I normally flag these posts as book reviews, but this won’t really be a review as such – every word Rowling wrote has been analysed in such microscopic detail that any attempts at a summary would be redundant. But ‘I read it so I write about it’ is the rule here, so here are a few things I noticed on this reading of Philospoher’s:

Compression. At around 220 pages the Philosopher’s Stone is a masterpiece of compression. After a relatively leisurely start the last few chapters fly past. Let’s look at what Rowling squeezes in to the novel’s final three chapters:

Having been caught smuggling Norbert out of Hogwarts, the trio are taken to Professor McGonagall’s office where she deducts 150 points from Gryffindor. Harry becomes a pariah and considers resigning from the Quidditch team. Harry, Hermione, Neville and Malfoy report to Hagrid for their detention in the Forbidden Forest. While in the forest Harry sees a cloaked figure drinking unicorn blood, then is rescued by the centaurs, who reveal who is behind the mysterious goings on at the castle. After the year-end examinations, Harry learns Hagrid has revealed the secret of getting past Fluffy. Dumbledore has been lured away from the castle and Professor McGonagall refuses to take them seriously, so the trio set out to stop ‘Snape’ from taking the stone themselves, immobilising Neville on the way. They get past Fluffy, Devil’s Snare, the room of flying keys, and the giant wizards’ chess game, losing Ron at that point. Hermione works out the potions puzzle and then goes back to help Ron while Harry pushes on to find Quirrell looking into the Mirror of Erised. There are a few pages left for Harry to defeat You-Know-Who, rescue the stone, recover in hospital with the benefit of a visit from Dumbledore, attend the end of term feast, win the House cup, and catch the train back to Kings Cross.

This is breathless, extraordinarily compressed stuff – in the film version almost a third of the 160 minutes running time is occupied with these three final chapters, beginning with the Forbidden Forest detention. There’s not a word wasted. The speed with which events flash past make the book hard to put down – where would one pause? – and don’t allow the reader time to consider the extraordinary recklessness with which the trio proceed – for example what were they planning to do when they caught up with ‘Snape’? The later books in the series unfortunately lose this economy, and while the world-building is mainly fascinating and well done, they become more self-indulgent and much slower.

Frivolity. For a story which starts with the attempted murder of a baby and the actual murder of his parents, and which ends with the death of a teacher, this is a surprisingly light-hearted book. The sense of peril is limited – the bad guys are easily foiled, and the trio deals with them without help from friends, teachers or any adults. This sense of comfort – we know things are going to end with the good guys winning – is emphasised by a strong sense of playfulness running throughout the book. Dumbledore consistently messes about, whether in his opening comments to the school – “Before we begin our banquet, I would like to say a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak! Thank you.” – or in his comments about his scar being in the shape of a map of the London Underground (I wonder how they translated that joke in foreign language editions?) Even at the end, when announcing the imminent death of Nicholas Flamel and his wife, he still has time to joke around with Bertie Botts every-flavour beans.

Age-appropriate content. Possibly Rowling’s cleverest idea in terms of the structure of the series is the way the books age with the reader. School stories usually have two ways of handling this issue. One choice – the Simpsons model as I think of it – is for the characters never to age. That way the Secret Seven can enjoy perpetual summer holidays staying with relatives in a variety of unremarkable locations each of which have hidden secrets. The alternative approach, for the characters to proceed through the school years in each episode of the series, can be problematic. The number of stories the author can write using these characters is fixed to the seven secondary school years (none of these stories are ever set anywhere other than in secondary schools). Second, as the children age hormones kick in, more adult themes are introduced, and the author runs the risk of losing younger readers.

Rowling’s chose the latter approach – her characters start school aged eleven, and each story spans one school year. But she was able to write sufficiently quickly – seven books in eleven years (1997-2007) – that the pre-teen readers she captured with this first book aged with her characters, cementing their identification with Harry, Ron, or Hermione. Talk of ‘growing up’ is common among Potter fans (and even her critics), and going through that collective experience, together with all the ceremony that became associated with the later books, made Harry Potter an important part of many people’s adolescence.

Nostalgia. I may have written about this elsewhere in this blog, but I once spoke to a group of primary school children about my experience of going to school in the UK in the sixties and seventies. They all had just the one question – ‘Were the teachers really allowed to hit you?!!’ Rowling is a near contemporary (she was born in 1965) and attended school in Gloucestershire, so would have had a very similar educational experience – and in particular one in which teachers, and adults more generally, were allowed to hit children. (Bear in mind corporal punishment was made illegal in schools in the UK in the1980’s.) Harry’s experience of being hit by his teachers (including the excruciating scenes with Professor Umbridge) are really a reflection of Rowling’s own experience, and something that would alien to children of the late nineties or later. Which point underlies the profoundly nostalgic flavour of the books – they are in the tradition of the boarding school stories of Enid Blyton, Anthony Buckeridge, Angela Brazil and Frank Richards (to name a few). The Potter books are suffused with the atmosphere, themes, values and language of these earlier stories – Malory Towers, Secret Seven, Famous Five, Jennings and Billy Bunter – which I am sure Rowling would have grown up with, but would have been largely unfamiliar to her younger readers. All the cultural references throughout the stories, from lemon drops to the excitement of travelling by steam train, are rooted in Rowling’s childhood.

This is surely part of the incredibly successful formula of Harry Potter – the boarding school story has deeply, rigidly established patterns and structures (crushes, pranks, midnight feasts, inter-house rivalry, letters home, the crusty old janitor, and so on) which will have been well known to adult readers, but felt quaintly historic to most of her millennial audience.

So those were my impressions of this reread of Philosopher’s Stone. It’s aged well, and while you can never recapture the impact of the first read, with all the well-timed surprises and reveals, there are sufficient Easter eggs and signs of how cleverly plotted the whole series was (for example I had forgotten that Hagrid borrows the flying motor-bike he delivers Harry to Privet Drive on from Sirius) to justify one more return to Hogwarts.