The obligatory Harry Potter post

(Originally published on 22nd July 2007)

So, Harry Potter. It's all over. The boy has become a man. Marvellous.

This isn't going to be a rant about Harry Potter. I'm not a fan - I have the read the first of them, as I felt it my duty as bookmonger, and was reminded of the pleasure I got from Roald Dahl as a child - but I'm happy enough for people, young and old, to enjoy them. In a way, I wish I were a fan, getting caught up in the all the anticipation, excitement and attendant persiflage.

But the Harry Potter phenomenon does concern me. And I think it's because it's become so much more than a way to show people what wonder can be found in the humblest of bookshops. Now anyone can, and apparently does, flog Harry Potter, even shops that don't normally stock books. Last Friday night certain clothes shops adjacent to bookshops dressed their staff up in all manner of thaumaturgical regalia to tap into the craze.

So I think what worries me is that people drawn to reading Harry Potter are going to expect this sort of glamour to attend the book trade generally. Hollywood tries to turn all its products into a relentless cavalcade of stars and CGI, all sound and fury signifying nothing, while the independent film industry continues its lonely decline, so it'll all be about making each release into an event. A film's success is determined in its first weekend's ticket sales.

The book industry is trying to ape that sort of business model, making authors, especially the media-savvy and photogenic, into stars, with the result that the general public's critical abilities are those which will suffice for 'watercooler' autopsies. But Harry Potter is a one-off. Anyone waiting for this kind of hullabaloo to show them what to read next isn't going to buying books again any time soon.

Back in January, when Stef Penney won the Costa Book of the Year (next year awarded alongside the Monster Munch Award for Contemporary Architecture), books made one of their occasional forays beyond the review supplements and into the news pages. But most journalists just wrote about Penney's agoraphobia and the supposed incongruity of this condition with her writing about the wilds of Canada, it not apparently occurring to any of them that having an imagination tends to be very much part of the job spec when it comes to writing fiction.

Reviews, sometimes even in the Sunday broadsheets, are often no more than a description of the plot. (I’d like to make an honourable mention here of Claire Allfree, who reviews for Metro, a publication not normally associated with intellect and insight; but both are abundant in the two and a half inches the newspaper is prepared to give her in lieu of more mobile phone ads and text messages from idiots.) It’s no wonder John Banville’s masterly Booker winner, The Sea, has sold so poorly in comparison with more prosaic winners, when nothing happens until 20 pages from the end, but after 80,000 words pieced together with such rare beauty. There are distressingly few of us who feel aggrieved that Jim Crace, England’s most stylish novelist, is not paraded through the streets of his home city of Birmingham in a streamer-festooned, open-top bus every time he publishes a new book.

Last week I was interviewed by a journalist from The Los Angeles Times about the then imminent Potter: she said she knew the films but not the books! They had no book readers up to the task? Books seem to have become a niche interest, a novelty, a hobby for the socially retiring. (The same day I also appeared on Al-Jazeera, in a piece on Alastair Campbell's diaries; my mother is now convinced I'm a prime terrorist target.)

There will always be word-of-mouth titles which skew the market - A Year in Provence, A Brief History of Time, Captain Corelli's Lousy Rotten Stinking Mandolin - and names, even at the literary end of the spectrum, who shift books no matter the quality of their latest (yes, I do mean you, Ian McEwan and Sebastian Faulks). And then of course there's The Da Vinci Code.

Now, anyone who's ever read a line of Nabokov or Conrad or Walcott will be able to tell from reading a single sentence from The Da Vinci Code that the publishers have made flesh the philosophical exercise involving an infinite number of monkeys and a similar number of typewriters (and no copy editors). The language in that book is so excruciatingly poor that the manuscript ought to have been so scored with blue pencil by its editor that one might have wondered if a young Picasso had been doodling on it. I'm sure the story is gripping, but one man's page-turner is this man's stomach-turner.

This total lack of analytical skills is why The Lord of the Rings gets voted the best book of all time, why students quote from Wikipedia in their essays, why the media's coverage of any political issue or scientific development is reported such starkly black and white terms that any debate is reduced to mindless sloganeering.

So, I hope all those waiting for Harry savoured every last word, but I hope that that you’ll pick up something that needs a bit of engagement some time soon. It doesn't matter that people read trash or watch trash or eat trash; it does matter when our minds, our palates, our expectations become so dulled that we don't want anything more, that we can’t even recognise something with real value, something worth treasuring.

I address that last adjuration to all those fans of G P Taylor, Jennifer Donnelly, Meg Rosoff, Philip Pullman and all the other children’s authors whom publishers are pushing on readers scared to pick up anything not first vetted by Richard & Judy. And that includes all of you out there who made The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time into a word-of-mouth bestseller and even voted it as a 'Vintage Future Classic'. Let's not be coy here: it may shed light on a previously relatively unreported condition, but it's a children's book. If you found the plot satisfying, then you have a reading age of nine and almost certainly read the book with a supply of Cheesestrings and Sunny D within easy reach.