good a piece of fantasy as the Hugo award it has received implies. It is also not difficult to see why Rowling is taking longer than expected over the fifth novel, especially as she cannot really allow it to get any longer this time.

Ursula K. le Guin: Tehanu (1990)

Edition: Bantam, 1991
Review number: 902

It is rare for a sequel written many years later to match up with a famous original, and Tehanu is not an exception to this rule. In time it follows on immediately from the end of The Farthest Shore, and it continues the story of Tenar, one-time priestess of the Nameless Ones in The Tombs of Atuan. Rejecting the fame she could have had, she married a farmer from the island of Gont, birthplace of Sparrowhawk, the central character of all the Earthsea books. She is now a widow whose grown up children have left home, and she takes in a small girl, victim of extreme abuse - rescued from a fire in which she was put by her father, she is terribly scarred.

Tehanu is much more aimed at adults than the original trilogy, even if they had a dark side which would make them unsuitable for younger children. Its intended audience is probably those who, like myself, had enjoyed the first three novels at the appropriate age and who had grown up by the time Tehanu came out. Even so, it is a disappointment.

Rudyard Kipling: Rewards and Fairies (1910)

Edition: Wordsworth, 1995 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 899

While Rewards and Fairies is a sequel to Puck of Pook's Hill, it is probably much better known as the original home of Kipling's most famous poem, If -. Myself, I don't like the poem very much - it's too much the sort of "uplifting" thing children used to be forced to learn in school.

The format is identical to that of its predecessor, as Puck introduces the two children to a series of people - all male - who illustrate the history of Sussex, where Kipling himself lived in the latter part of his life. The tales this time, which range back right to the end of the Bronze Age, are not so interesting, and the collection as a whole has a perfunctory feel, as though Kipling doesn't care.

Ursula K. le Guin: The Farthest Shore (1973)

Edition: Puffin, 1974
Review number: 883

The third, and for many years, final, volume of le Guin's Earthsea series is again a bleak novel. It is more explicitly about death than the earlier two - that is what the title refers to - though it is treated in a less personal way here and so The Farthest Shore may be a novel suitable for younger children than The Tombs of Atuan.

Sparrowhawk is now an old man by Earthsea standards (about fifty), and is Archmage of the wizard's isle of Roke. There, the wizards begin to hear rumours from the farthest reaches of Earthsea that magic is ceasing to work. A prince from the West Reach comes with a definite message to this effect, and Sparrowhawk sets off with him on a quest to find out what is happening.

This turns out to be, in fact, people giving up their power for a promise of eternal life. The life they then have is only a pale reflection of real living, and brings a grey world without emotion or joy - or magic. It is possible that there is a subtext here about the way in which Puritan Christianity suppressed the practice of magic, but this may be reading rather too much into le Guin's writing.

While The Farthest Shore was a satisfying conclusion to the series when it was a trilogy, the first two novels are more memorable; the characters of A Wizard of Earthsea and the setting of The Tombs of Atuan make each of these books stick in the mind. This is probably a reason behind the eventual composition of Tehanu, though that too has a lesser impact.

Rudyard Kipling: Stalky and Co. (1899)

Edition: Wordsworth, 1994
Review number: 882

Few of Kipling's fictional stories contain much of an autobiographical element, despite his frequent use of the first person. In this collection of stories, the school and some of the characters are based on his own experiences; Beetle, in particular, is a self portrait.

The Devon boarding school portrayed in the book is basically a factory for producing future officers of the British army to serve in the colonies, and is by modern standards a violent place, with bullying and savage corporal punishment. Yet Kipling's evident nostalgia for his time at the school infects the reader, who senses the intensity of the friendships and the enjoyment of the experiences, which mainly focus on triumphs over the more petty minded masters. The success of his treatment makes a modern reader quite uncomfortable, especially when he seems to have fond memories of bullying. The way that his schoolboys rebel against authority was controversial at the time, but much less so now. Times have changed.

The reader is also made aware, more deliberately, of a different dark undercurrent. Sprinkled throughout the stories are notes about the future deaths of the boys; they are destined to die young in the service of the British Empire. (One of them, interestingly, is going to be shot by his own men, a less glorified death than the others.) Kipling's point is presumably that the Empire was maintained at a human cost; despite his reputation as a jingoist, this is not the only place where he showed an awareness of this. Few today would deny that there was a human cost, though the focus has canged so that we would think about what it meant to the colonised rather than the coloniser.

Stalky and Co. is one of the most uncomfortable of Kipling's books to read, and this is a measure of the author's talent, as he glories in what is to us unpalatable and almost brings us to feel we appreciate it too.

Ursula K. le Guin: The Tombs of Atuan (1972)

Edition: Puffin, 1974
Review number: 860

Of the three novels making up the original Earthsea trilogy, The Tombs of Atuan is most obviously aimed at children. This is not so much because of its content (like the others, it's unusually dark for a children's story) but because of what might have been its content; if it had been written for adults, there are several areas which le Guin would probably have explored more thoroughly.

The central character of The Tombs of Atuan is a young girl, believed to be the reincarnation of the Priestess of the Tombs, a centre for the power of primordial dark spirits, the Nameless Ones. At the age of six, she is taken to the Temple where her name is ceremonially taken from her (names are of extreme importance in the trilogy), so that she becomes Arha, the Eaten One. After some years, she suddenly discovers that a man has broken into the Labyrinth beneath the Temple, the place where no one but her is permitted to go. This man is Sparrowhawk, the central character of the trilogy, who is searching for a lost magical item.

The depiction of the ritual of the Temple an the dark fear which is the general attitude to the Nameless Ones is an important part of the novel, and the former clearly owes something to anthropological descriptions of rituals and Jungian ideas about them. (Le Guin's father was an anthropologist.) It is all very convincing. This could have been more developed in an adult novel, whose readers would be less impatient to move on with the story. The political rivalry between the various priestesses is another area which could have been made more of; Arha is nominally most important, but the middle-aged High Priestess of the newer cult of the Godking is a more dominant personality, and it is her temple, of the deified ruler of the empire in which the island of Atuan is situated, which receives rich gifts and patronage.

The obsession which Arha feels about Sparrowhawk definitely seems to have a sexual side, the fascination of a young teenage girl for the first man she has seen since she was brought to the Temple except her eunuch slaves. This is hinted at quite clearly, but it is another aspect of the novel which might have been made more explicit if it had been aimed at adult readers. In fact, it is picked up in Tehanu, the novel later added to the trilogy, which is meant to be read by adults.

It is common for the middle volume in a trilogy to be the poorest; though this is true of The Tombs of Atuan it is not for the usual reasons (and is, of course, a judgement only relative to the others). Still an excellent young adult fantasy story, it could have formed the nucleus of a greater adult novel.