The first Harry Potter film is out and is a massive success. With six more at least threatened for the future, the books and film have become an empire of the imagination. It is an idiot- proof franchise in operation here and unprecedented marketing will keep it there for some time, but unlike Star Wars or Star trek, or perhaps the Lord of the rings, posterity may wonder what the fuss was all about. It was inevitable to feel so after watching the very entertaining first leg of Harry's journey. Rowling is a very good storyteller indeed, to get children to read in the age of the electronic game is a commendable achievement, but she may never become a great mythic teller of tales. The mythic imagination is there all right, but she can't break out of the miserable parameters of insularity.

The movie is well put together and never fails to hold you, but in itself that is no guarantee of a future in the mind. It begins promisingly too, a huddle of wizards poring over a tiny orphaned baby who is marked out as being special. They decide to hide with his surviving family; people that they know will take great care not to mark him out as being in any way special. This hiding of a future hero is one of the markers of myth, and so is the inevitable ill treatment at the hands of obnoxious relatives. He is a male Cinderella when we first see him, our Harry Potter. In not shying away from such realities even though they are not politically correct, Rowling is telling the truth about families and how they behave towards the helpless. Children, who know it to be so, are enchanted when they find a grown up who does not pretend and expect them to go along with the fiction too. In all the books there is a gritty undercurrent of the tribulations of life. People get hurt when they fall off heights. But though honest about physical injury she is slightly equivocal about psychological ones.

The fun and games being when the house is deluged with Owl-mail, one of the imaginative touches that make her books so popular. There is no reason why the owl should be a magical mailman, it is a gratuitous absurdity and hence perfect. Another is the invention of the word Muggle to denote non-magic humans, a certain inclusion in future editions of the Oxford Dictionary. The Muggle relatives know what is up and try to prevent Harry from reading his mail, even when they are literally drowning in it. Harry is eleven now, a significant age in mythic terms as it begins the second decade of life, when consciousness and awareness begin to peak. He is taken out of the house by the breaking of the door by the entrance of Hagrid, who has come to escort him to Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Hagrid is more of a Hirsute Explosion than anything else, a lumbering bear-familiar in human skin and is the first helper the Hero meets on his journey. Harry makes a brief, token plea to remain in obscurity, "I'm just Harry" but the respect of Hagrid and the fearful loathing his aunt holds him in convince him of his destiny. Hagrid magically hexes Harry's fat bully of a cousin with a pig's tail, which is a child's revenge fantasy come true to the limit.

Hagrid takes Harry to a goblin bank where his thoughtful wizard parents had stored away wealth for this day. He realizes that the bank holds most of the secrets and terrors of the magic world. What is fascinating about this is the alternate reality that exists just around the corner. The magical world intersects with the Muggle world, it is hidden within the interstices of the Muggle world, it is bizarrely similar and totally alien to it. It is not so much a triumph of the imagination as capturing a certain quality of children's thought which knows there are marvels all around us, but hidden for unaccountable reasons. With Harry those marvels are suddenly manifest. Every child is confirmed in their unshakable belief of their special qualities through the vicarious medium of Harry. They hope it may be so, they feel it ought it be so, and with Harry it suddenly is just so.

It is also one of the peculiar flaws of the work, for the perfect magical world seems to be a Victorian, Dickensian world with all the dirt and most of the danger leached out. Harry's Muggle relatives seem to live in the 1990s, but the magical world is at a technological level that seems straight out of the Pickwick Papers or Dombey and Son. It is somewhat distressing to realize that Magic seems feasible only in the absence of electricity. Harry and his classmates wander around in the dark with oil lanterns! Why on earth is a steam train acceptable, but not batteries? It is not mere quaintness, but a romantic fallacy of there being too much progress. Star Wars won out precisely because in the midst of phenomenal technology the ascendant human spirit is the most powerful strength manifest. Magic does not need to turn its back on technology. For Rowling improvements in technology seem to mean aerodynamically streamlined, ergonomically designed broomsticks. Harry's world is a retreat to the myth-making womb of Victorian Empire when England was unquestionably top dog and supremely satisfied with itself. That it is still such a potent image should be a matter of disquiet.

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