I hope you are enjoying the new Harry Potter. Such a wealth of invention. And so witty. No profound psychological penetration, I suppose, but who ever expected that in a school story or a murder mystery? J.K. Rowling may not be Jane Austen, but then neither is Dorothy Sayers (who made the error of falling in love with her detective) or P.D. James (so much blood, such clever use of the Book of Common Prayer), Edmund Crispin (the thinking man’s Dorothy Sayers), or Agatha Christie (of whom to say that she has cardboard characters is to attribute to cardboard an excess of sensation).
Even without psychological subtlety, Rowling has conjured up wonderful characters. Anyone employed in education will recognize Professor Umbridge, an administrator from the Ministry of Magic who cannot herself teach her way out of a paper bag but is sent in to reform Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. “She drafted a bit of anti-werewolf legislation two years ago that makes it almost impossible for him to get a job,” says one professor about a brilliant colleague. The enemy of the Umbridges of this world is imagination.
And that is what Rowling has in superabundance. This is not teenybopper novelty-shop witchcraft. Still less is it the nasty world of black masses and witches’ sabbaths. I have never heard anyone miss a point so comprehensively as the earnest, amiable, and literal-minded evangelist on NPR who objected to the Harry Potter tales as promoters of the black arts by quoting sentences out of context, treating the novels in fact in the way that some people treat their Bibles—as if they were instruction manuals for lawn mowers. The bishop of London caught the spirit of the thing when he said he would happily appoint a chaplain for Hogwarts any day Professor Dumbledore requested one.
Of course, not every exercise of the imagination is good. Films like The Patriot propagate a view of the American Revolution that fails to acknowledge it as a civil war between two sets of American colonists, and so perpetuates hostility toward foreigners (and lobsters) that the world might be better off without. Braveheart irresponsibly fomented political hatred within the United Kingdom (think how well it did at the box office).
Yet Harry Potter generates sheer eutrapelia (handy word, that). It recalls the playful Roman poet Ovid. Scarcely surprising, seeing that Rowling (like The Rake himself) was a Latin major in college. Now she is the richest woman in England, richer than the Queen, God bless her (both of them).
Which just shows that imagination has practical consequences. In dreams begin responsibilities. Byron dreamed that Greece might yet be free. His dream formed part of the Grand Design or Big Idea that made Greece, in 1829, the first independent nation to be carved out of the old Ottoman Empire. The consequences of the long, slow disintegration of that Empire we are still living with, not least in Iraq.
Half a century after Greek independence, in Thessaloniki, then an Ottoman city, Yiannis Boutari founded the wine concern that still bears his name. Of course, Greeks have been making wine ever since Homer’s heroes sailed the wine-dark sea. But only recently did it become commercially available in glass bottles like Boutari’s.
There is something of the smell of a wooded Greek hillside about the red wine they make in the Naoussa in northern Greece, fifty miles from Thessaloniki. The grape is called xinomauro, which is Greek for acid black. Ancient and modern Greeks alike call red wine black—after all, it only looks red in a glass. Sure enough Boutari Naoussa is a good dark-ruby color. The taste is robust, not unlike cabernet, and the price, about $12, is a good value.
No need to clutter your appreciation by recalling that this comes from the same area as Alexander the Great—the man with the grandest designs in all the ancient world. Taste is its own idea. The taste buds are, after all, the swiftest messengers on the royal road from reality to the imagination.
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