the boy who wasnt Potter

What if the world’s biggest modern publishing phenomenon were a constant reminder of a psychic wound inflicted on you as a child? What if you had come within touching distance of global fame, only to lose your chance and fade back into obscurity? Such is the premise of David Foenkinos’s novel Second Best, which follows the life of Martin Hill, a partly fictional child who loses out on the cinematic role of Harry Potter.

Martin, the only child of an unhappy marriage, ends up on the set of Notting Hill by chance, through the work of his prop-designer father. Eleven years old, skinny and wearing round spectacles, he’s spotted as a potential young wizard by Harry Potter producer David Heyman – but despite Martin’s best efforts, he ends up beaten to the leading part by Daniel Radcliffe. 

Foenkinos’s premise sprang from an anecdote told by the film’s casting director: Radcliffe was, in reality, nearly overlooked in favour of another boy who was “terrific and very vulnerable” – until Radcliffe had the “balls” to show another side of the character, by which Harry would also become “very powerful”.  Likewise, in Second Best, Martin recalls how the casting director had wanted a young actor who could show both Harry’s vulnerability and his courage.

This disappointment inflicts a crushing blow on Martin’s ego – from now on, he can only refer to Radcliffe as “The Other” – and it’s only made more difficult by how his life begins to mirror Harry Potter’s own early years, unhappy and neglected, albeit without the escape-route of Hogwarts. Martin’s father grows ill, while his mother takes up with a man who, through his abusive, bullying treatment of his stepson echoes David Copperfield’s grim stepfather, Edward Murdstone – a clever move by Foenkinos, given that Copperfield, on the BBC, was Radcliffe’s debut acting role.

It’s all a playful blend of fiction and fact: just as Martin is never entirely sure where he ends and Harry begins, the reader is unsure as to which elements are invented and which aren’t. Yet what could have been a blackly comic novel, satirising our obsession with fame-at-all-costs, slightly misses the mark. Its coolly distanced third-person voice never allows the reader to know Martin intimately enough, and can lead Second Best to read more like an encyclopaedic entry on the making of the Potter films than a work of fiction. The retelling of JK Rowling’s original conception of Harry Potter as a series feels superfluous, given how widely known the tale of the impoverished single mother who scribbled away in a café has become; we also learn that Heyman’s mother produced Dangerous Liaisons, and that his father had financially backed Chinatown.

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