I DIDN’T GET INVITED TO THE funeral, but still — I’m certain he’s dead. Poor Harry. When did he die? Like so many, he slipped away from us when our backs were turned. We weren’t paying attention and then suddenly, he was gone; and we began to notice that we missed him. We — Wait. Harry Potter? The Harry Potter, our Harry Potter, dead? It can’t be. Not least because, as it’s hard to avoid knowing, the sixth instalment of his adventures will be released next week in the dark of night; Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire will be at a theatre near you in November; and the internet is aswarm with Pottertrivia posted by Potterphiles.

And yet I mourn Harry — the Harry I first met in 1997, before he was killed by the hype that now surrounds him. I remember it clearly: my husband brought home a children’s book with a jolly, friendly sort of cover and said: “The kids I teach really like this, I think it might be your sort of thing.” And sure enough, I did like Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone — I admired its energy, its author’s gift for names and naming, the book’s ability to re-imagine the eternal myth of the orphaned child who discovers powers beyond his ken. It wasn’t my favourite book ever, as we serious readers like to say, but then I wasn’t its target audience: make no mistake, the Harry Potter books are not true “crossover” books — books that bridge the gap between the child’s world and the adult’s world, as stories by Philip Pullman, Mark Haddon and Alan Garner do — they are children’s books that happen to be read by many adults. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.

Harry is no longer a hero in the purest sense of the word; he is now a celebrity, and that is something rather different. The books (and the films) have become Events, hardly appreciable in themselves but phenomena viewed through the mirror of the media: we watch ourselves watching, or read ourselves reading. Books, and even films, used to go out into the world, and that was pretty much the end of that, even if they were successes in their time. After (I would argue) the surprise success of Star Wars in 1977, the release of a film became noteworthy in its own right, and this desire to turn something, anything into A Happening soon bled into other forms. J. K. Rowling’s books are truly successful in that they began as word-of-mouth successes and they are genuinely loved. But the machinery that began to surround them couldn’t help but begin to affect the books themselves. No author should have to live under the pressure that Rowling has as she and her books became more and more successful. Madonna, let’s guess, wished, when she began her career, to be so famous that she would find it hard to walk down the street undisturbed. But Madonna wanted to be a rock star. Jo Rowling wanted to write books; she could hardly have anticipated the level of her fame. Her hero Harry, of course, is something of a celebrity when he begins — his escape as an infant from the evil Lord Voldemort makes him famous in the wizarding world before he knows who he himself is. But by the time The Goblet of Fire arrived, and we took the measure of the loathsome Rita Skeeter, merciless tabloid hack for the The Daily Prophet, the wizard world’s newspaper, it was hard not to feel that a mythical hero was having his world distorted by one quite outside his own. The creation of Rita felt like nothing more than revenge.

The books kept growing. Fatter and fatter they got, and their devoted readers devoured all the pages Rowling could produce. But should she have written so many? Hard to think so. The trouble is, once an author becomes an Author, the pressure to produce the books, once a manuscript has been delivered, is intense. Editors may wish to edit — sales and marketing teams, now an integral part of publishing, want to get a book out there. There have been rumours (consistently denied by Rowling) that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will be 38 chapters long. So we gather this is not the case — but it remains true that as the books have grown they have, too, somehow become smaller, lesser. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix could have been improved immeasurably if it had been cut by half.

These days, when sales of fiction are slowing and there is so much competition for the attention of children and adults, those of us who love books can seem awfully churlish if we dare to criticise the late, lamented Harry. And truly, it can only be a good thing if thousands of children are allowed to stay up late on a summer’s evening to await the arrival of a book they have longed for; or if they debate with each other in playgrounds and on websites what the fates might be of characters they have loved throughout a series; or if they want to go to boarding school so they can be more like their heroes and heroines. Such is the power of the printed word, and we must all be glad of that.

And yet it can be said, that when people, or characters in books (and the best of those are as vivid as our friends who walk beside us), die — as Harry has, drowned or buried by his giant, terrifying success, a force more powerful even than the wicked Voldemort — their spirits live on, much as the spirits of Harry’s parents do in him. There is something real left of Harry, in the hearts of his readers, who are able, as all loving readers are, to resurrect him in their imaginations. Harry is dead. Long live Harry!

Cast a spell — read about Harry Potter and the wizard holiday, see Travel

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