There has not been anything quite like it since the crowds waited agog on the quayside at New York harbour in 1841, to learn, from the final episode of The Old Curiosity Shop, whether Little Nell lived or died. Of course, the excitement, then as now, was commercially generated. But the hundreds of thousands of families who have, since midnight on July 20, been obsessed by the contents of the volume under review, were not grabbing the book out of one another’s hands as a publicity stunt. We have all been on a long journey together, with JK Rowling weaving her spell over our minds, just like one of the teachers at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, which Harry first attended at the age of 11.

The pure unalloyed enjoyment of the earlier books was of course darkened as soon as the story took us beyond Hogwarts to the other areas of the magical world – that very uninnocent place where Rita Skeeter writes her sensationalist drivel for The Daily Prophet, the Ministry of Magic allows itself to be infiltrated by the forces of darkness, the victims of malice – such as Neville Longbottom’s parents – languish as maimed patients for life in St Mungo’s Hospital, and the few who join the resistance, the Order of the Phoenix, huddle in the dingy “safe house” of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place.

By the close of the sixth book, however, even school has lost its glow. Albus Dumbledore, the beloved headmaster and greatest wizard of all, is dead, killed by the master everyone hates, Severus Snape. Hogwarts is in the hands of the enemy, and is certainly no place for Harry Potter and his two closest friends, Ron Weasley, the redheaded good bloke, and the frizzy-haired clever-clogs of Muggle parentage, Hermione Granger.

In the seventh and final volume, Rowling left herself a formidable array of narrative challenges. She had to tie up the innumerable loose ends, every one of which is about as safe to touch as a live electric wire. And she had to complete a readable narrative in which – surely to goodness (literally) – Voldemort would get his comeuppance.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Readers know that this is the last episode and that resolution will come only with heavy losses

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The problem for her was that, in narrative terms, she had reached the stage where all that was required was a denouement, and an explanation. And yet how could she write a book that was, in effect, “all” explanation of the mysteries that had gone before; and one that by definition (since Hogwarts was out of bounds for Harry and chums) could no longer follow the comforting old course of the school-story conventions, with its reassuring interludes of common-room gossip, of lessons with wildly eccentric teachers, Quidditch matches and food, glorious food? The answer is that nobody else could have pulled off such a narrative feat without being a bit heavy. Rowling does not disappoint us, though. Addicts will remember from the end of the sixth book that Dumbledore charged Harry with the discovery of the various Horcruxes into which Voldemort had cunningly divided his soul or personality to avoid death.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows duly follows the shape of a classic quest-romance, with many of the traditional hazards encountered along the way. (When, for example, Harry needs to get into the Lestrange Vaults in Gringotts Bank, to retrieve a Horcrux, he sure enough finds a dragon guarding the treasure, and there is a satisfying escape from Death Eaters when the three friends, Ron, Hermione and Harry, fly away on the back of this dangerous creature.)

Rowling makes appetising side dishes out of overlooked scraps – Griphook, for example, the disagreeable goblin first met when Harry, aged 11, draws out some of his gold galleons from Gringotts, turns out in this final book not merely to have his heroic side, but also to remind the children (children! They are now 17!) of the by no means innocent magical historical past, and of the injustices done in days gone by to goblins and elves by wizards. Another good thing in this book is the extent to which even our, and Harry’s hero-worship of Dumbledore is tested. The history of Dumbledore, his relentless ambition as a young man, his neglect of his family, and the risks he has taken in withholding information from Harry during the previous six books are all rightly held up to critical scrutiny, even if Rita Skeeter's “expose” of The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore is the garish and inaccurate farrago we should expect. The duel that took place between Dumbledore and Grindelwald in 1945 (significant date, surely?) was not a straight conflict between good and evil. There was impurity in Dumbledore’s quest for power over a rival wizard.

Some of you will not yet have read this book, so I cannot spoil the story for you. It is of course unbearably dark. Hedwig the owl is killed in the opening scenes, as Harry makes his final exit from 4 Privet Drive, and from then on, we know that the curses of the Death Eaters will fall with the merciless success of Homeric arrows at the height of battle in the Iliad. To those of you who loved Dobby the house elf, or the werewolf Lupin, and Tonks (by now married with a baby), I give nothing away, but keep the Kleenex close. There is one twist of the “surprise” plot, however, which I must disclose since it is key to the whole oeuvre. (Turn away now if you don’t want to know it.) Harry has been wrong all along about Severus Snape. The greasy-haired potions teacher and giver of detentions has, since childhood, adored Harry’s mother, Lily Evans. Since her death, Snape has been a tirelessly courageous double agent, so good at his work that he hoodwinks the Dark Lord up to, and beyond the moment of his own heroic death.

What is the story all about, in the end? Love and death. Tom Riddle, who transmutes himself into Voldemort, wants power over death. But so, too, did Dumbledore – that is the point of the three Hallows, magical devices: a wand, an invisibility cloak and a “resurrection stone” that parallel Riddle’s Horcruxes. In wizard lore they first appear in the nursery story of The Tale of the Three Brothers. The first two brothers try to trick death, and come to sticky ends playing tricks with the resurrection stone and the wand. The third, who remained hidden in the invisibility cloak until he was old and ready to die anyway has learnt to greet Death as an old friend.

The story hedges its bets about whether life after death is “true” or whether Harry’s conversations with the dead Dumbledore, or his dead parents, are just happening inside his head. “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

What these books ultimately hinge upon, however, is an unshakeable belief that love is stronger than death, and that while the pursuit of power is illusory, the pursuit of love will always in some way be rewarded.

It would be easy to write a sermon that spelt out such familiar ideas. But there are not many writers who have JK’s Dickensian ability to make us turn the pages, to weep – openly, with tears splashing – and a few pages later to laugh, at invariably good jokes. The sneerers who hate Harry Potter, or consider themselves superior to these books often seem to be hating their harmlessness – the fact that they celebrate happy middle-class family life, and the adventures of children privileged enough to attend a boarding school. But, as WH Auden said in another context, why spit on your luck? We have lived through a decade in which we have followed the publication of the liveliest, funniest, scariest and most moving children’s stories ever written. Thank you, JK Rowling.

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS
Bloomsbury £15.99 pp608
Buy the book here at the offer price of £15.99 (inc p&p)

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websites: www.jkrowling.com Rowling’s official website

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