Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
by JK Rowling
608pp, Bloomsbury, £17.99
There are still one or two questions left unanswered at the end of Harry Potter's last adventure. It cannot be giving anything away to reveal that we never discover how Eloise Midgen can be a martyr to acne at Hogwarts, a place where bones can be grown back and complex orthodontics effected with the wave of a wand.
With JK Rowling it has generally been niggling little questions of internal logic that give the reader pause, rather than the mysteries of her grander scheme in which that prime specimen of embodied evil, Lord Voldemort, slowly acquires the power he needs to defeat Harry Potter, his only adequately qualified adversary. By book seven, if you are familiar with Rowling's vast, ever-expanding parallel universe, it seems only to be expected that this wizarding terrorist should, by now, be close to completing a fascist-style takeover of the UK (both material and magical sections), in the course of which non-wizards and half-wizards are being rounded up for questioning by "pure bloods" and sent off - if they survive their show trials - to a wizard-run concentration camp. Now that the 17-year-old Harry has abandoned school for his dreadful, extramural quest, only he can determine whether the lights will go out all over the democratic wizarding world.
To anyone unacquainted with the epic so far, the latest tale will be incomprehensible. In earlier volumes, Rowling made heroic efforts to initiate new readers, but since this process would now require, at a minimum, a glossary, rule book and catalogue of magical objects, she seems to have given up the task as hopeless. But some regular readers may also be disconcerted by a tranche of Hogwarts in which there is neither Quidditch nor lessons. All the familiar Harry scenes have gone missing, from the inaugural, always comforting comedy inside No 4 Privet Drive and the annual bullying bout on the Hogwarts Express, to Mrs Weasley's Christmas jumpers and - more mercifully - Hagrid's inevitable adoption of some tiresome magical creature whose assistance will later prove critical. There was a time when you could set your clock by it.
To go into detail about the questing and battles that have replaced the usual timetable would probably be unfair: even a week after publication there may still be one or two children as innocent of Harry's fate as the American crowds who gathered at the New York harbourfront in 1841 to ask disembarking passengers from England, "Is Little Nell dead?" But only Quidditch fans could complain about the outcome: Rowling has woven together clues, hints and characters from previous books into a prodigiously rewarding, suspenseful conclusion in which all the important questions, including the true nature of Severus Snape, the fates of Crabbe and Goyle, and the presence of the dark wizard Grindelwald on a Chocolate Frog card in book one, are punctiliously resolved.
The author was surely right, on the eve of publication, to implore journalists not to spoil the surprise for a generation who have enjoyed something unique in children's literature (where the characters tend to stay the same age, like William Brown, or, if they do mature, to do so as hobbits, Romans or Aslan worshippers): a chance to grow up, in real time, with their heroes. But Rowling was duly accused of colluding with a ruthless marketing operation, which led to 2m copies of her book being sold within 24 hours of publication.
Although her sales techniques do contrast sharply with arrangements in Harry Potter's Nintendo-free world, it is curious that Rowling should be so harshly judged for her engagement with the book trade. Didn't most eminent Victorian novelists fight just as greedily for their profits, become, in several cases, international celebrities, and see their better cliffhangers and denouements stimulate the nation into moments of collective delirium?
But as her critics point out, Rowling is no Dickens. That the welfare of Harry Potter should, each year, become a question of national importance has only deepened a suspicion, in some quarters, that Rowling's writing is not merely mediocre but contaminated by her participation in a crass celebrity culture. In 2000, Harold Bloom despaired for her readers. "In an arbitrarily chosen single page - page 4 - of the first Harry Potter book", he objected, "I count seven clichés, all of the 'stretch his legs' variety".
If his computations had continued, Professor Bloom's cliché tally might by now have run into the thousands; the books have got so long and Rowling's style has remained unsophisticated, with an irrepressible tendency to show and tell. You feel that simply by cutting intra-paragraph repetition and the number of times she describes an angry Harry saying something angry angrily, Rowling and her editors might have saved 10,000 trees.
But colossal energy and wit have gone into other things: writing at speed, almost before her readers' eyes, Rowling has willed into fictional being, in every book, legions of new characters, places, spells, rules and scores of unimagined twists and subplots. This is altogether a towering fictional edifice whose vividness and sheer scale are enough to compensate, for many of us, for any deficiencies in design. Anyone who, as a child, never wanted a favourite book to end, must envy the Potter cohort a magical world that has grown by hundreds of pages a year; a world whose arrangements Rowling has depicted in such sublime, almost manically generous detail, that for 10 years her readers could more or less live inside it.
Equally enchanting for younger readers, Rowling appears genuinely to like and respect children, to cherish them, almost, for their moods, faltering courtships, naive political ideas, mistrust of adults and, in the new book, a vocabulary that includes the word "toerag". Only her teenagers can save their parents' generation from Voldemart's schemes for a master-race - in itself the consequence of the older wizards' conceit and their cruelty to supposedly inferior beings, the gnomes and house-elves. As well as saving adults, Harry the freedom fighter subjects them to homilies, in which he urges remorse, courage, good parenting: "Parents", Harry tells an errant father, "shouldn't leave their kids unless - unless they've got to."
His, then, is a most instructive mission that might be as nauseating as anything in Heidi, were Rowling not free with deflating asides from various members of the Weasley family. "Overkill, mate", remarks Ron, just as Harry's bonding session with a mistreated elf teeters on the brink of mawk.
It is a key element in Rowling's own myth that she plotted the entire Potter series before she started, and on its completion, you can see that the protagonists, the principal families and their allegiances, the design of Hogwarts public school, and the grand plan for a final confrontation between goodness and badness were, as alleged, always in place. But since book three there has been more and more evidence of (occasionally helpless) ad hoc-ery. Everything must have changed once it became clear to Rowling and her publishers that her readers - adults as well as children - would gobble up as much Potter as she could bear to produce. Hence such things as the tri-wizard tournament and an excursion to Downing Street to meet a Muggle prime minister whose original has also disappeared without trace. Even the newly arrived Hallows, some nifty plot accessories that allow for all kinds of crises, personal challenges and protracted revelations, point at a desperate struggle, once Rowling had arrived at the middle of the last book, to hold off the final act.
By itself, the cheeky Hogwarts motto (Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus) that ornamented the title page of The Philosopher's Stone is enough to suggest that Rowling did not, back in 1997, plan to end her series with a protracted meditation on death, prefaced by a few lines from Aeschylus: "Oh, the torment bred in the race, the grinding scream of death." The Potterati, scanning the text for learned allusions (and there are plenty, from Dante and Orwell to Jesus Christ and Tinky Winky), may well see in its genocidal, dystopic shadows the intrusion of a real world that became, not long after Harry Potter arrived in it, a far more frightening place. But the book's resounding melancholy may derive from something simpler. Whatever happens in the last of these brilliant adventures may matter less, for the millions of children who grew up with Harry Potter, than the end of his companionship and with it, the end of their childhood. Which is a much more wholesome story than Peter Pan's, but sad, all the same.