The late Harry Potter

[deborahhbbrd]

No: HPFGUIDX 130289

The prophecy certainly seems to suggest the deaths of both Harry and
Voldemort, and this would be rather a weak ending in my view, though
pretty well in line with Hamlet.

But actually, child readers can put up with death if it's well
motivated. What about Beth in Little Women - or did she survive into
Good Wives? (Nobody reads The Old Curiosity Shop any more, so let's
ignore Little Nell - but grown men and women wept in the streets when
the magazine in which she finally became extinct appeared, and they
all survived and kept on buying Dickens!) And there's always the final
CS Lewis volume in the Lion, Witch and Wardrobe series - is it The
Last Battle? The three main human characters - Peter, Edmund and Lucy
- are in a train crash, and are delighted to discover that they've
died in it because now they need never leave their alternative world.
Which is obviously heaven, since Narnia ends. And we know that the
books were written with a clearly evangelical purpose ... which we
don't know about the HP books. We may suspect that they follow the
usual pattern of good triumphing over evil, but to call this Christian
is too narrow.

The idea of Dumbledore rising from the dead like a phoenix is
charming, but alas! I can see too many holes in it. And as for Harry,
my best bet is still that he survives as a mortal being but without
his magical talent - becomes a Squib, I suppose. And that would be a
kind of death. But certainly gentler than the real thing, and
something that could very well move the plot along to its conclusion:
something like: only by Harry doing a Prospero and renouncing that
rough magic can Voldemort lose his own power.

My other great hope of the moment is that JKR is less, er, sentimental
than some of her fans! Children are the great realists, remember.

We shall see.

Deborah, who would love to see through walls and into printing works!