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Censorship

      In some states in the US, Rowling’s books have been withdrawn from school libraries because they’re deemed to romanticise the gothic and condone occultism. Some of her denouncers have even accused her of being responsible for children browsing the net in search of Satanic cults. A lady called Carol Rockwood, the head teacher at a Church of England Primary School in Chatham, Kent, also banished Rowling’s books from her library in 2000 because she believed that the ‘devils, demons and witches are real and pose the same threat as, say, a child molester’. There’s even ‘The Organisation of People Against Potter’ (TOOPAP), and in Austria a Harry Potter ‘hate line’ where critics work through their grievances by phone.

      Rowling’s own view is that we should censor the censors, not the books, which she sees as innocuous and therapeutic. She has never, she claims, met a child who wanted to be a witch or wizard after reading anything she wrote. ‘People find anything in a book if they wish,’ she claims.

      The Christian overtones of the books can also be seen in details like the children going home from Hogwarts for Christmas and Easter holidays, though such matters are handled in secular fashion. The snake symbol of the evil Slytherin House is also a Christian one. In much the same way as J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis incorporated Christian concepts into fantasy literature, Rowling also has this subtext. Her work is really about moral choices, the ones we all face as we try to negotiate our way through grey areas. The fact that these issues are couched in mythical contexts does nothing to detract from their didactic nature.

      What Rowling is basically saying is that we can be masters of our destiny even against apparently insuperable odds. If we think about boggarts, or the Mirror of Erised, what they share in common, despite superficial differences, is that we can influence what we see in the mirror, or what shape the boggart takes on. One encapsulates our desires and the other our fears. To this extent, they’re corollaries of each other. Harry learns to assert himself over his fate, and to this extent the books are actually old-fashioned. As Edmund Kern writes in The Wisdom of Harry Potter (Prometheus Books),‘If children reading the books grow up to be greedy consumers, intolerant chauvinists or dabblers in malevolent witchcraft, they will not do so because of what they read in Harry’s adventures.’

      Neither does the violence in the novels lead to violence in the real world because it’s so obviously fantasy-driven. In the main what Rowling is writing are so many allegories of the primeval battle between good and evil.

      In North Carolina some years ago, however, a young girl jumped off a kitchen table with a broomstick, imagining she would be able to fly after reading The Philosopher’s Stone. She wasn’t seriously injured but critics of Rowling use anecdotes like these as sticks to beat her with. Pursuing such an analogy would lead to calls to ban Superman comics for fear their readers would try to jump off buildings and fly as a result, or calls to censor C S Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia because they feature astrology. Rowling has emphasised that her ambition was to make wizardry not fearful, but fun. She wanted to demythologise and domesticate an erstwhile eerie genre. She has, in effect, created Harry in Wonderland.

      Her books encourage noble behaviour, and if Harry occasionally breaks rules or tells lies, that’s no reason to undermine Rowling’s overall ambition. She’s merely trying to make him into a three-dimensional character. Everyone, from Huckleberry Finn to Holden Caulfield, the narrator of The Catcher in the Rye, has in their way shunned convention to find their identity. Rowling isn’t condoning rebellion. She’s merely telling us we shouldn’t be sheep—especially if we live in a spider-infested cupboard at Number 4, Privet Drive.

       Centaurs

      These creatures, which are half man and half horse, appear in The Philosopher’s Stone as friends of Hagrid. Their names are Ronan and Bane. See also Firenze.

       Chang, Cho

      Harry develops a crush on this pretty Seeker for the Ravenclaw Quidditch team and as a result asks her to accompany him to the Yule Ball—though she turns him down for Cedric Diggory, foolish lass. After Diggory is killed she and Harry become an item, as they say, but Cho is threatened by the presence of Hermione. Cho gives Harry his first kiss in Order of the Phoenix. She’s an exotic character to be sure, but rather sketchily drawn and not too significant in the overall scheme of things.

       Charities

      Rowling is a generous patron of Edinburgh’s Maggie’s Centre, which helps cancer sufferers, as well as the National Council for One Parent Families, and the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Scotland. She’s never suffered from cancer but a close friend of hers did. Her mother died from multiple sclerosis, which devastated her, and she’s also a single mother, having had a child with Jorge Arantes.

       Chasers

      There are three of these on a Quidditch team. Harry’s father James Potter was one. Ability at this game clearly ran in the Potter family.

       Children

      Rowling says she prefers children rather than adults to interview her at book signings. They ask better questions, she believes. Who better to understand a child than a child?

       Children’s author

      The stand-up comedian Steven Wright tells this joke: ‘I wrote a few children’s books—not on purpose.’ For too long this genre has been the Cinderella of literature. In the same sense as children were once looked on as unformed adults, so children’s writing has inhabited a kind of limbo for authors who are perceived to be unsuccessful (or, as Mr Wright would have it, accidental) ‘adult’ writers. Rowling dislikes being called a children’s author as she feels her books can be equally appreciated by adults. An enormous number of adults agree. As Elizabeth Heilman writes in Harry Potter’s World (Routledge), as far back as 1998 adults were reading them ‘behind false grown-up covers’ to hide their secret addictions. (They’ve since come out of the closet because the books are now published in adult editions as well as children’s ones.)

      ‘I never saw myself as consciously writing for children,’ Rowling claims,‘but rather for myself.’ She adds that she doesn’t feel she has to write a quote unquote adult book to earn herself bona fide authorial chops. However, one gets the impression she has a sneaking wish to write a book (or many books) for adults in the future. Adult writers she admires are Nabokov and Roddy Doyle—particularly for Lolita and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, respectively. The latter book has marital disharmony as its theme—something Rowling can well identify with. Doyle has also written evocatively about childhood, especially in his Booker Prize-winning novel, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

       Chipping Sodbury

      Rowling was born in a village called Yate, close to Chipping Sodbury. The latter sounds much more exotic than Yate, so she generally tells interviewers it was here she came into the world. It was, she says, ‘a place that doomed me to a love of weird place names’.

       Chocolate frogs

      These delicacies are the delight of Hogwarts students, and carry the added attraction of coming with cards. Rowling says she likes food to be identified in books in great detail, and

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