SO it’s goodbye Harry Potter . . . or is it? A midnight chorus of electronic
tills, the biggest one-day sale of any book in history and a predicted
damehood for J K Rowling, the author, set the seal yesterday on the most
popular series of novels in history.
However, even as tired youngsters leafed through pages to discover the outcome
of the showdown between the boy wizard and his would-be nemesis, Ladbrokes,
the bookmaker, was cutting the odds on there being an eighth Potter novel
from 16-1 to 10-1 after a flurry of stake money. Rowling is now 1-4 to
become a dame in the New Year honours list.
For one special night, normal bedtime was cancelled as children were permitted
to plough through torture, seven deaths and the final, fatal confrontation
between Harry and the wicked Voldemort. The ending should remain a prize for
readers who have read all 608 pages.
Tomorrow comes the release of sales figures. It is almost certain that Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows has outstripped its predecessors by selling
more than 2m copies in Britain in the first 24 hours after publication.
WH Smith said the book was leaving its stores yesterday at the rate of 15
copies a second.
In the United States the book’s publisher produced a record 12m copies for
sale. Amazon, the online bookstore, said that pre-orders from customers had
hit 2.2m copies.
As the midnight release approached on Friday, there were mothers in the queues
refreshing friendships forged on school runs 10 years ago when the wizard
first appeared in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Their daughters
were also there, but now they had grown into young women, arriving a little
self-consciously from wine bars and nightclubs.
Rowling surrounded herself with 500 children dressed as wizards and witches
for her swansong, a midnight reading at the Natural History Museum in
London. Sophie Stoll, 15, from Halesowen in the West Midlands, said: “When
she started reading the whole hall fell silent. It was eerie, everyone was
listening to her in awe.” But some had their eye on the main chance: by noon
yesterday three copies of the book that Rowling had signed were on sale on
eBay.
In Piccadilly, central London, there was a 7,000-strong queue at Waterstone’s,
where a hubbub of witches, wizards and muggles had been starting to wait
since Tuesday.
Harry Campbell, 20, a geology student from west London, had endured an
explorer’s trials to get an early copy: “I got caught in a torrential
downpour and on Thursday night I was sleeping on the pavement curled up in a
jacket because it was freezing. It’s the final book so I’d do anything for
it."
When the clock reached midnight in Britain, doors were flung open in 10,000
shops around the globe.
In Sydney, about 1,500 Potter fans rode two steam trains from the city centre
to a mystery destination to collect their books. In Karachi, a book launch
was cancelled while police defused a car bomb outside a shopping mall. In
Paris, more than 200 fans waiting outside The Red Wheelbarrrow bookshop sang
the Hogwarts school song to music played on the shop’s piano.
A child’s eye
Here’s what our panel think of the new Potter:
Ellie Edmonds, 9 Characters get tortured, while some die. I cried
several times. But it is a great book, and probably the best one.
Grace Calvert, 11 It is relentless. Harry and his pals are always on
the run, but there is also more romance than before.
Tim Leake, 11 The style is really heavy compared to the earlier Harry
Potter books.
Ruby Riley, 14 This is the final war between good and evil, and it’s
very scary. I’m so sad to finish it. It feels like I’m saying goodbye to my
childhood.
Pitch dark – the book reviewer
This last Harry Potter book is not the happiest, writes Nicolette Jones,
children’s book reviewer for The Sunday Times.
The world after Dumbledore, with Voldemort back, is a world of fear and
despair, where Muggle-born wizards are rounded up and where children are
tortured and are taught that Muggles are “like animals, stupid and dirty”.
The joie de vivre that characterised this series bubbles under, leavening dark
passages with Ron’s jokes, his increasingly undisguised passion for Hermione
and Harry’s romantic understanding with Ginny. But it is no longer the
salient quality of the story, which is full of doubt and grief. There are a
lot of deaths, perhaps a few too many to bear. The jubilant finish we had
hoped for is qualified by loss.
J K Rowling teases her readers, too, making them fear the demise of characters
who turn out to be safe, so reading is an anxious experience with lingering
false hopes when characters do die. And some previous certainties are
undermined: even Harry’s faith in Dumbledore is shaken by revelations about
his past.
Much of the story concerns, as expected, Harry’s attempt, aided by Ron and
Hermione, to fulfil Dumbledore’s instructions to find and destroy the
Horcruxes – the objects that contain the fragmented soul of Voldemort and so
can make him immortal.
The book’s messages are that good and bad are not always clear-cut and,
dubiously, that dying is not such a big deal, “quicker and easier than
falling asleep”. Overall, though, we learn that victories in war come with a
price that make them feel hardly like victories at all.
Rowling has not lost her mischievousness as, for instance, when Ron gives
Harry a book for his 17th birthday, Twelve Fail-Safe Ways to Charm Witches,
saying: “You’d be surprised, it’s not all about wandwork, either.”
The last 150 pages of the book are the most compelling, gathering together
characters, places and objects from the previous volumes into a tense,
emotional and action-packed denouement.
There is a brief postscript that looks ahead 19 years. It fulfils some hopes
but leaves us feeling that adult lives are much less passionate and exciting
than youth.
But not literature – the academic
Joanne Kathleen Rowling is a good woman who does good works.
The honorary degrees awarded her for services to juvenile literacy are a
worthy mark of her goodness. If there were a Nobel prize for goodness, she
ought to get it. A couple of billion smackers, one thinks, couldn’t happen
to a nicer person. Better her than Paris Hilton. Or Mrs Talentless Beckham.
But how good a novelist is JK Rowling? Is she, say, Günter Grass good? Jane
Austen good? Iris Murdoch good? Any good?
Those grey people who assemble the national curriculum don’t think so. In the
157 authors nominated 10 days ago by Ken Boston (“chief executive of the
Qualifications and Curriculum Authority”, to give him his full preposterous
title) as what “every British teenager should read” — a list which can find
room for Douglas Adams — Harry Potter is excluded.
There may, of course, be sneaky thinking behind the exclusion. Salman Rushdie
isn’t on Boston’s list either. Not because he’s no good (he’s the best
writer Britain has) but because putting The Satanic Verses on a GCSE course
would precipitate jihad in the classrooms of Bradford. It may well have
crossed the grey bureaucratic mind that “the little buggers are going to
read Harry Potter anyway so why prescribe him?” Truth is, the Harry Potter
books are hugely successful, but not great literature. What they are is a
fascinating example of literary mania: that reading madness which takes
temporary possession of a whole people from time to time.
Readers are like cattle. Most of the time they “browse” contentedly. But,
every so often, they stampede. There are innumerable examples of literary
manias. Psychiatrists, for example, routinely refer to something called the
“Werther Effect” — copycat suicide. So popular was Goethe’s 18th-century
novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, that all over Europe young men donned
yellow trousers and shot themselves in the head, in imitation of Goethe’s
doomed hero.
The “Potter Effect”? On the Today programme, a young Pottermaniac, queueing at
the witching hour, was recorded saying: “I’m so happy, I could die!” Not
literary criticism, but mania. And, one must say, more fun than lit crit,
even on the rainiest night of the year. Literary manias expire with horrible
suddenness.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the novel in 1852. In America, at the height of its
popularity, steam-driven printing presses exploded, trying to keep up with
sales demand. Its English publisher was delighted to see all six passengers
in his first class carriage from Brighton reading his edition. But, two
years later, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book was dead on the shelves. Last
year’s book.
Robert Elsmere, If Winter Comes, Anthony Adverse: ever heard of them? I
thought not. Each one was the best-selling bestseller, the Harry Potter, of
its day, and 50 years hence Harry Potter will be a distant memory, with the
afterthought, “What on earth did we see in it?” It’s mysterious.
The fact is, Harry Potter works for the here and now, but it won’t last. But
then, neither will Douglas Adams; charming though his books were. Rushdie
will last. Assuming, that is, we’re not all living in the Caliphate in 2057.
And, if we are, the imams won’t have much patience with Godlessly Pagan
fantasies by a shamelessly unveiled female. So, should we look down on JK
Rowling? No. She’s a good woman and a deservedly successful author. And (I’m
halfway through it) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is damnably
readable.
John Sutherland, Professor of English at University College London
