What accounts for the phenomenal success of the children's Harry Potter books - especially among adults?
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Since the Harry Potter books first appeared four years ago, over 74 million copies have been sold worldwide. The latest, The Goblet of Fire, sold 833,000 hardback copies between July and early November 2000. The first, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, is being made into a blockbuster film, and enjoyed an unprecedented eight-hour reading on BBC Radio 4 on Boxing Day 2000.
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So far as children go, much of Harry Potter's success can be put down to an effective marketing strategy. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone challenged most publishers' assumptions about what children read: especially its setting in a boarding school (seen to be old-fashioned and irrelevant to the modern child), the length of the book and the higher level of vocabulary. Bloomsbury publishers took on the first Harry Potter after major children's publishers had rejected it, and its marketing department took up the challenge.
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That people were so surprised by the fact that children evidently enjoyed a long book about a boy whose experiences were (on the surface of it) alien to their own, perhaps says more about our expectations of children than about children's actual reading habits. The ongoing popularity of classics like CS Lewis' Narnia tales suggests that children are not totally satisfied by short stories using a limited vocabulary and directly reflecting their own experiences. It is to Bloomsbury's credit that they saw this and acted on it.
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It is not hard to see why children like the Harry Potter books. What is less obvious is why adults have made so much of them.
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It is the much-discussed appeal of Harry Potter to adult readers that has helped to keep the books high on the bestseller lists and in the headlines. Again, that parents are enthusiastic about Harry Potter is understandable. As I know from reading to my niece, a good children's book can only make bedtime reading a more enjoyable experience all around; and if the stories are gripping enough, tired parents will often keep turning the pages after switching their children's lights out.
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But please - adults who have nothing to do with children? Commuters absorbed in The Goblet of Fire, earnest debates over The Philosopher's Stone at grown-up dinner parties - what's that all about?
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Spotting the adult market for Harry Potter, Bloomsbury published the books with more 'grown up' covers so nobody need feel embarrassed reading the book on the London Underground. It need not have gone to the expense. Many adults these days do not seem at all bothered by the idea of seeming childlike - they even revel in it.
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However much people worry about the state of kids today, adults increasingly seem to want to retreat to that state themselves, rediscovering their childhood innocence, openness and playfulness - or something. Many adults like to use children's toys to get about (scooters), play children's games (Playstation) and watch films and TV for children (Toy Story, The Tweenies). Through reading the Harry Potter series, it would seem many want to enter children's imaginary fantasy lands, too. It is significant that grown-ups do not read (for themselves) those children's books that deal with 'real life' issues: sex, drugs, bullying and that other worthy gritty realism stuff.
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In attempting to account for Harry Potter's success, debate has raged over the content of the books. Some have hailed them as new classics, with their roots deep in the rich traditions of children's literature, and others condemned them as superficial and derivative. In my view they are reasonably enjoyable to read, pacy and humorous, with a few surprises; but the characters, especially the evil ones, tend to be caricatured and superficial, and the plots, despite a few twists and turns, are fairly predictable.
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But whatever the quality of the literature, this certainly does not account for the appeal of the Potter books. Ultimately, they are pure escapism - and that's what has worked for adults.
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The battle between good and evil, and the certainty that all will turn out right in the end (just like any Hollywood blockbuster that we escape to on a Saturday night), has its own appeal. But the main characters in the Potter books are children, and the adults are mostly stupid or evil. In identifying with these child protagonists, you could see adults' enthusiasm for the Harry Potter books as reflecting a rejection of the grown-up world, where things are complicated and don't all turn out right in the end, where adults do bad things and get away with it, and where nothing seems certain.
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It is not only in fiction that more and more adults seem to want to escape from this reality, rather than get to grips with it. And I can't see this leading to a happy ending.
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