On Imagination (18 June 2004)

Last weekend I had the pleasure of going to see Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Now I'm a fan in general of Harry Potter; I've read all the books, and now I've seen all the movies. The fact that he's a wizard doesn't bother me in the least. I don't mix him up with reality. I don't think that Rowling's wizarding world is an extension of devil-worship. No; I'm perfectly capable of using my imagination.

And I don't think that children are any less capable than I am. If anything, they're more able; anyone who's talked to a child lately will know that the way in which they view the world is a wonderful and magical way.

I know this well. I grew up on books brimming with myth and magic, and wouldn't trade that childhood for the world. I read every children's book that appealed to me; and the kind that did so were books in which life was not as dull and plain as it is in the real world. In the worlds of my childhood, carpets flew, people traveled through space, animals talked and toys woke up after the lights were turned off. There were ghosts and imps and centaurs and fauns and winged horses in my life. Monsters inhabited dark corners, and fairies lived at the bottom of other people's gardens. Our garden had a plaster pirate that I just knew used to come to life after dark; his footsteps shook the ground each night, and I kept my eyes screwed shut until the sun came up, because I knew that if I didn't I'd see his eyes, paint and lacquer though they were, peering at me through the windows.

I read every colour Fairy Book I could get my hands on. The Bible stories that kept me most occupied were the ones where cool things happened. David and Goliath was fun but expected; what I really liked was when Baalam's ass turned around and spoke to him, or when Hezekiah made the sun stand still. I believed in Santa Claus and Jesus Christ, in ghosts, chickcharnies and magical cats, in rabbit holes and magic mirrors, in Middle Earth, tesseracts, and Narnia.

A wizard who went to boarding school would've filled the most ordinary centre of my imagined world.

Now I know that there are people who believe that Harry Potter and his ilk are evil and bad for children. They endanger the soul; magic and witches and wizards, even good ones, are the spawn of the devil.

I believe exactly the opposite. I don't think that anything that so captures the imagination of a child, or of an adult for that matter, is negative, especially not when what captures that imagination is so obviously a morality tale, a struggle between good and evil. We are inundated with images and stories in our society in which there is no struggle at all. Evil has already been crowned unopposed; every movie that glorifies killing, every tale that emphasizes greed and revenge and jealousy and selfishness trains the imagination in the ways of violence and hate, and runs up points in hell.

But Harry Potter does none of those things. I believe that J. K. Rowling's creation is so very successful, so very popular, because she has given children what generations of writers have not: new and positive doorways for their imaginations. Rowling doesn't play by the "rules". Good people die in her books; magic doesn't get you everything you want; people act for the benefit of other people, and sometimes suffer for it; and good and evil struggle with one another on every page.

She's given children back the world I knew when I was growing up: the world of the moral imagination. It didn’t do me any harm. And I doubt it will damage any of our children either. If anything, it will help them.

You see, I think that it's more dangerous to stifle a person's imagination than it is to feed it, especially in a world where the moral currency centres around sex and strength and power. It's that, and not books like Harry Potter, that are the spawn of the devil.

The devil, old people used to tell me, finds things for idle hands to do. How much more does he find for idle minds? Our jails are full of young men with active, agile minds whose imaginations have been taken over by criminality because they were not given the freedom to think outside of prescribed limits. On the one hand, we raise our children on rules and regulations, on Biblical precepts and preaching; on the other, we feed them the sounds and visions of violence, intolerance and greed.

I believe that there's a whole lot of room in this world for ideas that feed the moral imagination. After all, that's what our uncles and grand-aunties used to do for us in the evenings on the island when they told us Ol' Story. They told us tales about talking goats and rabbits, about gaulin women and worms and snakes and mirrors that turned into rivers and old people who had the power to reward the good and punish the bad. Moral tales that exercised our imaginations.

You see, J. K. Rowling understands what the old people knew. A moral lesson learned through the exercise of the imagination stays with a person for far, far longer than any lecture or preaching can ever do. I believe that our imaginations are one of the greatest tools for a moral life that we have. It is time we encouraged and fed them.

So here's to Muggles, and Quidditch, and Firebolt flying brooms. Here's to Harry Potter. Here's to the moral imagination.