Of course people are suspicious of media hype. Some even make a life's work of avoiding - even opposing - anything they perceive to have been "hyped". And, like a stopped clock, they're bound to be right sometimes.

The problems arise - as a letters page contributor pointed out yesterday, apropos the O'Flaherty nomination - when they miss the difference between media hype and public opinion. Sometimes, the public excitement/disgust/fear transmitted by word of mouth at pubs, dinner parties and school gates actually did exist long before a publicist ever hit the phone to seduce a hack. And this, oddly enough, appears to be the case with Harry Potter.

There are too many awe-struck parents telling the same tale for too many years for it to be otherwise. This is the story of Harry Potter and the Suddenly, Astoundingly Silent Child.

It's about a child - usually a boy - who has never read much more than the Sky One TV listings and who suddenly becomes glued to a long, quite complicated book with big words and no pictures, which has absolutely nothing to do with a film or a computer game. Then reads another and another. Wizardry, really.

Then his parents become curious and read it too. And nearly implode with relief that it's not a Silence of the Lambs for 12year-olds and come over all nostalgic because it reminds them of the wholesome, fantasy adventure stories they grew up with and wafts them far, far away from the Less Than Zero world of sleazy decay and decadence to a world of optimistic children and the triumph of good over evil.

Then his big sister reads it, loves the Dark Side and reckons the jibes at Muggleland - smug, tunnel-visioned, image-obsessed suburbia - are cool.

And soon we hear of the clever, beautiful author, a single mother who wrote the book in freezing penury, who mapped out the entire seven-book series on a train journey from London to Edinburgh and who used her initials because boys might not read a book by a woman. And who is now rich beyond fantasy and gets to ride around Britain in her own private, red steam train. Witchcraft, obviously.

It has to be. Joanne Rowling has accomplished the seemingly impossible. She has produced something that no sane Muggle can seriously oppose. The worst the critics can find to sniff about is that Harry's story is "derivative". So, much ink has been spent over comparisons to Star Wars, Enid Blyton, Greek myths, C.S. Lewis, E. Nesbitt, you name it . . .

"Oh, give me a break. We were told at university that there are only two plots in all of literature," says Niall MacMonagle of Wesley College dismissively. "The first is the person goes on a journey; and the second is a stranger comes to town."

Harry qualifies on all fronts - along with Jane Austen and Henry James.

The next worst thing that can be said is that Harry Potter is not in the top league of children's literature.

"The truth is that any month of the year children's books appear that are at least as good as, if not better, than Harry Potter," says Robert Dunbar of the Church of Ireland College of Education. For example, he cites two recent books by US authors, Holes by Louis Sachar - "an absolutely brilliant book" - and Wringer by Jerry Spinelli. "These books are superb and have won prizes but, of course, have received not one iota of the publicity that the Harry Potter ones have".

Liz Turley, senior librarian with Dublin City Libraries, agrees with his assessment of Holes, which is about a boy sent to a young offenders' jail in a US desert and forced to dig holes in the sweltering heat. "It's a very profound book, a book of literary excellence, which can be read on very different levels but it's a different kind of book to Harry Potter and I don't know if it would have the same general appeal.

"I think that Harry Potter appeals to the world of the imagination in a way that TV has robbed us of a little . . . It's creating pictures of the mind, reinvented fantasy and the imagination."

So while Harry may not be the world's greatest or most original literature, no one disputes the fact that the books are "pageturners", as Mr Dunbar puts it, or that the likes of Pokemon, Goosebumps or the Babysitters' Club (present and previous publishing hits) make him look like a genius.

SO how did Rowling get it so right? Well, for one thing she was clever enough to base her stories in a boarding school. "Every child has to go to school," says Mr Dunbar, "with all their oddities and rituals and book-lists, so every child can identify with a lot of that - but with the bonus that Harry is a wizard in training who can also do wonderful things.

"One of the functions of quality writing for young people is to provide wonderful imaginative opportunities for growth - and it works very well in that regard. And Harry Potter is fun."

And, for the record, he rates Rowling well below Tom Sawyer but well above Lewis - whose seven-strong series of Narnia books has never been out of print since the 1950s. "Rowling's books are all about the healing power of love and send out a warmer message than Lewis.

"With Lewis you are always aware that the voice of the preacher is never far from the background. It's very rare to find writing for children that doesn't want to preach; while Rowling does have a message, it's more oblique. And I wouldn't say that Lewis's books are as well-written."

Ben Barclay (12) agrees: "I've read all of the Narnia books but I found them too strange. With Harry Potter you can almost believe that it's real. And he's really fun."

Mr MacMonagle (a good bit older) has no reservations either. "Where does it rank? It's an adventure story second to none . . . J.K. Rowling has done something magical because she has really brought reading alive. There aren't many who have been able to bring book news on to the TV headlines and to the business pages. Harry Potter is on the world's lips . . . I've yet to meet someone who doesn't rate them.

"I've heard her on radio and she sounds very rooted, very grounded. And she doesn't dumb down. She does write a sentence structure and vocabulary that are quite challenging. And the sentences are based on things that are so extraordinarily vivid in visual terms that they are said to be ideally suited to dyslexics."

He recalls how, during the row about Harry Potter v Heaney's Beowulf, when two of the three Whitbread judges, Jerry Hall and Imogen Stubbs, had a mind to award the prize to the third Harry Potter book, Sky News went looking for an English don who had ideally never heard of Harry. What they got was Jane Roberts, a professor of Old and Middle English, who, to general astonishment, was equally au fait with the merits of Harry and Beowulf. "The great thing about Harry Potter," says Mr MacMonagle, "is that when he grows up he'll read Beowulf because it too is a series of dramatic adventures, a story about good and evil, that blends the magical with the real . . ."

Harry has also the psychologists' seal of approval. "They're very well written, with quite complex storylines," says Fiona Kelly Meldon, a consulting psychologist. "There's a mix of fantasy and reality which is good developmentally - children move in and out of those two facets all the time. They test out in fantasy what they want to do in reality; they might mash a toy in reality play when they really want to mash their brother. But by discovering in fantasy that the toy can't be put back together they discover that maybe they should temper that reality because it may have a consequence they can't deal with . . ."

She does mention one somewhat unexpected side-effect. "I have heard parents complain about children going into wizardry and not clicking out again. I was a bit gobsmacked about that. But you'll always have children who are somewhat more obsessive and who will act out their fantasies more. And you've got to have creativity . . ."

This morning the long wait for Harry Potter, number four, is finally over. The hype is fading away with the Blue Anglias from Easons, the private trains, the erudite analyses and the silly comparisons.

And in their place, in millions of homes around the world, a child will be finding a quiet corner, to inhabit another world and dream dreams of amazing adventures, fabulous feasts, faithful friends and powerful dark forces - and learn to hope that with love and courage, good will surely triumph.