Just in case you don’t know: Harry Potter is an orphan who lives with his aunt and uncle in a boring suburb. On his 11th birthday he discovers that he is really a wizard, the child of a magical family. Leaving King’s Cross station from the magical platform nine-and-three-quarters, he is transported to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where he has various adventures, comic and serious. There are plenty of japes and jokes, but ultimately Harry is engaged in a struggle with a supernatural force of evil, in the person of the Lord Voldemort. In 1997 JK Rowling published Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, to be succeeded by Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Three more books are promised. In terms of advance publicity and immediate sales, Goblet of Fire must be the most successful novel of all time.

The scheme of the child passing from real life into an alternative or fantasy world (and usually returning to reality again) originates, of course, with Lewis Carroll. It has been borrowed time and again since: it is the basis of Peter Pan, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, CS Lewis’s Narnia books and Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. But Rowling gives an odd twist to this theme. We expect the real world to be prosaic, and the otherworld to be untrammelled by the laws of ordinary nature, but she comes close to reversing this pattern. The Dursleys, Harry’s guardian family, are very nasty-fairytale nasty. They are Cinderella’s wicked step-parents, keeping Harry in a cupboard under the stairs. Their son Dudley keeps bullying Harry; grotesquely fat and preposterously spoilt, he plays the role of the Ugly Sisters. Harry even has a strange scar on his forehead, like the birthmark which identifies the prince or princess in many a romance. So the real world is made exotically horrible, while by contrast, the running joke about the magical world is that it is as humdrum, bureaucratic and businesslike as anywhere else. It is controlled by a Ministry of Magic; the Minister wears a green bowler hat and pinstripe robes. Hogwarts sends out a list of the kit which new boys need to bring with them, just like any other boarding school, although other schools may not ask for a cauldron and a pointed hat. A wizard’s arts are acquired not supernaturally but by years of study: the more you swot, the more magic you will be able to do.

This turns upside down the common habit of science fiction. In the hands of a master like HG Wells, the pseudo-science is ingeniously worked out and given a kind of plausibility, but in much second-rate fantasy, from Dracula to Superman, what is presented as science is really magic: though Van Helsing is supposed to be a scientific investigator, only magic can make Dracula turn into a bat, and despite some nonsense about kryptonite and so on, only magic can make a person in human form speed effortlessly through the air or put on underpants in a nanosecond. In the Harry Potter stories, by contrast, what is declared to be magic seems more like an alternative science, an otherworld set of physical laws to be learnt in the classroom. The paradoxical upshot is that these books have rather little magical atmosphere. Rowling’s subversive jokiness makes the flying broomsticks and metamorphosing sweets into a series of conjuring tricks or comic turns. The magic does not need to be glamorous, for the glamour lies elsewhere: in escaping the Dursleys, Harry escapes from the start of a fairy story not into reality exactly, but at least into a genre of fiction which purports to be naturalistic-the public school story.

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