Eileen Battersbylooks back on a saga which reaches its fated conclusion today
Voldemort's evil is far-reaching; it has even managed to infiltrate some famously self-righteous newspapers, not given to breaking embargoes.
This dastardly act indicates the extent of the Dark Lord's influence even over silly Muggle journalists who appear to have no sense of self-control, fair play or fun.
Meanwhile, copies of the seventh, and final, volume chronicling the life and adventures of Harry Potter, orphan, young wizard and aspiring Everyman, have been legitimately delivered in the last few hours by elite heavily muscled flying corps owls who have braved rain as well as the pursuit of Death Eaters and Dementors to ensure the reading begins. It has.
By the time you read this, many of us will already be privy to some, or all, of the facts (depending on how fast you can read) that are likely to shock the wizarding world as well as those Muggles eager for further details in a saga that spans one boy's career at an educational establishment entrusted with the shaping of the wizards of the future.
Life has never been easy for Harry Potter because for him from the very beginning it has been associated with death. Since surviving the attack which killed his parents when he was an infant, Harry has been tested time and again. Long before he was summoned to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and subsequent unintentionally heroic deeds, he had had to deal with a miserable childhood, living off the begrudging "charity" of his horrible relatives, the Dursleys.
JK Rowling has ensured that readers grasped the desperate loneliness that dominated Harry's first 10 miserable years at No 4, Privet Drive. Loneliness remains central. There is also his lack of a history, forced as he has been to witness the parenting of Dudley, while he himself was ordered to live in a cupboard under the stairs. The day a yellow parchment envelope, bearing a purple wax, coat of arms seal, arrived at Privet Drive changed his life.
It gave him a past and possibly a future, albeit at a psychologically and emotionally demanding price. By volume five, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003), Harry even admits to feeling angry. Harry Potter's story is unlike any literary quest, because unlike Tolkien's Frodo, he is not actually involved in a quest. Rowling, however, is.
Her quest has been to steer this immense tale of survival, which unfolds during the course of one boy's schooling. There is a large cast of characters.
Wizarding, as well as Hogwarts itself, has a long, detailed history. Harry, aside from his chance survival - a survival which marks him apart just as conclusively as his lightning-bolt scar - is ordinary, a hero by chance, not design. Initially, he sees Hogwarts as a home and a sanctuary.
It provides him with friends, in Ron and Hermione and Hagrid; it also gives him a taste of popularity when he is seen to have a talent for Quidditch. All too soon he then experiences the backlash of petty gossip and jealousy. Hogwarts makes it even harder to endure life with the Dursleys at vacation time.
No one is likely to claim that Rowling is Tolstoy, but then, she wouldn't either, although Harry's adventures extend to about 1,000 pages more than War and Peace. Nor does she ever approach the literary sophistication of the great Tolkien, who placed his trilogy in the context of a vanished, heroic world drawing on elements from the Old and Middle English literature on which he was an international authority. Rowling is different; her imagination is street-wise and drawn to realism.
Harry becomes close to his godfather Sirius Black, only to watch him die because of Harry's botched rescue attempt.
Rowling does not even allow the boy the luxury of idealising his dead father: a flashback sequence all too clearly reveals James Potter to have been a smart alec bully; an ordinary teenager, not a hero. Then Harry loses the support of Dumbledore.
Harry Potter is about storytelling. Rowling's achievement lies in the narrative cohesion as much as the gags and the bizarre creatures. It is also, for all the magic, less a fantasy than a violent thriller. The books are plot and character-driven and have been sustained by the ever-growing wealth of detail and cross-references. Her prose is ordinary, unpretentiously functional.
"Harry had the horrible sensation that his insides were melting." Nothing fancy, but the reader gets the message.
Even at her most polemical, as in the side-swipes at social class, pure-blood versus mudblood, story is always bigger than the message.
Harry and his pals are growing up, the boyfriend and girlfriend stuff adds to the tensions, they lose patience with Hagrid's eccentricity.
Rowling has followed her characters as closely as she has her story. In the early books, Rowling made it clear that "things" were taking place at Hogwarts. Harry and his friends were caught up in these events. As time has passed and the subsequent books have come out, Harry became more actively confrontational and the story has settled into a clash of wills between Voldemort and Harry, just as the magic becomes increasingly violent.
The prophecy, kept on a shelf in the department of mysteries, in the Ministry of Magic, makes it clear that only one of them can live. Well, she has killed off Cedric Diggory, Sirius (my alter ego) and most daringly, Dumbledore; she can kill again. Now let's read on.