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

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