Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J K Rowling

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was published in 2007, ten years after the first book in the series. By this point, Rowling’s saga had become a global phenomenon, with midnight book launches, publication dates shifted so kids wouldn’t bunk off school, a film series well under way (it was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in 2007), and a very public haranguing by literary heavyweights such as Harold Bloom (“In an arbitrarily chosen single page — page 4 — of the first Harry Potter book, I count seven clichés”) and A S Byatt (“Ms. Rowling’s magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, … soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip”) laying in on Rowling in a way that now seems incredibly petty, like academics berating a child for neglecting to quote Eratosthenes in his “What I did on my holidays” essay. But all this is, frankly, irrelevant (as it should be) now it’s just me reading the series for pleasure.

So, what are the pleasures of The Deathly Hallows?

For the seventh book in a seven-book series, where everything has surely by now (thanks to Harry Potter and… Any Other Business?, a.k.a. The Half-Blood Prince) been set up for the final confrontation between our hero and the evil Lord Voldemort, The Deathly Hallows opens in bravura style by kicking off some entirely new plot-lines, and emptying a whole new set of questions-in-need-of-answering into our hapless truth-seeker’s lap. Whose blue and Dumbledorean eye is looking out from the broken fragment of Sirius’ communication mirror? Why had Dumbledore been in possession of James Potter’s invisibility cloak on the night Harry’s parents were murdered? How do the Death Eaters track Harry & co. so quickly to Tottenham Court Road? Whose is the silver-white doe patronus? Why is Harry suddenly less able to produce a patronus of his own?

Jonny Duddle cover

It struck me on my first reading of the series how incredibly satisfyingly it was in the way it mixed the uncovering of past events (the first rise of Voldemort, the school days of Harry’s parents, and so on) with each book’s present-day action. And that’s still going strong even in this final book, if not stronger. Having had Voldemort’s origin-of-evil story told in The Half-Blood Prince, we now get what might be called the tarnishing of Albus Dumbledore, as tabloid reporter Rita Skeeter reveals the “disturbed childhood, the lawless youth, the lifelong feuds and the guilty secrets” of what has been the warmest and most comforting character in the series so far.

Why does Rowling do this? Right from the start, Dumbledore seemed a gleefully archetypal character, the grandfatherly wizard who mixes aspects of Gandalf, Father Christmas, and, frankly, God (or at least Aslan) in his calm, patient, white-bearded wisdom, his acceptance and encouragement (and, also, his distance). At the end of the last book he was — quite rightly, and as tradition demands — taken out of the action, ready for our hero Harry to face things on his own.

But no, it seems he has lingered. And not lingered in the way Obi-Wan Kenobi lingers in the original Star Wars trilogy, to pop up as a ghostly presence and offer a little prompting and guidance (“Use the Force, Luke”, “Go to the Dagobah system, Luke”, “Don’t forget to brush your teeth, Luke”), but lingered to go sour. Dumbledore, we learn, was not always that Santa-like saintly wizard. In his early days, great as he already was, he became preoccupied with the same thing that drives the evil Lord Voldemort:

“I had learned that I was not to be trusted with power… I had proven, as a very young man, that power was my weakness and my temptation…”

Death has become one of the most important themes in the Harry Potter series, one that is, intriguingly, profoundly connected with Harry’s role as a truth-seeker. Increasingly, Harry’s seeking after the truth has been driven by a need to make contact with what death has taken from him (his parents, Sirius, Dumbledore), and to learn why it had to happen, why they had to die.

Brian Selznick cover

And death has twined its bony fingers into another theme, too, one that runs not only throughout this series but (as I said in my mewsings on the first book) through fantasy literature as a whole: power, its temptations, and its misuse. Voldemort defines himself entirely in terms of power, and sees its ultimate use as being to hold off his own death, while doling it out to others on a whim. But, as the case of Dumbledore in this book reveals, death in the Harry Potter series humanises those who die (which is perhaps why Voldemort flees it). Even as great a figure as Dumbledore, when he passes through the veil, is revealed to be what he always was: a human being, with faults, with mistakes, with regrets, with secrets — with a story. The crucial thing is, in Rowling’s world, this humanisation doesn’t compromise her characters. Dumbledore isn’t a lesser presence because of his revealed faults, once we have the full story. (After all, it’s “his early losses [that] endowed him with great humanity and sympathy”, in other words, which made him who he is.)

This humanisation-in-the-face-of-death is something Rowling does to other characters, too. Most notably in this book — and most poignantly — Severus Snape, who finally gets his story told (when you’d think it ought to have been in The Half-Blood Prince, which was, after all, named for him). Snape’s story is the last to be revealed, but is told alongside that of another character who has, surprisingly, not had hers told yet either: Lily Potter. (And the influence of Lily, Harry’s mother, over Harry’s development, is much more prevalent in this book, where up till now he was mostly defined in terms of how he measured up to his father. In this book, we’re told Harry is now exactly the same height as James Potter — so he’s as much like his father as he’s going to be — and this is no surprise. But it is a pleasant surprise when Harry sees his mother’s handwriting and realises that she “made her g’s the same way he did”. We’ve long been told his eyes are his mother’s — and this is what makes Snape’s “Look … at … me …” so poignant — but more and more we learn it’s Harry’s inner nature that derives from her, in a book where protective mothers — including Mrs Weasley, Narcissa Malfoy, and even Neville Longbottom’s grandmother — come to the fore. Just as Lily sacrificed herself for Harry, so Harry, here, sacrifices himself for others.)

Snape is revealed to be the most divided character in the series, caught between the love of power (his being the head of Slytherin, and his being a Death Eater) and the power of love (when his need to protect Lily brings him back to Dumbledore, and enables Dumbledore to enlist him in protecting Harry). Snape is, I’d say, the one character whose take on the events of the Harry Potter series would be worth reading.

But before all these backstories, The Deathly Hallows enters a surprising stretch (for a final and should-be-action-packed book), where nothing happens for a long time, a period of frustration, isolation, and endurance, in which the main trio do little more than bicker and get on each others’ nerves. It starts to feel like Frodo and Sam’s section of The Return of the King, that despondent slog through the wastes of Mordor, where they keep going not because they must finish their task, but because it would be even more of an effort to turn back.

Kazu Kibuishi cover

Then — things kick off, and the second half of The Deathly Hallows is perhaps the best, in terms of sheer storytelling, in the series as a whole. And that, after all, is what it’s about (and this is the big point Bloom and Byatt so blatantly missed). It’s not about the literary qualities of the language (though Rowling has moments of good writing, my favourites being a baby dragon described as looking “like a crumpled, black umbrella”, the barman of the Leaky Cauldron looking “like a gummy walnut”, or Harry, alone with a bickering Ron and Hermione, feeling “like the only non-mourner at a poorly attended funeral”). But mostly the language is only there to tell the story — and tell it not to jaded academics but story-hungry what-happens-nexting kids. Nor is it about the originality of imagination. Rowling freely makes use of every fantasy archetype she can lay her hands on. But, she makes original use of them. And it may be she does so simply for a quick joke, but it may also be that she does so (as with Dumbledore) to say something deeper, that goes to the heart of her theme.

Using such fantasy archetypes is part of how she creates such an immersive world. It’s not (as I said in my mewsings on the first book) immersive in the traditional How to Write Fantasy & SF way of presenting a logically consistent reality with carefully-worked-out rules for magic. It’s immersive because it’s so rich and alive. There’s no time to stop and think about logical inconsistencies, it’s already throwing another Dahlish joke, or Dickensian character, or Rowlingish list at you. (She loves her lists: of wares in a magical joke shop, titles of magical school-books, varieties of owls, sweets on a snack trolley, or the contents of a Hogwarts storage room.) Most of all, it’s alive with story: with little sub-plots and details, with little connections (as you realise, for instance, that some fellow-pupil of Harry’s who was initially just a name is in fact the descendent of some famous witch or wizard), as well as wider, deeper (sometimes subterranean) arcs.

Olly Moss

The theme of fame I puzzled about before this re-read of the series has proved to be just part of a much more varied and interesting theme of truth, memory, and history, how these can be distorted, and how such distortions can pave the way for the rise of an evil such as Voldemort. In other words, this is a story about the power of story, both for good and for evil.

The series’s own politics aren’t, perhaps, all to be read as a straightforward allegory, tempting though it seems. Hermione’s efforts to emancipate the house elves at first feels like it’s drawing a parallel with human slavery, but the series doesn’t resolve it at all in that way. I suspect it might just be a joke about the sort of elves you find in a fairy tale like “The Elves and the Shoemaker”, and how Hermione overthinks the whole thing, or misinterprets it in entirely human terms. House elves aren’t oppressed humans, they’re house elves. And Harry’s deal with the goblin Griphook in The Deathly Hallows makes it clear that goblins aren’t supposed to be read as oppressed humans, either, but as non-humans who have their own values, ideas, and agendas. This aspect of the books, perhaps, needs more material to play out.

And it’s with The Deathly Hallows that Rowling can best refute A S Byatt’s criticism that her fantasy is not “numinous”. Byatt was mistaking Rowling’s first-book groundwork — her laying out of a cornucopia of fantasy elements — for her end theme. It’s with The Deathly Hallows that things come as close as they get to a religious statement, and if they’re to be read in that way, it seems to me Rowling is doing something slightly different. The way the previously God-like Dumbledore is revealed to have had a weakness for power in his youth before learning to be more human reminds me of Jung’s psychological reading of the Old and New Testaments in Answer to Job. God, Jung says, gave His son to mankind in the New Testament as a propitiatory sign that He’d changed from His highly judgemental, punitive, and patriarchal Old Testament ways. It wasn’t to redeem humankind from original sin, but to redeem God from His old self. If so, then Harry is Dumbledore’s “son” in this book, and it’s surely significant his self-sacrifice comes to have a magically protective power over everyone opposing Voldemort: he “dies” to redeem them all from evil. (And Harry finding himself in an ethereal King’s Cross is perhaps the most explicitly religious reference.) But whatever her own beliefs, Rowling never gets as dogmatic as C S Lewis. Rather, as with Dumbledore and Snape, she humanises it all, and perhaps de-patriarchalises it a bit while she’s at it.

In the end, the Harry Potter series is about “the triumph of good, the power of innocence, the need to keep resisting.” But it’s also about a good story well told, one that’s even more rewarding on a re-read. Rowling can be, amongst all the whizzes and bangs of her magical world, a subtle storyteller, taking more from the likes of Jane Austen than Roald Dahl. Fantasy-wise, her imagination runs the gamut, and seems to have furnished a generation (if not more) with all the weird beasts and magic lore the likes of Dungeons & Dragons, Fighting Fantasy, and a generous helping of Ray Harryhausen films did to a previous generation. (By which I mean mine.)

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The Gods of Pegana by Lord Dunsany

Lord Dunsany by MJEIn 1903, at the age of 25, four years into his title, Lord Dunsany went to see a play called The Darling of the Gods, written by David Belasco and John Luther Long. Long’s 1898 story, “Madame Butterfly”, had made use of his sister’s stay in Japan as the wife of a missionary (though apparently it bears too many similarities to an 1887 French novel, Madame Chrysanthème, for this to be the entire inspiration), and had been adapted by Belasco for the stage in 1900. The Darling of the Gods, a success in New York and newly transplanted to the London stage (where it was produced by the wonderfully-named Beerbohm Tree, and starred Lena Ashwell as Princess Yo-San), was also set in Japan, or, rather, a fantasticated version of Japan that was the sort of place an early-20th century Western audience wanted it to be — a storyland of escape, exoticism and picturesque tragedy, an embodiment of all the lingering dreams of the Decadent and Arts & Crafts movements of the late 19th century, that had so fallen in love with the aesthetics of imported Japanese prints and lacquered wood. In a further act of what Harold Bloom might have called a ‘creative misreading’, Dunsany, watching the play, was overtaken by the poetic possibilities of creating a pantheon of gods, and the result was his first published (and only self-funded) book, The Gods of Pegāna, brought out in 1905. (Online text here.)

OrientalStories1932

cover to Oriental Stories, Winter 1932

This is a situation that recurs throughout the history of fantasy: one culture, encountering another, becomes overwhelmed by fantasies of that distant place and creates its own version of it, a version that becomes increasingly stylised and storyfied, till it enters the realm of pure invention. At the start of the 18th century in France, for instance, the first translations of The Thousand and One Nights were followed by increasingly creative ‘translations’ of other, obscure, ‘newly-discovered’ collections of Eastern tales, footnoted to varying degrees of veracity, till finally the whole thing becomes a convention and people openly pen invented ‘Oriental Tales’ using all the pre-existing backdrops, props and costumes of this imagined version of a distant culture, with no relation to the facts at all. (And when William Beckford wrote Vathek, he was doing the same thing at a double remove: he wrote his mock-Oriental Gothic tale in French, as though it were a ‘genuine’ French imitation Oriental tale, rather than a poor English one.) A similar thing happened in the 19th century, with a different meeting of cultures, this time when the Brothers Grimm began to investigate the folk tales of the peasant classes. Which is why, when Victorian England fell in love with fairy tales, they pictured their heroes and heroines in Germanic peasant dress and dark, endless forests.

Lord Dunsany’s Pegāna, then, is mock-mock Oriental. But it’s also, thanks to its prose style, mock Biblical, and perhaps it’s by being pulled in two separate directions that it breaks free from any definite cultural associations and starts to seem like a wholly new thing. Which is why it’s regarded as one of the first books of truly modern fantasy. Pegāna, though, is not a separate, invented world. The name refers to a sort of Olympus, a dwelling place for Dunsany’s invented gods, though one that exists ‘Before there stood gods on Olympus, or ever Allah was Allah’.

Before our world was created, two forces, Fate and Chance (like Moorcock’s Law and Chaos) cast lots ‘to decide whose the Game should be’. Nobody knows which of these two won, only that the winner went to the primal creator, MĀNA-YOOD-SUSHĀĪ (whose name is always shouted like that), and told him to create the gods.

In the Land of Time by Lord Dunsany (Penguin Classics)Dunsany’s world is founded on the fact that Man can never know the answer to the important questions. Whichever one it was who won that initial casting of the lots — Fate or Chance — as far as we’re concerned, our fate is decided: Man was created by Kib, and each man will be killed, in time, when Mung (Death) makes ‘the sign of Mung’ to him, and between those points he must follow the path set out for him by Dorozhand (Destiny), who alone knows the ‘reason and purpose of the Worlds’. In the face of this, all a man can do (and it is ‘man’, because there are no women in Dunsany’s first book) is distract himself in the works of Limpang-Tung, ‘the God of Mirth and Melodious Minstrels’. The gods, meanwhile, enjoy nothing more than to laugh at their creation, all the while knowing that, when their own maker MĀNA-YOOD-SUSHĀĪ wakes from this sleep (which will end the world), he will laugh at them for their pettiness in creating it.

We poor humans, meanwhile, have nothing but fatalism for our solace:

‘All that is is so because it was to be. Rail not, therefore, against what is, for it was all to be.’

Dunsany has a lot to say about ‘Prophets’. There are prophets who speak the truth, and there are those who lie. Those who speak the truth speak the one and only truth any honest man can: that he knows nothing of the gods, and has no influence over them. This sort of prophet is not very popular. The people would rather have a prophet who gives them a comforting lie, and The Gods of Pegāna has its fair share of such false prophets: Yug, who claims to know all things, but dies all the same; Alhireth-hotep, who claims to speak with Mung (Death), so Mung comes calling; Kabok, who goes so far as to say he advises Mung, but does a runner when Mung starts lurking in his garden at night; and Yun-Ilara, who genuinely does not fear Mung, to the point that he spends his days in a high tower shouting insults at the god of Death… Only, in his weary latter years, to regret this, and instead spend his time begging for Mung to visit.

"Mung and the Beast of Mung", by Sidney Sime

“Mung and the Beast of Mung”, by Sidney Sime

Most of these tiny tales are poetic parables mocking false hope and the empty promises of religion. Dunsany’s invented names — one of the hallmarks of his writings — are at first of two types. There are the brutal-sounding single syllables, which he gives to most of his gods: Skarl, Kib, Sish and Mung. And there are the overblown, overlong names, like MĀNA-YOOD-SUSHĀĪ, or Yoharneth-Lahai. I get the feeling these names started off as basically comic: the short names are meant to emphasise the primitive, nonsensical nature of some of the gods of Pegāna; the long names emphasise the over-grand nature of others. In a similar way, the mock-Biblical language is used to satirise religious writing with its entirely tautological way of enforcing belief:

‘Kib is Kib. Kib is he and no other… Because this is written, believe! For is it not written, or are you greater than Kib?’

But a sort of poetry creeps in, both into the invented names, and into the prose:

‘Then Mung went down into a waste of Afrik, and came upon the drought Umbool as he sat in the desert upon iron rocks, clawing with miserly grasp at the bones of men and breathing hot.’

The first section to really read like modern fantasy — evoking wonder for wonder’s sake — is ‘The Eye in the Waste’:

There lie seven deserts beyond Bodraháhn, which is the city of the caravans’ end. None goeth beyond. In the first desert lie the tracks of mighty travellers outward from Bodraháhn, and some returning. And in the second lie only outward tracks, and none return.

The third is a desert untrodden by the feet of men.

The fourth is the desert of sand, and the fifth is the desert of dust, and the sixth is the desert of stones, and the seventh is the Desert of Deserts.

In the midst of the last of the deserts that lie beyond Bodraháhn, in the centre of the Desert of Deserts, standeth the image that hath been hewn of old out of the living hill whose name is Rānorāda — the eye in the waste.

About the base of Rānorāda is carved in mystic letters that are vaster than the beds of streams these words:

To the god who knows.

Now, beyond the second desert are no tracks, and there is no water in all the seven deserts that lie beyond Bodraháhn. Therefore came no man thither to hew that statue from the living hills, and Rānorāda was wrought by the hands of gods…

The penultimate chapter, ‘The River’, is perhaps Dunsany’s best prose-poem in the book, about silence, sleep, dreams, and the end of all things:

‘It hath been said that when Skarl ceases to drum, and MĀNA-YOOD-SUSHĀĪ awakes, and the gods of Pegāna know that it is the End, that then the gods will enter galleons of gold, and with dream-born rowers glide down Imrana (who knows whither or why?) till they come where the River enters the Silent Sea, and shall there be gods of nothing, where nothing is, and never a sound shall come. And far away upon the River’s banks shall bay their old hound Time, that shall seek to rend his masters; while MĀNA-YOOD-SUSHĀĪ shall think some other plan concerning gods and worlds.’

Le Guin, The Language Of The NightIt’s strange to think that, in her 1973 essay ‘From Elfland to Poughkeepsie’, Ursula Le Guin would call Dunsany ‘the most imitated’ writer of fantasy, whose archaic prose style, and mode of poetic invention through fantastic names evoking distant, story-misty cities and hinted-at magics, made him ‘the First Terrible Fate that Awaiteth Unwary Beginners in Fantasy’. This style of fantasy, heavy on magic and imaginative invention, can be found in, for instance, Michael Moorcock’s method of writing Elric books with a list of fantastic-poetic concepts like ‘The City of Screaming Statues’ by his side. But nowadays (and things may have come to an end starting with Terry Brooks’s Sword of Shannara), the dominant mode of fantasy, as typified by George R R Martin, is at the opposite extreme: minimal magic, minimal poetry, maximal grit. But perhaps the outlook on life is basically the same: both share a cynicism about the promises of religion, and an insistence on the inevitability of death (not to say Death working overtime, in Game of Thrones).

The final word, as ever, belongs to Mung, who will always have the final word:

And Mung said: ‘Were the forty million years before thy coming intolerable to thee?’

And Mung said: ‘Not less tolerable to thee shall be the forty million years to come.’

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The Western Canon by Harold Bloom

The Western Canon by Harold BloomPublished in 1994, Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon is a celebration of great literature. It has achieved a certain notoriety for Bloom’s taking a stance against what he saw as the unwanted politicisation of literary criticism (‘the School of Resentment’ as he calls it, being deliberately provocative), when for him the key to all ‘deep reading’ is the experience of the individual, alone with a book. ‘Such a reader,’ he says, ‘does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.’ But the real core of the book is Bloom’s attempt to, as he puts it, ‘confront greatness directly’. Doing this, he necessarily talks about ‘the canon’ — his particular Valhalla of great works from Western literature — but whether you agree with his choices or not is beside the point. It’s the conclusions he draws, or the aspects he celebrates, that are the reason to read The Western Canon. My own experience certainly chimes with his:

‘When you read a canonical work for a first time you encounter a stranger, an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfilment of expectations.’

As well as the standard reasons you’d expect for a work to be considered great — ‘mastery of figurative language, originality, cognitive power, knowledge, exuberance of diction’ — Bloom adds another, ‘strangeness’:

‘…a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.’

Bloom_ShakespeareWildest of Bloom’s many wild ideas is that the way we’ve come to see ourselves as human beings has been, at least in part, formed by the representations of human beings in our greatest literature. For him, Shakespeare is the greatest of the greats, and the most influential on human nature itself. His pronouncement that ‘The more one reads and ponders the plays of Shakespeare, the more one realises that the accurate stance towards them is one of awe’, may sound overblown, but frankly, it’s nice to be in the presence of someone who allows themselves a little bombast when talking about what they love. ‘Shakespearean drama,’ Bloom writes, ‘seems at once utterly familiar and yet too rich to absorb all at once.’ And whether you agree or you don’t — or whether such statements could ever be lived up to by any work by any writer — I certainly find them inspiring, both as a reader as a writer. And that’s one of the things I like about this book: it makes me want to read better, to read ‘deeper’ or ‘stronger’, as he puts it. Bloom’s model as a reader (and critic) is Dr Johnson, who is, he says, ‘everything a wise critic should be: he directly confronts greatness with a total response, to which he brings his complete self.’

Reading properly, then, makes you both human and whole.

Bloom’s canon is no mere dusty list. It is, rather, an eternal battlefield on which current works must fight it out with the greats of the past to win a place: ‘a conflict between past genius and present aspiration, in which the prize is literary survival or canonical inclusion.’ Bloom’s judgements and summaries of writers and their works have a wonderful strangeness of their own, being utterly unverifiable but always illuminating, intriguing, and provocative, like the literary criticism version of Zen koans. ‘Shakespeare,’ he says, ‘is the inventor of psychoanalysis; Freud, its codifier.’ Or, to put it another way: ‘Hamlet did not have an Oedipus complex, but Freud certainly had a Hamlet complex and perhaps psychoanalysis is a Shakespeare complex.’ Later he says, ‘Freud, slyly following Shakespeare, gave us our map of the mind; Kafka intimated to us that we could not hope to use it to save ourselves, even from ourselves.’

Agon by Harold BloomThe thing that brought me to Bloom’s book was when someone told me he’d included David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus in his long list of canonical works (a list required of him by his publishers, apparently, rather than being something he set out to compile). In an earlier book, Agon (from 1982), Bloom devotes a chapter to sketching out a ‘theory of literary fantasy’, which he then applies, in some detail, to Lindsay’s novel (as well as offering an explanation of sorts for his one venture into fiction, his — dull, in my opinion — attempt at a Lindsay-esque novel, The Flight to Lucifer). This ‘theory of literary fantasy’ is short, but I’ve always found it to apply whenever I pause to test it on a work of fantasy I’m reading. Rather than an all-encompassing theory, it’s an attempt to understand a peculiar aspect of fantastic literature: why, when given the freedom to invent anything, and therefore to potentially indulge oneself in nothing but power-fantasies and pleasurable daydreams, great fantasy literature ends up confronting genuinely difficult and meaningful themes — in other words, what rescues truly good fantasy from the accusation of escapism:

‘What promises to be the least anxious of literary modes becomes much the most anxious… The cosmos of fantasy, of the pleasure/pain principle, is revealed in the shape of a nightmare, and not of hallucinatory wish-fulfilment.’

Fantasy, for Bloom, is the ‘compounding of Narcissism and Prometheanism’ (which sounds like a neat counterpart to Brian Aldiss’s definition of SF as ‘hubris clobbered by Nemesis’). It certainly applies to the best of the fantasy books I’ve reviewed on this site — think of, for instance, Ursula Le Guin’s Threshold, where two characters seek to escape from their daily lives in a fantasy world, only find themselves on a quest to face something even more dangerous and difficult; or a similar situation in William Mayne’s A Game of Dark, where an escape from a difficult home life is illuminated by a parallel quest to destroy a truly disgusting dragon.

Harold Bloom, photograph by Jeanne Bloom

Harold Bloom, photograph by Jeanne Bloom

Bloom’s The Western Canon has persuaded me to read a few of his choice of great books (among them, appropriately, Jane Austen’s Persuasion), though by no means all of them. But always, dipping into it, I’m revitalised as a reader. My canon is not, and will never be, Bloom’s (I’d put Peake’s Gormenghast books in there for sure, as well as Le Guin’s first two Earthsea books), but I can’t help but agree with him about the core purpose of reading, and of writing about what one reads:

‘Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.’

‘Our ultimate inwardness’ — the thing I, for one, certainly search for between the covers of a book.

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