It isn’t surprising at all that Harry Potter became a blockbuster and eventually a household name around the world. It handles every element that in a child’s adventure book must contain, not to say critical common places of western traditions. Reading the book you can easily come across dragons, three headed dogs, trolls, goblins, wizards and witches, castles, centaurs, etc. Most outstandingly, and it links to the Eurpean medieval tradition, it deals with the Philosopher’s Stone, of which it was said could turn people young again. In many ways, this book was a few years ahead of its time, but I’ll deal with this later on in this post.
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This is a neat, fresh easy to read narrative but full of content and richness in the language. Excellent reading for a child or a teenager. I could identify two major different locations for the book: Private Drive, the house where Harry Potter lives and was raised with his cousin, uncle and aunt and Hogwarts, the magic school. There are other secondary locations, like, for example, the island where Harry’s uncle decides to take his family to escape from Hagrid and wizardry, London magic hidden market and Gringotts bank as well as the forbidden forest, where centaurs and unicorns live.
In a nutshell, the story goes like this: a regular boy who lives with his uncle, aunt and cousin, an al alter ego of Cindirella, discovers, all of a sudden, that his is the son of a very famous witch and wizard couple who happen to have been killed by Voldemort, the evil wizard. Harry is summoned to attend Hogwarts, the school of magic. Once there, he goes through a number a vicissitudes. Harry has to play in a strange game called Quidditch and has to find out where the Philosopher’s Stone is, once he knows who is at his side and who’s against him. Along with him, there are other students at Hogwats like Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger.
I’m really not going to bore you out longer with the book’s plot, I just wanted to tell my readers, (if I happen to have any) a couple of anecdotes: I started reading this book and ended up watching the film because Paqui, the teacher in charge of our school library, suggested we should devote the Book Week at school in April to Harry Potter and I want to play a couple of scenes with my students. So I still have to choose the scenes, write the scripts and pick out the actors and actresses for the event.
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I read the book from my tablet, sometime between the months of November 2019 and January 2020. I bought my copy and read on the screen and wrote down notes on every character and situation. I thought it would be clearer to me if also had some visual feedback, so I also rented the film and watched in Spanish – I have to confess – and the last step I will take is to watch and select from Youtube the scenes I want to perform with the students.
Why is this book become so famous and important after over 20 years? One of the reasons, I would argue is: if you think of it, you don’t need an invisibility cloak now, because you can use drones with built-in cameras to watch what you want, you can search for a name on Google rather than browse through a whole library. You still can’t predict the future looking at a crystal ball, though and you can’t see your dead relatives in a mirror either. Of course we can’t fly on brooms for the time being, I’m afraid, but it’s not such a far fetched possibility. In conclusion, the book was written at the edge of impressive technological changes of our time and as Arthur C. Clarke said: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” and at that time, some of the book events were more magic than day-to-day routines.
My favourite quote of the book is: “… to the well-organised mind, death is but the next great adventure … ” Chapter 17 p 229. I looks like Mrs. Rowling believes in a world beyond after death. To end up with, I would like to emphasise that this a really thrilling book to boost up children and teenager’s enthusiasm towards reading. It’s thrilling, amusing and good enterainment.
I will keep you posted with our students’ performance of the novel at school next April. I’ll get to work as soon as I come back from my Christmas holidays.
Essaying English 