For me, the real significance of Harry Potter is not the muggle / wizard divide, but (as you hint in your use of the phrase "old enough to know better") the fact that suddenly it became respectable for grown men and women to read children's books in public. I was nineteen in 1997 and in my early 20s as the rest of the series emerged; I was astonished when friends of my age devoured the books as if they were still eleven years old.
I would compare the far better written Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper. Its five component novels were published a generation or so earlier (the first book, Over Sea, Under Stone, came out in 1965; the other four emerged in quick succession between 1973 and 1977). The Dark is Rising is also basically about the "muggle / wizard divide", so to speak (indeed, Cooper's hero Will Stanton also discovers he has magic powers at the age of 11)... the point being that, regardless of the zeitgeist, "atypical" heroes are dramatically interesting.
The Dark is Rising contains some really quite challenging material for children of a similar age to its hero. The treatment of the character of Hawkin (in the second book, which lent its name to the sequence as a whole) is genuinely disturbing, and Cooper's psychologically precise exploration of his sense of having been betrayed and its consequences is worthy of a grown-up novel. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that grown-ups in the 1970s didn't read these books (except to their own children); they understood that even the best childrens' literature should be treated as a rite of passage, as a gateway into serious fiction written for adults.
Succinctly put, the basic problem with post 1997-literary culture is not that people start out reading Harry Potter, but that they don't end up reading Henry James.
I think the 2012 Olympic ceremony had its moments, there was enough Queen & Bond & Mr Bean, and the ceremony that culminated with the Olympic fire, with that beautiful eerie song, was pretty powerful & I was proud of it. The NHS stuff was baffling, but if you want a sign of how far we have fallen, imagine what a 2022 London Olympic opening ceremony would look like - the New Years Eve London fireworks last night, I guess courtesy of New Labour man Sadiq Kahn, were like a parody of the woke movement.
What a brilliant essay, Ed. I loved your book, "Small Men on the Wrong Side of History", and your insights in this piece are equally as good. Even though I was a communist at the time (I know, sorry!) I voted for New Labour.... Little did I know that it wasn't that far from Gramsci-ism in the end at all...
Alan Clarke and Nick Fairburn as exemplars is a stretch….they were (barely) tolerated, it is true , but both were loathed. This visceral loathing being a harbinger of our own glorious time. Max Hastings, supposedly of the right, was vicious (in a wanky, bien pensent way we’ve also become too familiar with) about Clark in ‘Editor’ and, of course, he appalled ‘islington’. I doubt Clark would have been elected in Kensington if it hadn’t been for his diaries and the tv documentary “love Tory’. He was worth a guinea a minute as an entertainer but was a social and political anomaly. My point is that the rot was already well established…..the hyper mawkish Diana nonsense didn’t come out of nowhere.
Good stuff, Ed. As a rather severe Anglophile I really should visit the UK some day.
For me, the real significance of Harry Potter is not the muggle / wizard divide, but (as you hint in your use of the phrase "old enough to know better") the fact that suddenly it became respectable for grown men and women to read children's books in public. I was nineteen in 1997 and in my early 20s as the rest of the series emerged; I was astonished when friends of my age devoured the books as if they were still eleven years old.
I would compare the far better written Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper. Its five component novels were published a generation or so earlier (the first book, Over Sea, Under Stone, came out in 1965; the other four emerged in quick succession between 1973 and 1977). The Dark is Rising is also basically about the "muggle / wizard divide", so to speak (indeed, Cooper's hero Will Stanton also discovers he has magic powers at the age of 11)... the point being that, regardless of the zeitgeist, "atypical" heroes are dramatically interesting.
The Dark is Rising contains some really quite challenging material for children of a similar age to its hero. The treatment of the character of Hawkin (in the second book, which lent its name to the sequence as a whole) is genuinely disturbing, and Cooper's psychologically precise exploration of his sense of having been betrayed and its consequences is worthy of a grown-up novel. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that grown-ups in the 1970s didn't read these books (except to their own children); they understood that even the best childrens' literature should be treated as a rite of passage, as a gateway into serious fiction written for adults.
Succinctly put, the basic problem with post 1997-literary culture is not that people start out reading Harry Potter, but that they don't end up reading Henry James.
I think the 2012 Olympic ceremony had its moments, there was enough Queen & Bond & Mr Bean, and the ceremony that culminated with the Olympic fire, with that beautiful eerie song, was pretty powerful & I was proud of it. The NHS stuff was baffling, but if you want a sign of how far we have fallen, imagine what a 2022 London Olympic opening ceremony would look like - the New Years Eve London fireworks last night, I guess courtesy of New Labour man Sadiq Kahn, were like a parody of the woke movement.
What a brilliant essay, Ed. I loved your book, "Small Men on the Wrong Side of History", and your insights in this piece are equally as good. Even though I was a communist at the time (I know, sorry!) I voted for New Labour.... Little did I know that it wasn't that far from Gramsci-ism in the end at all...
Alan Clarke and Nick Fairburn as exemplars is a stretch….they were (barely) tolerated, it is true , but both were loathed. This visceral loathing being a harbinger of our own glorious time. Max Hastings, supposedly of the right, was vicious (in a wanky, bien pensent way we’ve also become too familiar with) about Clark in ‘Editor’ and, of course, he appalled ‘islington’. I doubt Clark would have been elected in Kensington if it hadn’t been for his diaries and the tv documentary “love Tory’. He was worth a guinea a minute as an entertainer but was a social and political anomaly. My point is that the rot was already well established…..the hyper mawkish Diana nonsense didn’t come out of nowhere.