JK Rowling's saga matured mid-series but the final instalment still provides a tense, thrilling finale, writes Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent.
No food, no sleep, no moment at which it is safe to draw a breath - and that is just from the reader's point of view. Harry and his friends have learnt not to relax their guard for an instant - when they do, it's another death-defying crisis.
The reader must approach this chillingly exciting seventh and final volume with care and expect to experience nervous spasms as well as difficulty holding the 607-page book steady. You will laugh out loud, though probably not as often as you will gasp, even sigh.
Our boy wizard is now on the run in the company of Hermione and Ron. Be warned, more old friends will die, but no matter how upsetting this is, the plot-driven book will, as plot-driven narratives tend to, stick like glue to your fingers until the final page.
Loyalty will be tested and betrayal becomes a reality as unexpected, at times unpleasant, truths surface. Voldemort, the Dark Lord, has summoned up all his power, but so too has the resourceful Rowling who has continued to speak with, and never down to, her audience.
Her streetwise, subversive series begun a decade ago arrives at a hard-won conclusion, particularly for those who have read the previous six books as closely as Rowling appears to have recalled them in composing this one. Attention to detail has proved her strength from the beginning, and this forensic care, with its impressive narrative cohesion, careful use of ever increasing cross-references and flashbacks, has served her well, as has her neutral tone and believable characters. The rest is due to a relentlessly inventive story that races on.
Story always wins. The murkier and more complex the better. Harry's colourful experiences have often been comic - flying cars, wayward all-night buses and bad-tempered trees, not forgetting talking portraits, unpopular teachers, misunderstood dragons and girl ghosts given to weeping in toilets - but there have also been so many moments of terror. Harry learnt all about death early on, the slaughter of his parents dominates his limited personal history. Apart from that, there was only loneliness and resentment, as well as the bitterness of being regarded by his horrible Dursley relatives as little better than something smeared on the sole of a boot.
Hogwarts seemed to give him a life, but with it, ongoing challenges. As the series gathered momentum, the threats became deadlier; the dangers all the more real. Death became more than an historical fact, it became inevitable. Literary critics will continue to debate Rowling's unpretentious prose which is neither heroic nor Gothic - but so what? Style is not always relevant and is not a factor with fiction such as this; Harry's story has been about what Rowling had to tell - not how she told it.
Her use of language is ordinary, neither formal nor heightened, and never as irritatingly knowing as that employed by Lemony Snicket.
There are moments of beauty, such as in The Order of the Phoenixwhen a storeroom-like classroom is transformed into a forest to accommodate the needs of Firenze the centaur when he takes over as Divination teacher from Sybill Trelawney, or elsewhere, as in the death and re-birth of Fawkes the Phoenix.
In the death and re-birth of Fawkes, Rowling favours description and many touches which initially seemed like caricature, have, over the course of the books, fused as elements in developing believable characters. The telling has spanned the six years Harry spent at Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft.
With each year, the often bewildered and always interesting Harry has grown that bit taller, older, more magically adroit and more able to confront his destiny. His horrifying dreams became more three-dimensional, his self-doubt more poignant and his bond with Voldemort more bizarre. Harry, an ordinary boy made exceptional by circumstances, also became snappier. Harry's anger was always an undercurrent and it gradually became a theme.
It has to be conceded that after the energy of the middle books, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(1999), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire(2000) and, at 766 pages, the longest instalment, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix(2003), a strong trio which consolidated the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Princeseemed different, almost business like; less magical and more violent.
There was the problem of the opening sequence, in which the British Muggle prime minister, weary from a demanding day, reluctantly agrees to meet, and apparently not for the first time, Cornelius Fudge, outgoing Minister for Magic. Aside from the fact that the prime minister is a dimwitted individual well out of his depth as regards things magical, the previously unimpressive Fudge appeared to have developed a sense of irony.
The real difficulty for the reader is accepting that such relations could exist between a Muggle prime minister and a Minister for Magic. Throughout the previous six books, Rowling made it clear that the wizarding and non-wizarding worlds were parallel societies. To suddenly be privy to Fudge explaining to the prime minister that a number of disasters that have devastated the Muggle world have been caused by Death Eaters and Dementors is disconcerting.
When the prime minister says: "I thought Dementors guard the prisoners at Azkaban?" it seems completely out of place. The sequence is the most unconvincing in any of the books and there is also the fact Rowling makes it clear throughout that while most wizards have a passing awareness of Muggle life, Muggles know nothing about the wizarding world.
Still, after that shaky opening chapter, the action was back on course as the depraved Bellatrix Lestrange and her sister, Narcissa, mother of Draco Malfoy, one of Harry's nastiest school mates, seek a house in which to meet the most ambivalent character in the series, Severus Snape. It is fair to suggest that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Princeintroduced a darker, meaner atmosphere. Harry, Ron and Hermione and the others have begun to bicker.
The everyday rituals of school life are not as obvious. Harry's sense of wonder is being challenged and he and his friends, their faith in the protective power of their elders, are stroppier.
Boyfriend and girlfriend stuff is another factor as is the harder, meaner atmosphere introduced to Hogwarts with the arrival in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, of Dolores Jane Umbridge, High Inquisitor. If Snape had been insultingly sarcastic, through his delivery of many of the best one-liners in the books, Umbridge brought cruelty as a means of punishment into the school.
Magic as taught in the school as a means of defence became increasingly violent. Rowling has emphasised throughout the series that nothing is fully black or white, yet the violence undercutting much of the magic became blacker. Ambiguity is central to her storytelling and particularly to her approach to character. Having already killed off Cedric Diggory, Sirius Black and Dumbledore, it is obvious she sees death as a fact of life. So the sixth book prepared the way for anything to happen in this final book - and it does.
Right from the opening paragraph, magic and menace preside. One of the many strengths of this final book, with its comic interludes among the prevailing tension, is her treatment of what emerges as the true love story. This is love at its least soppy, it also adds a tremendous edge to the story and shows the advantage of not having a tale revolve solely on one individual. Again, it shows the importance of narrative cohesion.
Rowling looks to her cross-references and the many connections she establishes between some of the central characters. In this final volume, the impact of Voldemort on the Muggle world and reported on from the wizarding community's viewpoint, is more believable than in the previous book. Harry confronts death with the stoicism of a philosopher exploring a new aspect of ethical thought. So what happens when you set out to write seven books plotting one boy's school career? Well, it means each book represents one floor in the structure. It also means each book becomes dependent on the others, or inter-related. The whole ends up overpowering the sum of the parts. In the case of the Harry Potter odyssey, that is not a weakness, it was inevitable.
What could have painted Rowling into a corner, ended up being her achievement, a celebration of story. If you read one Potter book, you will want to read them all. It is to her credit that a series which matured so well in those middle three books, survived the lulls of the penultimate instalment, to carry its readers to this rollercoaster of a finale.