Harry Potter is a fictional orphan locked in a cupboard by his aunt and uncle, after which he discovers a magical world and a better class of nemesis than his ugly suburban relatives. It seethes with class. The Dursleys are lower-middle-class, golf-club-haunting gammons. I suspect their MP is Dominic Raab, and I suspect they vote for him. The improved nemesis ‘Lord’ Voldemort is half landed gentry and heir to a Jacobean manor house on a hill.
Harry Potter is world famous, and so people want to join him in suburban misery (we are near Watford), though in a slightly larger cupboard: the vast prop room in a former sound stage off the M1 called the Warner Bros Studio Tour London — the Making of Harry Potter. Harry is a boiler-plated mythical hero. His ordinariness is absolute. His loneliness, like that of Frodo Baggins, keens at you. Like all effective mythical worlds this one is never-ending; but imagination does have limits.
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