Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. By J. K. Rowling. London: Scholastic Press, 1998. Pp. 309. $17.95.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. By J. K. Rowling. London: Scholastic Press, 1999. Pp. 341. $17.95.

Without a doubt, the world of Harry Potter is a child's secret space. One might argue that the essential appeal of Rowling's series is the beguiling and enchanting alternate reality that Harry and his wizard cohort inhabit. To be sure, "secret" may not seem a completely applicable word, as hundreds of journalists and reporters assess the Harry Potter phenomenon, thousands of adults purchase and discuss the books, and millions of children hungrily gobble up the words depicting Harry's experiences. That Harry is a terrific kid with an interesting background, that Rowling is a storyteller par excellence—those secrets are out. But the space of Harry Potter, where he lives, both physically and psychically, is a world apart, a land removed, a place that by its very nature must be covert and not locatable on a Rand McNally map.

Harry's life begins miserably; after losing his parents, he is condemned to live with his insufferable relatives who store him in the cupboard below the stairs. Harry, skinny and small, is practically a shadow of his huge cousin, Dudley, who bullyingly despises Harry and makes sure Harry has no friends. Thus, from the outset, Harry virtually lives in secret and is a secret. Whenever he asks his aunt why he has his lightning-bolt-shaped scar, she snaps, "Don't ask questions," and Harry learns nothing about his parents or the way his life would have gone had they lived. Furthermore, the explanation for Harry's ability to do strange things, like grow his shorn hair back overnight, is unknown to everyone, most of all to Harry.

Harry's first inkling that another world exists alongside the one he knows comes in a shape rather bigger than an inkling. Hagrid, the very large and hirsute groundskeeper at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, arrives to rescue Harry, and after divulging that there is a parallel world out there, whisks Harry away to it. Through means such as tapping on certain bricks in a London alley wall, stepping onto an invisible platform at King's Cross station, or, later, flying through the air in a turquoise Ford Anglia, Harry gains access to this hidden world, and the reader is carried along with him.

The secrecy and remoteness of this world is reinforced over and over again. Not only does one have to know how to enter the secret Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, one must be rowed across a night-black lake and then be "carried through a curtain of ivy that hid a wide opening in the cliff face . . . [and] carried along a dark tunnel." Once inside the turreted, Gothic castle that houses Hogwarts, Harry discovers all sorts of mysterious passageways, hidden staircases, and forbidden hallways. To get to bed, Harry and his classmates are led "through doorways hidden behind sliding panels and hanging tapestries" and up more staircases and down more corridors. Finally, Harry tumbles into bed at last, a "four-poster hung with deep, red, velvet curtains." Recalling Jane Eyre's womblike red room (not the only connection between her story and his), Harry's draped bed both protects and exposes him as he slides into a sleep sometimes troubled by frightening dreams. As she emphasizes this engrossing mysterious journey to bed, Rowling reminds readers not only that Hogwarts is foreign territory to Harry but that it is a place entirely cut off from ordinary knowledge and experience.

As if a parallel world were not enough, Rowling keeps drawing Harry and her readers more deeply into a secret existence, removing Harry first from "Muggle" (or conventional) society and then, later, even from his own, cloistered milieu at Hogwarts. Harry's singularity has much to do with having not been defeated by Voldemort when that evil wizard killed Harry's parents but failed to kill Harry, and the lightning bolt on his forehead attests to this hard-won individuality. But as if this singling out were not quite enough, Harry must prove himself, over and over, by venturing deeper and deeper into places that no one else dares go. From this perspective, Harry continues both to uncover secrets and, to himself as well as others, be a secret.

The final confrontation at the end of Sorcerer's Stone involves Harry pushing even further into hidden realms. Getting past Fluffy, the three-headed dog, is only the first step in a series of ever-complicated trials and obstacles that lead Harry, eventually, to uncover the biggest mystery of the book and then to battle it out with Voldemort, his enduring antagonist. As he descends deeper into these covert places, Harry must shed the friends who accompany him until he is completely alone as he enters the black flames that lead him to the "last chamber." What Harry finds on the other side is shocking. Recalling Darth Vader's admission in Star Wars and tantamount to the "big secret" of a movie of several years ago, The Crying Game, the revelation of what Harry discovers in the last chamber provides a moment of almost pristine surprise and delicious pleasure to those with no prior knowledge of what is revealed. Like the Crying Game secret, the uncovering of this first major surprise of the Harry Potter series forces the viewer/reader to revise the interpretation of much of what already transpired and sets up a high level of anxious excitement about what will happen next. Although the CryingGame's disclosure is sexual, and Harry's discovery is appropriately pre-sexual, one assumes that Harry's repeated confrontations with Voldemort will be similarly revelatory for him as he struggles hard to dis-identify—but perhaps eventually also to identify—with that which he finds appallingly "other" but strangely familiar, and to a certain extent, always already known.

If our examination of the secret spaces of childhood reveals that in fact these sites are critically important to children, then we might surmise that part of Rowling's stunning success in the Harry Potter series is her acknowledgement and celebration of these hideaways. Children's literature abounds with sequestered places, many of which lead to parallel realities, ranging from Alice's stumbled-upon rabbit hole to the Pevensie children's wardrobe to Max's bedroom-turned-forest. As innumerable critics and reviewers have noted, in creating her immensely satisfying series Rowling does much more than lead her readers to secret places. Her mingling of various literary genres (including the orphan story, the boarding school story, the quest narrative, the fairy tale, etc.), her playful mixing of the mundane and the marvelous (such as the Wizard equivalent of baseball cards, in which the person in the photograph moves and talks), and her reassuring adherence to pleasing narrative conventions (the abused child in a substitute family, triumphs at sports, comeuppance for unpleasant characters) all play their part in creating the books' success. Secrets are pivotal to Rowling's design, as the title of her second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, indicates.

If there is any flaw in Rowling's second book, it may be the blatant admission of the intoxication of secrets. When put right out there on the front cover in the form of the title, a secret may lose a little of its shine. For a related reason, I consider Chamber ofSecrets a slightly inferior book—its structure is a bit too apparent, or predictable. A parallel plot can be seen at the outset of the story, which begins where Sorcerer's Stone did, with Harry at home with the Dursleys. To be sure, Rowling consciously employs narrative standards that demand such repetition—most fairy tales rely on these to a certain degree—and the Dursleys are necessary antagonists whose purpose must be reasserted with every new beginning of a volume. Thus we begin again with the motif of the abused child in the substitute family, and we expect that Harry will once again break out of this prison/home and rediscover his "true" family. Predictability is disappointing, however, at the end of the book, as Harry approaches the Chamber. As Harry and Ron track down and advance upon the mystery that has been plaguing them, their difficult and often-blocked path more than once recalls the one taken in Sorcerer's Stone. In both books, Harry must descend under the school and move along uncharted corridors, encountering threatening obstacles and eventually reaching the murderous adversary hidden deep within. Both times, Harry enters the unknown territory by means of a hidden passageway which, upon first examination, yields nothing but blackness (in Sorcerer's Stone he climbs through a trapdoor and falls down into cold darkness; in Chamber of Secrets he descends through a pipe under a bathroom sink into a "dark slide" that he tumbles down). With this similarity of entrance, a reader is not thoroughly surprised when Harry discovers, at the end of his journey, that he must once again confront an enemy who turns out to be—ultimately—the same antagonist he has always been. Both times Voldemort, in his respective guises, screams "KILL HIM!" repetitively, and both times—well, reviews should not give away endings of stories, but it's not a big secret that the ending of Chamber of Secrets is quite similar to Sorcerer's Stone's.

Is this predictability a problem? It is only if it anticipates what should be kept secret—to the last possible moment. But in Rowling's case, the books compensate for these minor weakness because the parallel world of Hogwarts is so well maintained. Readers thrill to return with Harry at the outset of each school year, and be reabsorbed, with him, into this pleasurable parallel existence. Many adults delight in children's rapt devotion to this secret space and encourage their entry into it.

But others do not recognize the allure and importance of secrecy. Rowling's secret world is threatened by the aggressive marketing that will be mounted once the first book is released in film version, by Warner Brothers, in the near future. While both Rowling and Warner Brothers have affirmed that they do not want to produce a junky, cheap, hurried movie, everyone knows that Warners' will release a multitude of related items with the film. Rowling courageously discouraged parents from buying "action figures" at the end of a 60 Minutes interview, but she is well aware that myriad toys, food products, clothing items, and hundreds of other material goods will flood stores and homes. There's plenty to criticize about these grasping tactics, but they do not disturb me as much as this: the taking away of children's control over Harry Potter. For at the time of this writing, children do control these books, and in large part because the rapacious marketing has not yet occurred. When the Harry Potter books burst into public awareness, they belonged to children. The phenomenon is fueled almost totally by children themselves; adults may write and rant about the books, but it is the children who read them, discuss them, build birthday parties around them, invent games involving them, and act them out. In this sense, children own the Potter books, and because of this ownership they can fully inhabit their secret world. It is a pleasure to watch children create their own Quidditch logos, devise their own Hogwarts board games, construct their own Harry Potter Halloween costumes. Independently imagining and designing, children participate in and control the magic Rowling initiates for them. Once marketers intervene, forcing children to view Harry Potter and Hogwarts the way they see them, in patterns and packages developed to generate the most income, the character and the books no longer belong to children. The power no longer is theirs.

Of course this aggressive marketing drive to translate Harry into visual and tangible images and products is not a phenomenon that affects the Harry Potter books alone. Nowadays, almost all successful books, for both children and adults, eventually are hoisted up on the screen, where the author disappears almost completely from the picture. Directors and actors reign supreme.

Hand in hand with the disappearance of the author is the disappearance of the reader; we do not read movies but watch them. It is critical to understand the difference between these two activities: the first fosters independence, participation, and construction, while the other encourages passivity, unquestioning acceptance, and compliance. As our culture moves more deeply into the visual, as books move onto movie and computer screens, we need to evaluate the diminishment of the written word.

Literature, particularly children's literature, provides us secret spaces. It gives readers entry into a world that is invisibly alongside the known. But this entry must be through a passage that leaves holes, leaves something out—that's where the constructive work of the imagination plays its part. Children need these secret spaces in order to become whole readers, and eventually, whole people, who experience lives of the mind while they experience lives of the mundane.

Harry's odyssey, then, is the journey made by all children, as they read and as they grow. He navigates through the quotidian and the marvelous, the known and the unknown, the public and the private, the open and the secret, as he makes his way to adulthood. The reconciliation of these oppositional spaces may be adulthood itself, but the story is in the passage, not the destination, and thus these worlds need to maintain some distance from one another so that passage is possible.

Similarly, children know that the secret worlds they inhabit—both of their own creation and one they borrow from reading—are things apart from the lives they live under the supervision of adults. This secret world is a place of freedom, a place that most of us, sadly, are forced to give up as we grow up. But all of us, children and adults, can regain temporary access to this liberating private space through literature, through the very individualized act of reading. For Harry's secret world is a world children already know: the place they live apart from adults, on their own, in power. Rowling charmingly decorates, populates, and dramatizes this place, but children are so comfortable there because they already know it.

Perhaps Rowling and Harry are strong enough to overcome the commercial grasp. Perhaps even after the movies are made and the toys manufactured, children will remember the books—and read them. As adults we may never fully regain the pleasures and privileges of children's secret spaces, but as their mentors and guides we can steer children through the commodification, back to the origins, and leave them to flourish in Hogwarts, Harry's secret home, and in its twining, hidden, turreted wonder, the emblem of childhood freedom itself.