A TERRIBLE PROPHECY was hanging over Harry Potter’s life, and because of it, millions had been waiting, as Dickens’s readers once did, to find out if he would share the fate of Little Nell.

We left Harry Potter at the end of his sixth adventure, bereaved and wretched, having seen Dumbledore murdered, charged with the quest to search out and destroy the remaining magical objects (Horcruxes) into which his archenemy Voldemort had put a part of his soul.

The light-hearted touches that made the first three books so popular with younger readers are almost entirely gone, with a 17-year-old Harry even growing a beard while in hiding from Voldemort, now in total control of the Ministry of Magic, installing Snape as Hogwarts’s headmaster.

Friends’ loyalties and love are severely tested, not least by the Horcrux, which addresses their darkest fears. The body-count is far higher than anticipated, though all who die tend to be those you care least about (with one exception).

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

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

BACKGROUND

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If you remember that Rowling is writing out of a tradition you may be reassured. She makes sure the prophecy is fulfilled, but there is a twist – and an opening for a whole new series.

But just how good is she, really? Yes, Rowling is not an original, high-concept author. Unlike Philip Pullman, who acknowledged many of the sources that inspired him at the end of His Dark Materials, Rowling (perhaps for legal reasons after fighting off a plagiarism case) has been very cagey about which living children’s authors most influenced her own work.

Terry Pratchett, Eva Ibbotson, Ursula Le Guin and Diana Wynne Jones all have some cause to feel bewildered that the millions did not come to them, given just how much of their ideas get incorporated into Harry’s world. Yet it is, in a sense, irrelevant.

Rowling’s imagination draws on the same sea of stories that every other children’s author dips their bucket into. It is how she has combined these stories, and enlarged on them with such detail, energy and conviction, that makes her work unique.

True, her style is plain, often pedestrian. An excess of adverbs weakens the dialogue, repetition that any decent editor would have excised is left in and she has a fondness for sub-plots that became maddening in the later books. Her care never to describe the manifestations of any emotion that goes below Harry’s stomach strikes some as conventional.

Yet cinema loves her because of her overwhelming skill at narrative, the creation of instantly recognisable archetypes, and some genuine psychological insight about adolescence, often wrapped up in jokes.

Morally, Rowling is far more interesting than the norm, for where C. S. Lewis and Tolkien have unambiguously good or bad characters, she is careful to show how, as Dumbledore tells Harry, that choice makes all the difference. Good and bad wizards and witches spring from the same families, and this confusion is played to the hilt in the Deathly Hallows. Malfoy, Harry’s sworn enemy, becomes a pitiable character when his father’s bullying coldness towards him is revealed and, like the awful Dudley, shows signs of redemption. Only Voldemort (like the Dursleys) chooses to be remorseless, and that is his undoing.

How Rowling gets to this point, in a thrilling climactic scene – complete with fighting statues, stampeding school desks, full-blown wizarding warfare and some brilliant reversals that link every strand of every book – is embroiled in a mystery that can be unravelled only by cunning and patience.

It is the detective element, as much as the perennial appetite for fantasy, that makes her appeal to an adult audience as well as to children. A number of classic children’s authors, such as Alan Garner, Tolkien and Le Guin explore magic almost as a branch of manic depression – something both powerfully seductive and powerfully destructive.

Rowling’s magic, like E. Nesbit’s before her, it is deliberately mundane. Wizards have to do homework and pass exams. Magical creatures need care. The meals that appear at the wave of a wand still have to be cooked in kitchens, somewhere, by someone. This is why readers fall under her spell: because she makes the magical real, and reality correspondingly more magical.

The child becomes the father, and the father (and mother) the child in this last book. It is beautifully judged, and a triumphant return to form. I could have done with more jokes in the epilogue, to counterbalance many partings. No, she isn’t Henry James or Nabokov or even Dickens (who let us not forget, was thoroughly despised by academics, for his vulgar story-telling vitality and grotesque characters, until a generation ago). But Rowling’s imagination has changed the perception of an entire generation, and that is more than all but a handful of living authors, in any genre, have achieved in the past half-century.

Whatever other critics say, she is right up there with the other greats of children’s fiction. Our children’s children will queue up to make the journey to Hogwarts in their turn, and the gratitude of parents as they enjoy another day of peace during the holidays will be undying.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling

Bloomsbury, £17.99; 608pp

Buy the book here for the offer price of £16.19 (free p&p)

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