No more school

When, ten years ago, you bought for Jack or Chloe a jolly-sounding novel about a schoolboy getting up to all sorts of pranks at an academy for wizards, I don’t suppose you could have predicted the tone of the seventh and last book in the series. It is apocalyptic, redemptive, Wagnerian and quite extraordinarily keen on violent death. I think there are 24 named characters who meet a specified death through violence in this volume, and over 50 others, we are told, are killed anonymously.

To the adult reader, the routine nature of all these deaths, the inability to register much in the way of a fresh response will be troubling. We are promised grief when somebody on Harry’s side is killed, and ‘screams and cheers and roars’ when an enemy dies. More than once, a character finds that hard work is an easy cure for grief. But probably, to a young reader, what will seem more worrying is being repeatedly asked to rethink his attitude to a character; many characters who had seemed spotless here become corrupt, and a couple of apparent villains have their honourable intentions laid open.