The first Harry Potter book opens on a grey Tuesday in Surrey, with a family who would like it known that they are perfectly normal. The insistence is the book's first joke and its first warning. Nobody opens a novel by announcing that nothing strange ever happens unless something strange is about to, and within a page Mr Dursley, who runs a firm that makes drills, sees a tabby cat at the corner of his street reading a map. He looks again and the cat is reading the street sign. He decides it was a trick of the light.
His day gets worse in small, exact increments. There are people in cloaks in the town. Owls fly past in broad daylight, which owls do not do. On the evening news a weatherman reports owls behaving oddly all over the country, and viewers in Kent, Yorkshire and Dundee phoning in about a downpour of shooting stars. Mr Dursley overhears strangers talking about the Potters and their son, Harry, and goes to bed hoping it has nothing to do with him. The cat is still sitting on his garden wall.
Then the chapter changes its point of view, and for a few pages the reader is given nearly everything. An old man with a silver beard puts out the street lamps with a device from his pocket. The cat becomes a stern woman in an emerald cloak. A giant comes down out of the sky on a motorbike with a baby wrapped in blankets, and the three of them leave the child on the Dursleys' doorstep with a letter. From their conversation the reader learns that a world of witches and wizards exists alongside this one, that a terrible figure in that world has fallen, that he killed the boy's parents and failed to kill the boy, and that the boy will be famous there and is better off growing up without knowing it.
Chapter two jumps ten years and hands the story to Harry, who knows none of this.
The technique the book runs on becomes visible here. The craft term for it is the narrative gap, the distance between what a reader has been shown and what the reader has been told it means. The first Harry Potter book opens two such gaps at once and keeps both open for three chapters.
The first lies between the reader and Harry. The reader knows he is a wizard, knows he is famous somewhere, knows how he came by the scar on his forehead. Harry believes the scar came from the car crash that killed his parents, because that is what he has been told. Every strange thing that happens to him is a message the reader can half read and Harry cannot read at all.
His hair, cut almost to the scalp by his aunt, grows back overnight. A jumper shrinks as his aunt tries to force it over his head. He finds himself on the roof of the school kitchens with no memory of climbing there. He dreams of a flying motorbike, and his uncle tells him that motorbikes do not fly. A small man in a violet top hat once bowed to him in a shop. The reader is a step ahead every time and is not allowed to say so.
The second gap lies between the reader and the answers. The first chapter told the reader what had happened and kept back how and why: how a baby survived what killed two adults, what the scar is, what the letter on the doorstep said, when anyone from that other world will come back for him. The reader is ahead of Harry and still waiting, and the book times the two kinds of waiting so that they close together.
The arrangement explains how a book written for children can make its readers wait so long. A pure mystery keeps everyone in the dark, and a young reader kept in the dark for three chapters will often give up. This book keeps its reader waiting but never lost. The reader knows more than anyone on the page except the three figures who vanished at the end of chapter one, and that small advantage is what makes the waiting bearable. The suspense lies in how and when the knowledge will reach Harry, and a reader who is already holding the answer will wait a long time to watch it delivered.
At the zoo, on his cousin's birthday, a boa constrictor winks at Harry. They have a conversation, which the book reports without comment: the snake was bred in the zoo and has never seen Brazil. Then the glass front of the tank is simply gone, the snake is on the floor and heading for the door, and Harry is back in the cupboard under the stairs for the longest punishment of his life. The reader knows exactly what happened. Harry knows only that he will be blamed.
Then the letters begin, and the book changes gear, from irony to escalation. The first arrives in green ink, addressed to Mr H. Potter, The Cupboard under the Stairs. It is the first letter Harry has ever received, and his uncle takes it from him before he can open it. The Dursleys move him upstairs into his cousin's second bedroom, and the next letter is addressed to the Smallest Bedroom.
Whoever is writing knows where he sleeps.
More come under the door and round its edges. His uncle nails up the letterbox and stays home from work to guard it, and the milkman delivers two dozen eggs with a letter rolled up inside each one. On Sunday, when there is no post, letters pour out of the fireplace by the dozen. The family runs. They drive all day, stop at the Railview Hotel in Cokeworth, where about a hundred letters are waiting at the front desk for the boy in Room 17, and finish on a rock in the sea, in a hut with two rooms, in a storm, on the night before Harry's eleventh birthday. He lies on the floor and watches the lit dial of his cousin's watch count down towards midnight.
The escalation works on three lines at once:
The number rises, from one letter to dozens to a hundred.
The precision rises. The addresses follow Harry from the cupboard to the bedroom to a numbered room in a hotel in another town, so the reader understands the sender is not guessing.
The reach rises, from the letterbox to the eggs to the fireplace to a place the family did not know it was going, and every defence his uncle builds is visibly smaller than the thing coming for it.
Each stage is stranger than the one before, and none of them explains anything. The one object that would close the gap, a letter, is taken away or destroyed every time before Harry can read it. The book could let him open the first envelope and save itself a chapter, and in doing so it would give away the thing that is holding the reader, which is an envelope nobody is allowed to open.
When the gap closes, it closes at midnight exactly. The watch reaches twelve, and something slams against the door hard enough to shake the hut. A giant stoops in out of the storm with a squashed chocolate cake in his coat, and over the next chapter the reader hears the explanation alongside Harry. The two gaps close in the same scene. The reader has known the answer for three chapters and still gets to hear it for the first time, through someone hearing it for the first time himself, which is the particular pleasure of dramatic irony when it is finally paid out. It is staged as a birthday present, which is a small joke about what the book has been doing since page one.
The book is remembered for its world: the school, the sport played on broomsticks, the street of shops hidden behind a pub. None of it is seen before the fifth chapter. For four chapters the reader is held by something else, a run of events each stranger than the last, arranged so that the reader always knows a little more than the hero and never quite enough. The world is what readers came back for in the later books. What carried them through the first four chapters was the gap. The prose that does the carrying is plain and quick and makes no fuss about itself, which suits the method. A gap needs the reader's attention on the next event, and a sentence that asks to be admired pulls the attention back onto the page.
The technique is easy to name and hard to run, and the ways it fails are instructive:
Vagueness, when the strange events are atmospheric rather than specific and the reader has nothing to read. A cat studying a map is specific. A vague sense of unease on Privet Drive would have been nothing.
Stasis, when the strangeness repeats instead of growing, so that the fifth odd event carries no more charge than the first.
Cheating, when the answer, once it arrives, does not account for what came before.
The first Harry Potter book avoids all three. Every event is concrete, each is larger than the last, and when the explanation comes it reaches back and accounts for all of them: the hair, the jumper, the roof, the snake, the dream of a motorbike that does fly. A reader who goes back to the start after chapter four finds that nothing in the opening chapters was decoration.
I built the opening of a novel of my own from legal documents for the same reason. A reader handed an exhibit knows at once that a case is being assembled, and cannot yet tell what the case is for. Each document arrives like one of those letters, precisely addressed and giving nothing away, and the precision is what tells the reader that somebody knows exactly where this is going. The art is in the order the letters arrive, and in keeping the envelope closed for as long as the reader can bear it and not a page longer.