I’m trying to be as fair as I can – and I do think the books are interesting – but I’m starting to suspect that the moral universe of the books is another bit of furniture that she’s not particularly interested in.

And she avoids using the Christian moral framework of Voldemort threatening free will.

It is as if she has never read Ursula le guin or c s lewis.

I take the point about the books not being school stories, but I still think the Hogwarts setting is unusually thin. I’m pretty sure both Bunter and Stalky and Co have more of the kind of texture I’m thinking of – the sort of “Moppers finished early, so the lads went out to tweak some third-year spugs” stuff that Tomkinson’s Schooldays parodied so well. Apart from anything else, that’s what school’s like. My son rang home the other day scrounging a lift – “it’s after four now, so I’ll have to wait in Paton’s”. In what?

My theory – which didn’t quite make it into the post – is that the weirdness and exuberance of most school stories, which you know is the product of a child’s imagination working on a pretty mundane reality, has somehow been inverted or projected outwards in the Hogwarts setting: Harry isn’t making anything up, the setting really is weird and exuberant (the meals really are extraordinary; the teachers really are, well, freaks). Perhaps something similar’s happened between molesworth’s version of Latin (“tot quot, clot”) and the language of Hogwarts magic?

Andy – good point about the moral universe. Rowling can’t seem to decide whether Voldemort has had any effect on the realMuggle world, and if so what.

Never understood the hype.

The problem I have with Rowling is the moral relativism, I have been unable to work out what makes Voldemort evil, and what makes Dumbeldore good. I think it is becasue Rowling fails to establish her own moral and ethical framework of what the war with Voldemort is about that the plots become so rambling in the later books.

While I general I agree about Rowling;s tin ear, I must confess that the moment at which I decided that I was going to stick with these books was on the train journey to Hogwarts, when Ron is attempting to give Scabbers a makeover:

Sunshine, daisies, butter mellow,
Turn this stupid fat rat yellow.

Which is actually rather nicely constructed, but more to the point has real rhythm. Her ear can be OK sometimes.

Interesting that you compare her treatmenmt of Hogwarts as a school to Buckeridge and Willans. First of all I consider Willans to have been a one-off, in a class by himself. He zoomed in on the minutiae of public-school life to a greater extent than any other writer I know (even Compton Mackenzie, who had an awesome memory for that kind of thing and replayed his time at St Paul’s in a number of novels). He also had the ability to take seemingly trivial detail and spin it into a something gloriously surreal (like his description of the school piano, which make me fall about with laughter every single time I read it, or the cartoons – I know they were by Searle, but I assume the subject matter was Willans’s – of The Private Life Of the Gerund. So I don’t think it’s fair to compare Willans to any other “school story” writer: he didn’t write school stories, he created a school.

The comparison with Buckeridge is fair enough. It sets the bar pretty high, but no harm in that. As far as HPATPS is concerned your criticsm there is valid, though some more Jenning-like episodes are ahead (I’m thinking of the forbidden trip to Hogsmeade in HPATPOA, which brings to mind Jennings and Darbishire hiding from Mr Carter on the bus). The general; strangeness of arrival at a new school isn’t as well done by Rowling as by Buckeridge, but then if she had spent more time on it HPATPS might have been as long as her more recent tomes.

Once I started thinking of school story comparisons it was Michal Kendrick’s “Ozzy of Overstone” and Ozzy The Wiz” that came to mind for me. As Arthur C Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and Ozzy is the purveyor of a very advanced technology indeed, putting him firmly in the wish-fulfilment camp. But there too, In “Ozzy The Wiz” the school simply provides a matrix for the technology-based incidents, whether it be invisible rats getting loose, or apprehending a burglar in the school by means of a paralysing ray.

I think the difference is that with Buckeridge the whole focus of the stories is Jennings and Darbishire (and to a lesser extent their friends) and the mistakes they make in trying to comprehend the adult world. That’s it: there’s no other plot to be accommodated, because the plotlines are tailored to fit their misunderstandings. With the Overstone books, the storylines are a sort of basic SF, not specifically fitted to the characters acting them out. With Rowling, the plot lines are tailored to the characters well enough, but those plot lines aren’t ABOUT Hogwarts, they just happen to take place there. The school isn’t central to the story in the same way that Linbury Court is for Buckeridge. I’m not sure that you couldn’t make the same point about “Stalky & Co”, where the stories are about boys in a school but where the major plot lines (unsporting behaviour regarding hunting, bullying, etc) could work just as well in a different context. And Kipling, of course, got the Nobel Prize.

So while I take your points, I don’t believe either Buckeridge or Willans was trying to do the same thing that Rowling is trying to do. They may have achieved their goals better than she does hers, or not: but they were different goals to begin with.

P.S. Rowling is a splendid exponent of the throwaway line, as with the description on Dumbledore’s chocolate card of his hobbies being “chamber music and tenpin bowling”. Neither of which pursuits is ever referred to again, but it is a delightful pairing.