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.