It would take witchcraft to knock Hannibal, the sequel to Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs, from the top of the bestseller list. But witchcraft is just what is lurking around the corner. The publishers of J.K. Rowling's next Harry Potter story, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, are more than quietly confident. The book comes out next Thursday, at 3.45 p.m., and thousands of schoolchildren are already poised, £10.99 of pocket money in hand. So far, no orchestrated hype has been needed. "It could take some doing to defeat Hannibal, I admit," said Rosamund de la Hey of Bloomsbury, "but we have 70,000 advance orders and we are aiming to tackle it if we can".
Undaunted by the thought of taking on Harris's gory thriller, which, with an initial print run of 180,000, has proven one of the biggest first edition sellers of all time, De la Hey suspects that child purchasing power, coupled with the magical world created for her readers, will make for heavyweight competition. Advance orders on the Internet imply she is right. The print run is huge. At 110,000, Bloomsbury think it is the biggest ever for a children's book. Roald Dahl's Matilda, which has sold 250,000 copies, had an original run of 30,000.
Yet beyond the potential sales figures, perhaps the most extraordinary fact is that Harry Potter is about to take his place on the bookshelf next to that other Potter, Beatrix, when only two years ago the stories were completely unknown.
Not since J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan has a fictional hero grabbed the public imagination with quite such speed. Rowling's first two novels in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, tell the story of how the orphan Harry is transported via a steam train from a hidden platform on London's King Cross railway station to Hogwarts, a school for aspiring witches and wizards. With a feeling for invented language which is reminiscent of Tolkien and a sense of mystery that echoes the Narnia stories of C.S. Lewis, Rowling has provided her readers with a vast lexicon of Potterist terms.
Quidditch, for example, is the name of a perplexing and dangerous game played on broomsticks, while the term Muggles is applied to non-magical folk.
Rowling, whose first name is Joanne, is 34, and famously wrote the first of her two novels sitting in an Edinburgh cafe called Nicolson's, stringing out the time taken to drink her cappucino because the place was so much warmer than her home. The film rights have already been sold to Warner Brothers, and Rowling, who will be a millionaire before she is 40, has set herself the task of writing seven Harry Potter novels in all.
She is currently working on the fourth and, like her shadowy counterpart Thomas Harris, she will not be giving interviews or signing copies of The Prisoner of Azkaban. She has, however, promised fans that Harry himself will not be frozen in time as the series continues.
Her hero will be allowed to grow, facing the dark problems of adolescence, although she has indicated that he is unlikely ever to be reunited with his late parents.
Although readers have begged her to organise such a happy conclusion, some situations, she argues, are irreversible even through magic spells.
Matthew Fort adds:
In the TV-dominated, celebrity-spotted, smart-clever, self-referential world that dominates the children's market these days, Harry Potter is alarmingly old-fashioned. He is not postmodernist, ironic, sophisticated, slick, hip or street smart. He is cheerful, decent, kind and brave, loyal, good at games and rather moral. True, Harry is treated hideously by the ghastly Dursleys, and he escapes from the inequalities of the Muggle (human) world with relief, but it is only to a curiously well-run and ably staffed boarding school that serves exceptional food. For Harry, school is a haven, a cheerful, eventful Eden that is invaded and threatened from time to time. In fact, Harry stands for human goodness against the inhuman evil of Voldemort, whose designs he thwarts by revealing previously unsuspected powers released by almost self-sacrificial courage. In moments of supreme crisis, he exhibits those qualities we would like to think we would also demonstrate under similar circumstances, but on the whole are convinced that we wouldn't. (Well, that's true in my case anyway). If the underpinning of the novels is a conventional, mythic morality, the world in which it comes into play is anything but. Hogwarts is the school we would all like to have gone to. The accidental friendships and freewheeling relationships of school life are rendered with unsentimental accuracy. The dialogue sparkles with precise characterisation, humour and drama.
Much has been made of the fact that Rowling is a children's populist in the tradition of C.S. Lewis and Roald Dahl. She dismisses any affinity for Dahl. "I think Dahl was a master at what he did," she says, "but I do think my books are more moral than Dahl's." However, she has great respect for Lewis. "Lewis is simply a genius," she has said. "Even now, if I was in a room with one of the Narnia books, I would pick it up like a shot and re-read it."
And there is something of Lewis's Christian pre-occupations about the Harry Potter books, in the eternal battle between good and evil that involves a group of children whose own human characteristics are tested in various ways. But here all similarity ends. Where the Narnia chronicles move with ponderous majesty, creaking dialogue and significant symbolism, the Harry Potter series zips along with tremendous narrative drive, with jokes, japes and fearful terrors in almost equal parts.
If indeed Harry does have a spiritual ancestor, it is Wart in The Sword In The Stone, the first book of T.H. White's Once and Future King. There is the same seamless elision between the real and the magical worlds, the same acceptance of flexible time, moral purpose and sense of destiny. Harry is an orphan because, says Rowling, it is only by being free of his parents that he can have his adventures and confront his destiny.
Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, by J.K. Rowling is published on July 8th by Bloomsbury, £10.99 in UK