It has certainly worked at schools, especially for boys, whose reading has clearly taken an upward swing – for this alone, Rowling deserves her rewards.The second group are the Occasional Readers. These people claim that tiredness, work and children allow them to read only a few books a year. Yet now – to be part of the crowd, to say they’ve read it – they put Harry Potter on their oh-so-select reading list It’s infuriating, it’s maddening, it sends me ballistic. Yes, I’m a writer myself, writing difficult, unreadable, hopefully unsettling novels, but there are so many other good books out there, so much rewarding, enlightening, enlarging works of fiction for adults; and yet these sad cases are swept along by the hype, the faddism, into reading a children’s book Put like that, it’s worse than maddening, it’s pathetic. When I rule the world, all editions will carry a heavy-print literacy warning: “This Is A Children’s Book, Designed For Under Elevens. It May Seriously Damage Your Credibility.” I can dream, can’t I?The third group are the Regular Readers, for whom Harry is sandwiched between McEwan and Balzac, Roth and Dickens.

This is the real baffler – what on earth do they get out of reading it? Why bother? But if they can rattle through it in a week just to say they’ve been there – like going to Longleat or the Eiffel Tower – the worst they’re doing is encouraging others.By now you’re asking: “What’s he got against these books, they’re just a bit of escapism, just a great fantasy?” First, let me make it clear, I’m not here to criticise or praise the quality of JK’s prose or inventiveness They may indeed be the best children’s novels ever written. But I’m sure JK would be the first to agree that they are children’s books, that they are successful precisely because they appeal so directly to the childish imagination, address the problems and questions of childhood, enact the hopes and dreams of childhood. Now this is a completely different set of questions from those that mesmerise us in adult life. A child is free to wonder about magic, to believe in the clear purity of the struggle between good and evil, to bask in simple, unquestioning friendships. As adults, we deal with the constantly muddled nature of good and evil, we take on things like the constraints and longevity of love, we carry a responsibility for the safety of others, we crave success and fear failure, we confront the reality of dreams.And this is why different books are written for these two tribes: there is barely any genuine or useful crossover between the agendas. When I read a novel, I look to it to tell me some truths about human life – the truths that non-fiction cannot reach. These might be moral, sexual, political or psychological truths and I expect my life to be enlarged, however slightly, by the experience of reading something fictional.

I cannot hope to come closer to any of these truths through a children’s novel, where nice clean white lines are painted between the good guys and the evil ones, where magic exists, and where there are adults on hand to delineate rules. Adult fiction is about a world without rules.I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: “Does everything we read somehow have to improve us? Does even a novel have to ‘enlarge’ us? Isn’t there room for a bit of escapism?” Of course there is! But there is such a thing as escapism for adults. There are plenty of books that have little or nothing genuinely to say about the human condition, but at least they are constructed from the building bricks of adult experience – there are sexual tensions in the evil, there is a dubiety between the good guys and the bad, there is an understanding of complex human psychologies. Even the flimsiest of science fiction or the nastiest of horror stories or the most intricate of spy novels uses this as the mortar to bond together its narrative.

There is no such psychological understanding in children’s novels: it would be foolish for any children’s writer to hope that a child reader would understand, let alone enjoy, such a level of plotting. To read a children’s book is not escapism – it’s evasion, it’s retreat, it’s surrender.So how do all these grown-ups manage to get through it? Of course, we have all read similar books out loud to our children and enjoyed the experience, possibly enjoyed the book itself – only because we were vicariously enjoying it through them. This is one of the few untouchable pleasures of parenting; to live and relive experiences through your children, whether book or film or music; to watch them discover the joy of listening. This is no different from taking them to see the latest Disney – you’ll laugh, you’ll get into it, you may even have a good time.