| This weekend, I did my best to avoid Pottermania. Wizard costumes were banned from the Roy household. We refused on principle to check The Leaky Cauldron or J K Rowling's own website for updates, and I changed the Dumbledore screensaver to something innocuous and bland from the Windows menu. No one from our household queued up at 5.30 am outside bookstores on Saturday to be one of the first in India to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. |
| But by 11 am, my inner curmudgeon had been bludgeoned into submission by an army of Beaters, Snitches and as though dragged there by a summoning charm, I found myself at the bookshop. "One Potter, please," I muttered shamefacedly. All those months of raving at the marketing hype that had overtaken what had once been my favourite series, of complaining with the last two books that Rowling had sold out, had become too formulaic, and here I was, like any ordinary Muggle, frantic to know how Harry's story would end. |
| Or rather, which of the only two possible endings at her disposal would Rowling pick? The happy whimsy of the first Harry Potter book, where we were introduced to the Boy Wizard, the deeply disgusting Dursleys with whom he lives after the death of his parents, the magical world of Hogwarts with its singing Sorting Hat and a whole lot more, has grown steadily darker over each book in the series. |
| Despite the deadly dark magic of Lord Voldemort, the dark wizard whose obsession with pure-blood threatens the entire community of wizards and witches, it was only when Cedric Diggory died in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire that the Potter saga took a truly grim turn. By now, most Harry Potter fans understand that Book Seven will end with the biggest death of them all""either Voldemort will die, or Harry himself will succumb. Nothing else could bring one of the most successful series in children's literature to a close. |
| As Book Seven begins, we learn that the Ministry of Magic has been infiltrated by the Dark Lord and his supporters""Pius Thicknesse and the sinister Dolores Umbridge have a stronger role to play. The obsession with "pure-bloods" is turning into a drive against Muggles""non-magical humans""and Mudbloods""wizards from human rather than wizard families. Some scenes in this section are eerily, uncomfortably reminiscent of Nazi Germany, and the dull, mundane Umbridge is a terrifyingly convincing villainess. |
| In the wake of Dumbledore's death, Harry must complete the task that the legendary headmaster of Hogwarts""killed by Severus Snape, apparently on Voldemort's orders""set him: to find and destroy the Horcruxes in which the Dark Lord has split and hidden pieces of his own soul. There are moments of happiness and warmth in the early part of Book Seven""the wedding of Bill Weasley with the beautiful Veela, Fleur, Harry's growing bond with Kreacher, the hostile house-elf he inherited from the Black household. But soon, he, Hermione and Ron have left the shelter of the Burrows and the comfort of Hogwarts in order to track down the Horcruxes while avoiding Voldemort's growing army. Their friendship is put to the test, but there are worse things than squabbles among the gang. |
| Hogwarts is under siege""Snape is the new headmaster, and he is assisted by two Dementors from Azkaban, forcing several of the students to go underground and create "Dumbledore's Army". As Voldemort steps up the pace of his attack on Harry, the Muggle world and white wizards everywhere, many of the characters we have come to know and love over the course of this series die. The deaths are relentless, perhaps a little forced towards the end of the book, as Rowling tries to tie up every last loose end. After a while, the number of magical objects pressed into service, from wands to horcruxes, diadems to mirrors, swords to Snitches, makes your head spin harder than if you'd drunk a whole gallon of Firewater. |
| But in the end, Rowling offers many surprises. It turns out that we didn't know either the apparently evil Snape or the forceful, upright Dumbledore as well as we thought we did. And it seems that death may not be as final as it appears, that the living and the dead may exchange a few memories, arrive at some sort of closure. But more than the many plot turns and twists or even the conclusion, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a triumph for just one reason. |
| After a decade of relentless marketing, inescapable publicity and general Potter overkill, Rowling makes you care just as much for Harry and his friends in this final book as we all did at the promising debut of this young wizard, back in a more innocent time when both Joanne K Rowling and Harry Potter were relative unknowns. That, to my mind, is pure magic of the most spellbinding kind. The author is editor, EastWest and Westland Books; the views expressed in this column are personal |
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