| He claims to have hacked into the network at Bloomsbury, publisher of the Potter books, where, according to him, "It's amazing to see how much people inside the company have copies and drafts of this book." Gabriel's motives are pure, even spiritual: "We did it by following the precious words of the great Pope Benedict XVI when he still was Cardinal Josepth Ratzinger. He explained why Harry Potter bring the youngs of our earth to Neo Paganism faith. So we make this spoiler to make reading of the upcoming book useless and boring." |
| Quite the contrary. After ten years of the boy wizard, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Quidditch games and the evil but all-too-frequently foiled Lord Voldemort, the trouble with Harry is that we've had too much of a good thing. Rowling's creation still attracts a million gazillion fans worldwide, us non-magical Muggles will still queue up on the 21st of July to buy our copies of Harry's last adventure, but that first fine careless rapture has long since passed. |
| When you think of "Harry Potter" now, the first two words that spring to mind are just as likely to be "Trademark" and "Franchise" as "Boy Wizard". Gabriel's cunning plan to ruin our fun""he reveals the identities of the two characters in the Potter series who are killed off""made me want to read Book Seven, for no other reason than idle curiosity, to see whether he was right. |
| Pottermania is so much a part of the Potter books that it takes a little while to see that it exists in inverse proportion to the quality of Rowling's writing. The first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was truly startling, truly fresh""as ordinary, orphaned Harry Potter discovers that he is renowned in the wizarding world as the boy who foils Lord Voldemort, we shared in his adventures and discoveries at Hogwarts with genuine joy. |
| Over the next few books, though, Rowling's writing began to seem formulaic, the plots more tangled and needlessly complex, the books driven by the imperative necessity of topping the last one. The Quidditch matches became faster and more frantic. The body count started to go up""Sirius Black is dead (though fans hope he will make at least a cameo reappearance from beyond the grave), Voldemort kills off Cedric Diggory, and fans still want to know whether Albus Dumbledore, principal of Hogwarts, is dead or whether that was just a clever Rowling plot twist. |
| In Book Seven, Rowling has little choice except to up the stakes""killing off a Parvati Patil or any similarly minor character won't do, which means that it's either Harry himself or one of his two closest friends, Hermione Granger or Ron Weasley, who's going to get the chop. It's a bit like watching Jaws 4, where the body count stacks up in an attempt to compensate for the lack of plot""if Rowling is going to make Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows work, she's gonna need a bigger boat. |
| Gabriel has his own way of celebrating the publication of the last book in the Harry Potter series, I have mine. Here, for your entertainment, is a brief selection of genuine research papers and books on Harry Potter: |
| Jennifer J Conn, Faculty Education Unit, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia: |
| "What can clinical teachers learn from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone?""a paper that "critically analyses the teaching styles of the staff at Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft in the context of contemporary generic and medical education literature". |
| Alicia Willson-Metzger, Assistant Professor of Library Science, Captain John Smith Library, Christopher Newport University, VA: |
| "Thestrals in the Moonlight: Existential Intelligence in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"""in which she contends that, "in the characters of Luna Lovegood and Harry, Rowling is showing her readers two extremes of existential inquiry". |
| Alison Hansel, author: Charmed Knits: Projects for Fans of Harry Potter. Because we all know how much Lord Voldemort would appreciate a nice muffler as a Christmas present. |
| Tom Morris, author: If Harry Potter Ran General Electric: Leadership Wisdom from the World of the Wizards. Because Jack Welch would have been so much more successful if he'd played Quidditch. |
| And my favourite, from Joanna Lipinska, The Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Warsaw University, Poland: the self-explanatory "Social problems of the wizarding community within the UK - house-elves". |
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