There is a God. You don't need to consult the Catholic Catechism or the Book of Common Prayer. Just the news that J.K. Rowling is the highest paid woman in Britain confirms that somewhere, somehow, divine will sees that justice is done. There is no greater writer in English today; and her importance lies not just in the quality of her work, but in her extraordinary proselytising achievements for literacy among a generation of almost bookless boys.
She is now earning £56,000 a day. Last year, long before her latest book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was published, she earned £20 million. She is, apparently, a physically insignificant person, easy to miss in a crowd, utterly untouched by fame and, I imagine, untroubled and uncontaminated by her vast wealth. I hope so. It would be a pity indeed if such a very great writer should be damaged by success.
Discipline
She is, needless to say, a genius; but her talents are the conservative ones of the storyteller, in which plot and character impose their discipline upon the imagination of the writer. The reader comes first; and the writer who forgets his duty to those who pay for the morning coffee is a writer whose mornings will soon be coffeeless.
J.K. is living proof of the cyclical nature of culture. She is a child of Spielberg and George Lucas, those film-makers who are so frequently blamed for the loss of literacy among the young. It is true that they changed film with technology, and they made film narrative more accessible to children, so much so that it seemed a rented video of a film from either would always win in a contest with literacy.
But we all know that the personal relationship between the written word and the human imagination is one of the greatest joys in the world. However, that pleasure requires work, and it was not always easy for children to accept the intellectual effort involved. Was it not easier to turn on the television and watch without work? J.K.'s triumph was to subvert the supremacy of film by using the tools and narrative techniques of film. Harry Potter's world is Star Wars in a literary form. It has a cast of exotic characters, it is funny, it is full of menace, it is told with a young gifted boy, of gifted dead parents, as the vector for events. Instead of Luke Skywalker's light-sabre, Harry has an owl, a wand, a magic broomstick and an invisibility cloak.
Neither world is a pretty world. Both are full of threat, from Darth Varder in one and from Voldemort in the other. Even the similarity in names - both trisyllabic, with the heavy emphasis on the "d" and "v" sounds most of us subconsciously associate with the word "devil" - places us in comparable narrative conventions. Both conventions depend for their authenticity and their appeal on a moral order in which there is right and wrong, good and evil, and for all the ambiguities which arise in the narrative to confuse and to thrill, we know that good cannot triumph unless people take risks to ensure that it does.
Morality plays
In other words, we are back to the morality plays in which staged narrative was first formed, and where the rulebook of fiction was devised. The sinister and the dexter, the bad and the good, the deus ex machina of the improbable device to bring victory for virtue over evil: these are nuts and bolts of story-telling. I don't know how consciously J.K. employed them when she sat down to create her Harry Potter series, but what is interesting is that both she and George Lucas sketched out the plots for all their works in each series before embarking upon the very first.
In other words, godlike, intellectually, they created entire universes, with an underlying morality driving the process. Morality was not an afterthought to be grafted on to the tale; it is the tale. That is what appeals to adults and children alike: we yearn, all of us, for a moral order; and both Lucas and Rowling have given it to us.
Magic wand
But J.K. has done more than that. She has reinvented a literary form so subtly, so imaginatively, that it is almost impossible to say how she has triumphed when thousands before her had failed. To be sure, she does not condescend, and she knows when to trust her readers; but there is more to her than that, for countless of her rivals do not condescend, and have faith in their readers' abilities. She possesses that indefinable genius, the light-sabre of fiction, the magic wand of story-telling, combined with an astonishing confidence in herself and her audience: when did anyone write a children's story over 700 pages long?
She has drawn an entire generation of boys, hitherto besotted with computers and cartoon imagery and almost lost to literacy, back to the written word, granting them a gift for which they will be forever grateful. For others will follow, as others followed Lucas, and though none will be so successful, they will help form a genre of children's literature which will restore cultural primacy to the book.
Not for ever, of course; some film-maker sooner or later will do a Star Wars on the book-as-entertainment, and the struggle will resume; but that is the dialectic of existence and of all culture. In the meantime, the book is back.
You deserve your money, J.K: I hope you find happiness as well. God knows, you've created enough for other people.