Harry Potter’s life hangs in the balance. Millions of fans are holding their breath. Meanwhile, his creator is baking a cake —and keeping her secret.
On Saturday, readers around the globe will learn the schoolboy wizard’s fate with the publication of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and final book in J K Rowling’s fantasy series. Will Harry defeat his evil nemesis, Lord Voldemort, and restore order to the wizarding world? Will he die in the attempt, as many fans fear —and as Rowling, an expert narrative tease, has hinted? “Harry’s story comes to a definite end in book seven,” is all she will say a few days before publication, serving up tea and home-baked sponge cake in her comfortable Edinburgh house. Writing the final words of the saga felt “like a bereavement.”
That sounds ominously final. So have we really seen the last of the staff and students of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? “Because the world is so big, there would be room to do other stuff,” Rowling says carefully. “I am not planning to do that, but I’m not going to say I’m never going to do it.”
Rowling (her name rhymes with bowling, rather than howling), looking relaxed in jeans and a sweater, shoulder-length blonde hair stylishly cut, has wildly mixed emotions at leaving behind the character. Rowling’s enjoying the absence of pressure from publishers and fans clamouring for the next installment in Harry’s adventures. And she’s revelling in the chance to focus on normal life with her husband and three children.
But after finishing the last book, “I felt terrible for a week. The first two days in particular, it was like a bereavement, even though I was pleased with the book. And then after a week that cloud lifted and I felt quite lighthearted, quite liberated,” she says.
“Finishing is emotional because the books have been so wrapped up with my life. It’s almost impossible not to finish and look back to where I was when I started.”
While some critics have dismissed the books as lightweight kiddie fare, others have been impressed by their moral complexity and darkening tone. Death haunts Harry Potter, who was orphaned at the age of 1 when Voldemort killed his parents. He loses his godfather Sirius Black in the fifth book and his beloved headmaster Dumbledore in the sixth. No wonder fans fear for Harry’s future.
Rowling was profoundly affected by the death of her own mother from multiple sclerosis in 1990 at the age of 45.
“My mum died six months into writing (the books), and I think that set the central theme —this boy dealing with loss,” Rowling says. And she makes no apologies for exposing children to death.
“I think children are very scared of this stuff even if they haven’t experienced it, and I think the way to meet that is head-on,” she says. “I absolutely believe, as a writer and as a parent, that the solution is not to pretend things don’t happen but to examine them in a loving, safe way.”
Rowling says her success has been “the experience of a lifetime.” But it also has brought an intense level of pressure, scrutiny and criticism. In the United States, her book tours have attracted thousands of screaming children, but also death threats. Some Christians have called for the books to be banned, claiming they promote witchcraft.
But it’s only now that she realises just how intense the pressure has been at the centre of the Harry Potter whirlwind.
“I was very lonely with it,” she says. “It’s not like being in a pop group, where at least there would be three or four other people who knew what it was like to be on the inside. Only I knew what it was like to be generating this world as it became bigger and bigger and bigger and more and more people were invested in it.”
Rowling predicts that some of Harry’s fans will dislike “Deathly Hallows.” But she is proud of it. “The final book is what it was always supposed to be, and so I feel very at peace with that fact,” she says.
As for the future, she says she has no plans.
“I can never write anything as popular again,” she said. “Lightning does not strike in the same place twice.
“I’ll do exactly what I did with Harry —I’ll write what I really want to write, and if it’s something similar, that’s OK, and if it’s something very different, that’s OK. “I just really want to fall in love with an idea again, and go with that.”
J K RowLINg and her midas touch
It is a classic rags-to-riches tale. In the mid-1990s, author J K Rowling was a single mother claiming state benefits and writing in Edinburgh cafes while her daughter napped. She had no agent or publisher and planned to return to teaching to make ends meet, reports Reuters from London.
Just 10 years later, in February 2004, the creator of the Harry Potter stories was declared the first dollar-billionaire writer by the Forbes magazine, and her personal fortune has swelled since as more books and films appeared.
Joanne Rowling, 41, has questioned estimates of her wealth. But there is no doubt that she is one of the world’s most famous authors, and probably its most successful, having sold 325 million copies of the first six books in her seven-book Harry Potter series. The first four films earned around $3.5 billion at the box office. Rowling has talked of the downside to her fame and fortune, but the Potter success gave her a sense of self respect she did not have as an unemployed, single mother. “Yes. I don’t feel like quite such a waste of space any more,” she said in a 2003 interview, when asked whether success had changed her. “I totally felt a waste of space. I was lousy.”
Rowling enjoyed telling stories to her younger sister Di from an early age. She said she was writing “almost continuously” from the age of six, and as a teenager harboured thoughts of one day becoming an author.
According to her online autobiography, the idea of Harry Potter first came to Rowling on a crowded train from Manchester to London, but because she did not have a pen she developed the character of the boy wizard in her mind. She began writing Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone that evening. In December, 1990, her mother died after suffering from multiple sclerosis for several years, an event which Rowling said “changed both my world and Harry’s forever”.
The following year, she moved to Portugal as an English teacher and met and married journalist Jorge Arantes, with whom she had her first child Jessica. The couple later divorced. Rowling left Portugal for Edinburgh, where her sister Di was living.
There she finished her novel, writing most evenings and dashing into cafes when Jessica fell asleep in her pushchair.
She managed to find an agent, Christopher Little, but it took him a year to find a publisher to agree to print the first Harry Potter novel — Bloomsbury in London.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone went on sale in 1997, winning several awards and helping earn the author a US publisher.
In December, 2001, Rowling married Neil Murray, an anaesthetist, and the couple have had two children.
