Tunnels

I’m always suspicious when a book is touted as “the new Harry Potter“, and it’s not because I didn’t enjoy the Harry Potter series. I did—immensely. But “the new Harry Potter“ as s shorthand description of a new novel doesn’t always seem applicable.

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, for example, is occasionally mentioned as a “new Harry Potter“ and, despite seeing its popularity among my late-teen students, I don’t see the analogy—except in that it’s sold a lot of copies and is being made into an expensive-looking film. That, to me, is not what makes a new Harry Potter.

I’ve probably bored a lot of people with this story before now, but I did come into the Harry Potter series reasonably early—reasonably early, that is, compared to many of the six million people who bought Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I read the first two just before the third book came out in hardback.

But that’s not the main point of this anecdote.

At the time, I was teaching in a coaching college; among my classes was a Year 4 group, who met on a Thursday night at about 7 p.m. While not reluctant or in any way illiterate, they were not keen readers. They’d been reading Hating Alison Ashley and, frankly, hating it. In consultation with my boss, I suggested Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, fresh off my own reading of it.

At first, the students were very reluctant. They all bought the book and brought it into class. But they sat there while I read the first chapter out loud and moaned, “Miss, this is boooring. Do we haaave to read this, Miss?”

I wasn’t particularly sanguine about the outcome.

Until I came in the next week. And they were all sitting there, with the book lined up in front of them. Most of them had little piles of books one and two and the hardback of volume three. And they mobbed me when I came in; “Miss, I sat up all night reading this! Miss, I’ve read it twice already! Miss, I’ve read all three books! Miss, I had a dream that Voldemort came after me because I didn’t do my homework!”

The last one was a little disturbing.

But I’ve never seen anything like this in all my years of coaching classes of students ranging from Year 3s to graduate students. By the time I left that job several years later, those students were ploughing happily through the many hundreds of pages of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

I’m always suspicious, then, that “the new Harry Potters“ that are frequently vaunted refer only to the books sales, franchising, and movie deals, which to me is only part of what made Rowling’s novels a phenomenon.

But, and this immensely lengthy preamble has been building to this point, I still bought a copy of Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams’s Tunnels, despite the fact that it’s occasionally touted as “the new Harry Potter“.

Of course, according to the Wikipedia page, it’s attracted this accolade simply because Barry Cunningham, the man who signed the novel to the “plucky new children’s book publishing company” Chicken House, was the man who signed J. K. Rowling up to Bloomsbury—which seems a more tenuous connection than usual.

Of course, I haven’t read Tunnels yet; I only know that it’s the story of a fourteen-year-old boy who shares a passion for digging with his father and, when the latter mysteriously disappears down an unknown tunnel, unearths a terrifying secret deep underground.

Sounds great, frankly. I’m looking forward to it, even if it doesn’t generate the same general enthusiasm for literacy that marked my experience of the Harry Potter phenomenon.

But I’m not sure how those Year 4s of mine would have responded to it.

And I really hope it doesn’t have a borderline psychotic vampire anywhere in it.