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The Reverend Graham Taylor grabbed the spotlight like a Quidditch
seeker seizing the Golden Snitch last week, when the news service
Reuters reported that Taylor, a bestselling British fantasy novelist,
had been kicked out of a grade school after allegedly calling Harry
Potter “gay.”
But last Thursday, Reuters issued an embarrassing correction,
titled: “The story headlined ‘J.K. Rowling rival labels Harry Potter
“gay” is wrong and is withdrawn.” Turns out that Taylor had been kicked
out of a school after giving a talk to 12 year-olds, but he was
punished for using vulgar words such as “crap, poo, fart and bogey.”
Taylor reportedly said that Potter is “not the only gay in the
village”—a phrase stolen from the popular comedy “Little Britain.” He
later said that he was joking and that he did not mean to question
Potter’s sexuality.
This is just one more piece of evidence to show that Taylor can’t string together a coherent sentence.
Despite Taylor’s plodding prose, his publicists have billed his
novel, “Shadowmancer,” as another Harry Potter. Indeed, once readers
break through the choppy surface of Taylor’s writing, the resonance
with Rowling is hard to miss.
Set along the Yorkshire coast in the 1700s, the novel depicts
an evil cleric’s quest for world domination and the efforts of its
three teen heroes to stop him. Taylor’s wicked paralysis-inducing
beasts, called Varrigals, come at Taylor’s boy hero like the Death
Eaters that attack Potter from Azkaban. And the underground caves,
which set the scene for many of the battles, are reminiscent of the
tunnels beneath Hogwarts, Potter’s boarding school. But though Taylor
rolls out a host of fantastic and terrifying enemies, his inability to
ground the reader with any sense of who the main characters—Thomas,
Kate, and Raphah—were before they set out to save the world leaves us
wondering, like Kate, “Why did we get involved in all of this?”
Unlike Rowling, who makes sure we understand the stakes of the
Potter-Voldemort battle, methodically creating a new world that draws
upon long literary traditions of horrible families and utopian British
boarding schools, Taylor begins “Shadowmancer” as the nefarious Obadiah
Demurral is on the verge of perfecting his power. Already in possession
of one magical talisman—a Keruvim—Demurral only needs the other to
complete his goal. But the lives of Kate and Thomas are so
bad—destitute, with infirm or alcoholic parents—that it is hard to see
why they care.
To be fair, Reuben and Isabella, who briefly play host to Kate
and Thomas, seem to live a fairly functional, happy life. But that’s
all we get. Taylor, a former Anglican preacher who self-published the
first edition of “Shadowmancer” by selling his motorcycle, seems to
trust that the evident evil of Demurral will provide an adequate motive
for Kate and Thomas to kill the villain. Rather than creating main
characters with any depth, Taylor deploys Christian imagery, seemingly
hoping that the Holy Spirit will carry the plot forward.
Whenever Kate and Thomas seem to be at loose ends, a strangely
Jesus-like figure, known as the King, appears—direction, reassurance,
and food in hand. To convince Thomas to commit himself to the mission,
the King appears in a dream, and Taylor writes, “Thomas looked into his
eyes, and he realized they were the eyes of the cross, deep blue, warm,
all-seeing, all-knowing. He felt naked before him, as if this man knew
all about his life. Every secret, every lie, every ugly thought was on
display.”
From that moment forward, Thomas “believes,” thus endowing
himself with the magical power to call on the King at a moment’s notice
and defeat the giant birds, dragons, and other beasts Demurral places
in his path. That this mixture of the sacred and the occult is
unsatisfying should come as no surprise. It returns the novel to that
familiar, faith-testing question: if the King can defeat everything,
how have his enemies gained such strength? (“His ways are not your
ways, his thoughts are not your thoughts,” we are told. “Sometimes we
can never understand why he is or what he does… All I can say is that
he is in control no matter how dark or hard life may become.”)
Nor do Taylor’s efforts to add his own mark to what is
otherwise an amalgam of Rowling and Bible have the desired effect.
Raphah, the guardian of the Keruvim, sets the plot in motion when he
arrives in Yorkshire from Africa to return the talisman to its rightful
owner. Taylor has said in interviews that Raphah was meant to atone for
the paucity of black heroes in children’s literature. An admirable
goal, but in the novel, anyway, Taylor fails to address the
implications of his hero’s origins—even when Demurral takes the step of
branding him. The appearance of an African on the coast of Yorkshire
elicits relatively mild surprise from the local inhabitants. Indeed,
Raphah’s skin color and its evocation of the mysterious African
continent appear to be little more than a gratuitous reminder of the
ancient and mystical powers at work.
I can only conclude that the novel’s success—several weeks on
the bestseller lists in New York and London, in addition to a £2.5
million (about $ 4 million) movie deal—is the result of Taylor’s
ability to self-promote. His most recent hurdle into the headlines will
only increase his inexplicable popularity. After all, if it weren’t for
Taylor’s “gay” comment, would I have written this review—and would you
have read it?
—Staff writer Natalie I. Sherman can be reached at nsherman@fas.harvard.edu.
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