I found this news terribly sad, especially at this time of year. Terry Pratchett's books are- for me- synonymous with Christmas.

Since I was an older child/younger teenager I have without fail received the latest novel in the Discworldseries as a Christmas gift from my parents. A lot of people of whom I am fond- from Stephen Fry to mcgazz, sniff at Pratchett whilst harbouring fondnesses for other forms of fantasy/sci-fi. Still more sniff at the whole genre in general, or more specifically the kind of slightly mad fan base it engenders and nurtures. To the second charge I can only offer the old saw that, when thousands gather in absurd garb, sing songs and spend inordinate amounts of money for love of sport, society blesses it as healthy, heterosexual and normal; when thousands gather in absurd garb, sing songs and spend inordinate amounts of money for love of fiction, society stigmatises it as socially retarded, homosexual and weird. From any objective standpoint, is there any material difference between the "Statto"-style football bore and the Comic Book Guy? Of course not.

To the first and more knotty charge, I confess that Pratchett's books are hardly high art, but they exhibit a deeper, more compassionately humanistic outlook than, say, current hot potato/cold fish Philip Pullman's, a more inherently sceptical and believable school of magic and brand of witchcraft than JK Rowling's and a more internally consistent and sharply allegorical , or-more accurately-satirical, mode of writing than pretty much every other fantasy writer content to just throw in goblins for goblins' sake, from Tolkien through Gemmell.

And the man's a Carnegie Medal winner, which is not to be sneezed at. I also managed to get an A1 in Higher English based in no small measure on analysis of two of his novels, hard to do if they were just throw-away spoofs of the Bored of the Rings/Barry Trotter variety.

As Pratchett himself has pointed out, he was planning on dying anyway; the novels would not and could not last forever. What's distressing is not that the end of a thoroughly diverting, entertaining and -sometimes- thought provoking series will probably come sooner than was hoped. It's that such a prolific and sparky mind will now almost certainly be systematically dismantled by a thoroughly detestable and malignant disease that blights far too many, the existence of which refutes the idea of a benevolent creator more eloquently than any harmless tale of boy wizards, talking polar bears or walking pieces of Luggage ever could.

While highlighting the findings of the Progress In International Reading Literacy Study in yesterday's Sunday Herald, Joanna Blythman perpetuates anxieties that have been with us since the dawn of the post-war consumer age; each generation striving to make the lives of the next more comfortable, yet fretting over what might result from denying their offspring "character building" hardships, bordering on hysteria over the effects of the mass-media on child literacy, behaviour and health. In the fifties it was rock and roll and comic-books that took the wrap; a decade later psychedelia, later still punk; then the eighties rash of "video nasties"; today it's the games console and internet that are cited as the root cause of the happy-slapper, the 21st century juvenile delinquent. As ever, artists prove easier targets than the family (that hallowed institution, the benign veneer of which masks a multitude of sins).

While it is undeniable that English and Welsh children have slid down the literacy league table in question and that this slide coincides with a boom in digital media, drawing a line directly from one to the other (i.e. baldly stating that children read less because of computer games.) is the same kind of flawed reasoning that once led to suggestions that peanut butter caused criminality. Besides, it overlooks the facts that video-games and the internet frequently refer children back to the book shelf (via adaptations of prose), make books more readily available than ever (via Amazon, eBooks et al), offer opportunities to forge friendships over mutual love of fiction (via forums and chatrooms) and that the networking culture growing online depends utterly on the ability to read and write. Simply put, without literacy, the internet dies.

No, children aren't reading for pleasure because they don’t see their parents doing it, perhaps don’t see them at all, and one can assume it’s not Mario Galaxy that’s distracting mum and dad. Positive enforcement at home will do far more than any initiative foisted upon our over-worked and under-paid teachers, and is the only credible riposte to the louder, brasher charms of the games culture. Thank goodness Iain Bell was on hand to remind readers that an examination of our children's state of being can deliver nothing other than a verdict on our record as parents, and that those who are complacent enough to leave their little ones glued to the screen “for more than three hours a day” are just as guilty of neglect as those who’d permit their child unlimited access to the sweetie cupboard, the drinks cabinet or the keys to the tool shed.

I grew up in the eighties, a time when the child-centric censor’s bête noire was animated cartoons based upon brands of merchandise (Masters of the Universe et al). My brothers and I were exposed to hours upon hours of such thinly-disguised blandishments. Yet none of us are obese, illiterate or socially dysfunctional, despite being as fond of pleasure, as partial to the instant gratification of chocolate, toys and Happy Meals, as the next youngster. How did we escape our media-besieged childhood with minds and bodies unharmed?

Simple: our parents spoke to us, and when they did so we heard the word “No” more often than “Yes”. Pester-power is a myth; children will not ask for things, plead for things, scream and kick for things unless past experience shows such behaviours yield results. My brothers and I knew that is was foolish to ask for sweets outside the weekend, for toys at any time other than a birthday or Christmas. Such entreaties had not, would not and never did work. As long as today’s parents maintain their laissez-faire attitude to spending and debt, running themselves ragged spinelessly acquiescing to the whims of their bloated children* they will continue to cite their “time-poor” lives as the cause of their malaise, dumping blame at the feet of those third parties who sought only to educate or entertain but were left to raise their children. What is needed is not a change in the way we present books to the young (whose inherent love of narrative can be cultured, with perseverance, into a fondness for reading), but a revolution in how our society supports and values the time invested in them by their parents. We need to pull our heads out of the sand and rethink maternity and paternity leave, working hours, rates of pay and recreation. The only way to curtail the spread of the coach-potato kid is to help them avoid a future as coach-potato parents, not waste precious time trying to push the exponentially expanding digital genie back into its bottle.

*However, if this article is true, I have to question Nintendo's tactics; why blast the developed world with wall-to-wall advertising for a (relatively) inexpensive product you can only crank out to the tune of "two million a month"? What's the point of fiegning abundance on a product you either can't or won't release in adequate numbers than even come close to meeting demand? Won't the second such year of apparently orchestrated shortages inevitably inculcate a resentment toward Nintendo in general and the Wii in particular? I don't know, may be I'm missing something.

Lots of ink spilled over the boy wizard’s final bow this past weekend. Seems to be a love it or loathe it proposition, like all cult material. What struck me was the recurring refrain among the nay sayers, my own kin included, of “it’s only a book”, or more to the point, “it’s only a kids’ book.” Yeeees... So that precludes excitement?

Let me say right off the bat I’m not into JK Rowling’s writing. I tried once (Azkaban, I think), but found her prose more than a bit turgid and repetitive. I’ve enjoyed the last couple of films (the first two having been cack-handedly directed by Chris Columbus) but haven’t seen the very latest. By all accounts the more recent adaptations wisely dispensed with the less interesting sub-plots from the increasingly bloated novels. I used to have an excuse for seeing the Potter movies; children would ask me to draw the characters, the films defined their impression of them, hence that’s what I needed to be familiar with. But it’s been a couple of years since the last seven or eight year old made such a request. Nowadays it’s all about the Doctor Who.

Rowling- undeniably- knows how to address young people in terms that they understand and appreciate. If not these days, then certainly when her first book was published, such writers are rare animals. Potter is so successful now because a decade or so ago the author spoke, directly, to a generation of young people all but abandoned by the publishing industry. It’s interesting to look at the sales demographics; Waterstones estimate that very nearly half of the people who bought Hallows over the weekend are in their twenties or older. That makes the two points raised by my own experiences with workshop-goers crystal clear: those who read Potter from the start have stuck with it, despite the creeping realisation that much of it is indefensible; and it’s failed to a surprisingly large extent to bring in new fans. In other words, if you were there, and young, at the beginning then you fell in love with that world and can forgive it its manifold faults; if you weren’t, you’re forced to stand outside the bubble and only wonder why the hell people adore something so obviously and unrelentingly dopey (cf Star Wars etc).

Thus, it’s not really fair to dismiss Potter as kid lit because a) it demonstrably isn’t (not anymore), and b) even if it was, so what? It’d hardly be the first time a British writer found an audience across all ages with a story for children (cf Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, The Hobbit). Nor are the accusations of “lack of originality” entirely fair, since she’s working in a milieu where it’s virtually impossible to make a wholly original statement. Fantasy still labours under the shadow of JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which in itself echoes stories that are hard-wired into our collective consciousness. Such is the gravity of that trilogy that even those who set out to do no more than spoof it (e.g. Terry Pratchett, a man without whose output it’d be hard to imagine Rowling ever finding a publisher in the first place) end up getting sucked into the Tolkien model of intricate world-building. It’s worth remembering that Tolkien, a linguist, only wrote the books as a place in which to use the languages he’d invented; all his life he resisted any kind of allegorical or “deeper” reading to the books and deeply resented exactly the kind of obsessive behaviour that his densely layered fiction seemed to openly invite. The fact that goons dressed as elves sing “authentic” Middle-Earth hymns at his graveside every year would have the tweedy old buffer rising like a barrow-wight to smite them with his plus-ten mace…

But I digress. To me, the key to Rowling’s success is far less to do with any fantasy element (more of which later) and more down to her romanticised account of the public school system, particularly the English public school system. For all the attempts of Scots (including my own group of colleagues) to claim Rowling and her creation for Scotland, there’s really no denying the over-whelming Englishness of the stories. Admittedly, it’s a caricatured Blighty. Here all schoolkids are either good eggs or rotters, cheeky middle class kids can tell honest working class men what to do without fear of reprisal, everything stops for tea, including the cricket/quidditch, and the whole world clicks and whirls to the archaic rhythm of the Eton/Oxbridge calendar, threatened only occasionally by cads, bounders and traitors from the shadows. This is the foggy, fusty, ghost-strewn England of Arthur Conan Doyle (a true product of Scotland!), Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming, not Martin Amis, Will Self or Zadie Smith. Crucially, much of the world, and America in particular, believes that’s the England that actually exists. All that “Ten house points for Hufflepuff!” stuff might be anathema to anyone with an ounce of socialist blood in their veins, but it’s ambrosia to a true-blue establishment type (be they Royalist or Republican).

How else to account for Stephen Fry’s love of the books? Time again this rigorously secular man (anti-astrology, spiritualism, homeopathy etc) has attacked “weak-minded fantasy” (the afore-mentioned Pratchett’s a favourite target). Yet so much does he enjoy Rowling’s fiction that he’s perfectly willing to become- if you’re a visually impaired fan or, perhaps, a long-distance lorry driver- your probable personification of Potter. Rowling is surely as guilty of the painfully transparent ciphers (Professor Lupin’s a werewolf?! A woman named Umbridge is unpleasant?!), cloying neologisms and breathless hyperbole that annoy so many who loathe fantasy. Worse, she’s often criminally self-indulgent (example: just as Rowling started to become a celebrity in her own right, and her personal life scrutinised as a result, Harry and friends are forced to contend with a venomous tabloid hack for pages on end). All these sins seem to be forgiven thanks to her loving descriptions of communal meals, dormitories, sporting competitions, letters form home, teachers-as-surrogate parents and every other old saw from the pages of Billy Bunter and the rest.

To be clear, I don’t think Rowling deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as any of the writers I’ve name-checked or alluded to above (okay, she’s better than Frank Richards ;-)). I’ll go further: she’s yet to make an unequivocal display of both children’s fantasy and adult fiction like Robert Louis Stevenson and her canon is at once too bloated to bear comparison to the elegance of Lewis Carrol and too specific to stand against the dazzling variety and proficiency of Roald Dahl. And I’m not even convinced, as many of her defenders do, that she’s “introduced kids to the magic of reading”. My instinct tells me bookish kids read other stuff before breaching Potter.

What I think Rowling does deserve credit for is playing a big part in releasing the dull stranglehold that drippy cyber-punk scifi had on popular fiction in the late nineties. The apparent inability to present any kind of fantastic story elements without tacking on a cod-scientific explanation had taken root in the work of Philip K.Dick and his emulators, flowered into the StarTrek revival and the X-Files ufology boom, and reached its apotheosis with The Matrix (interesting to watch the Wachowski’s completely fudge their hard scifi premise with scads of pseudo-mystic bollocks in their post-Potter Matrix sequels).

The obvious legacy of Rowling’s success is renewed mainstream interest in all past fantasy, from Tolkein and CS Lewis through Ursula Le Guin, and publishers in search of the next big thing’s willingness to try untested, large-scale ideas from the minds of childrens’ authors (Lemony Snicket, Philip Pullman et al). The less obvious one is a tendency in all media to re-embrace the broadly, un-self-consciously fantastical; I don’t think I’m wrong in saying the reason today’s eight year old kids know a Dalek from a Cyberman is Harry Potter.