An A–Z of Harry Potter. Aubrey Malone
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Название: An A–Z of Harry Potter
Автор: Aubrey Malone
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Детская проза
isbn: 9780007328567
isbn:
Charities
Rowling is a generous patron of Edinburgh’s Maggie’s Centre, which helps cancer sufferers, as well as the National Council for One Parent Families, and the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Scotland. She’s never suffered from cancer but a close friend of hers did. Her mother died from multiple sclerosis, which devastated her, and she’s also a single mother, having had a child with Jorge Arantes.
Chasers
There are three of these on a Quidditch team. Harry’s father James Potter was one. Ability at this game clearly ran in the Potter family.
Children
Rowling says she prefers children rather than adults to interview her at book signings. They ask better questions, she believes. Who better to understand a child than a child?
Children’s author
The stand-up comedian Steven Wright tells this joke: ‘I wrote a few children’s books—not on purpose.’ For too long this genre has been the Cinderella of literature. In the same sense as children were once looked on as unformed adults, so children’s writing has inhabited a kind of limbo for authors who are perceived to be unsuccessful (or, as Mr Wright would have it, accidental) ‘adult’ writers. Rowling dislikes being called a children’s author as she feels her books can be equally appreciated by adults. An enormous number of adults agree. As Elizabeth Heilman writes in Harry Potter’s World (Routledge), as far back as 1998 adults were reading them ‘behind false grown-up covers’ to hide their secret addictions. (They’ve since come out of the closet because the books are now published in adult editions as well as children’s ones.)
‘I never saw myself as consciously writing for children,’ Rowling claims,‘but rather for myself.’ She adds that she doesn’t feel she has to write a quote unquote adult book to earn herself bona fide authorial chops. However, one gets the impression she has a sneaking wish to write a book (or many books) for adults in the future. Adult writers she admires are Nabokov and Roddy Doyle—particularly for Lolita and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, respectively. The latter book has marital disharmony as its theme—something Rowling can well identify with. Doyle has also written evocatively about childhood, especially in his Booker Prize-winning novel, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
Chipping Sodbury
Rowling was born in a village called Yate, close to Chipping Sodbury. The latter sounds much more exotic than Yate, so she generally tells interviewers it was here she came into the world. It was, she says, ‘a place that doomed me to a love of weird place names’.
Chocolate frogs
These delicacies are the delight of Hogwarts students, and carry the added attraction of coming with cards. Rowling says she likes food to be identified in books in great detail, and that’s exactly what she does herself with her endless inventories of goodies such as Jelly Slugs, Fizzing Whizbees, Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans, etc. (One of her favourite authors, Elizabeth Goudge, featured food significantly in her book The Little White Horse). The idea of the cards forms an easy identification with children who would buy certain items to collect cards featuring movie stars, soccer players, etc.
Cinderella
Rowling is often portrayed as a Cinderella figure, a kind of female Harry who lived, if not in a cupboard, at least in very reduced circumstances. This has caused many myths to grow up about her pre-fame days, some of which are rather humorous. One story alleged that she wrote her first book on table napkins, as if she was unable to afford a notepad. ‘The next thing’, she joked, ‘they’ll be telling me I wrote it on used tea bags.’
Cleese, John
Cleese does an idiosyncratic turn as Nearly Headless Nick in The Philosopher’s Stone. (So what else is new?) Rowling is an avid fan of the Monty Python series in general and Cleese in particular. She greatly enjoyed the dizzy lunacy he brought to the role of Nick.
Coffee
Endless cups of espresso gave Rowling the adrenalin to continue pushing her pen across the page when she was drained from mothering duties. She often talks about her days trying to manoeuvre Jessica’s buggy down the stairs of Nicolson’s café in Edinburgh, her knees trembling from the caffeine fix.
Colloportus
Hermione uses this spell to seal a door when she’s trying to stop the Death Eaters from escaping after they grab Harry.
Coltrane, Robbie
This genial Scot, best known for his role in television’s Cracker, plays Hagrid in the film versions of the Harry Potter books. The special effects department obviously worked overtime to make him look Hagrid’s size but he’s hardly wasting away anyway, even without the camera tricks. One of his problems with car seatbelts, he says, is trying to get the lap strap on! He has expressed a wish to join Overeaters Anonymous. He wants to be able to call a counsellor whenever he feels peckish so that he can be talked out of it.
Columbus, Christopher
The director with the same name as the man who discovered America made the first two Harry Potter movies. Rowling appreciated how he handled child star Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. He also made Mrs Doubtfire with Robin Williams and worked as a screenwriter on children’s films such as Gremlins, The Goonies and Young Sherlock Holmes.
Comic Relief
Rowling took time out from the Potter series to pen two books for this charity, both published in 2001. They’ve raked in over £20 million to date. They’re called Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. The former comes with a glowing Foreword from the redoubtable Professor Dumbledore, who cites it as one of the most popular titles in Hogwarts library. Rowling has fun with the book, but on the back page reminds us that the charity she’s supporting is ‘even more important and astonishing than the three and a half second capture of the Golden Snitch by Roderick Plumpton in 1921’. Indeed. The US edition is priced in Sickles and Knuts.