Goodbye, Harry Potter

Rowling's gift has always been for boisterous, jolly ensemble scenes and for cooking up zany and prankish magical creatures, spells and devices -- there's as much Fred and George Weasley in her as there is Hermione Granger. From Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans to the gnomes in the Weasleys' garden to the Whomping Willow, the texture and color of her imaginary world is earthy (but not lusty), homely, grounded, irreverent, antic, perfectly suited to the audience of 10-year-olds she first devised it for 10 years ago. Her voice, tone and imagination are rooted in social comedy and observation, not in the metaphysical and transcendent, which is why her more realistic bad guys -- the loathsome Dolores Umbridge, who makes a most-welcome cameo appearance in "Deathly Hallows" -- are more vigorous and chilling than her supreme antagonist, Voldemort. Umbridge is a bureaucrat, a petty tyrant and semi-closeted sadist allowed to run amok in a wizarding world gone wrong. We've all met people just like her, even if they don't come equipped with enchanted torture pens. Voldemort, by contrast, is a melodrama villain, a device. Sauron, he ain't.

Some critics have objected to an Op-Ed the British novelist A.S. Byatt wrote for the New York Times in 2003, in which she complained that Rowling's books lack the "shiver of awe" she expects from superior fantasy. But you don't have to dismiss Harry Potter the way Byatt does to recognize that she has a point. The sublime is missing from Rowling's series, but then you won't find it in "Barchester Towers" or "A Confederacy of Dunces," either, which doesn't make them anything less than masterly novels. The sublime and the comic don't mix well, and to try to squeeze both into a children's book is the kind of experiment even a master potion-concocter like Severus Snape would wisely avoid.

Nevertheless, for the final, climactic confrontation in a seven-volume series that has become a cultural phenomenon, people expect something epic, momentous, archetypal. So it's no surprise that the closer Rowling gets to that confrontation, the more heavily she relies on borrowings from writers with a natural gift for that sort of thing: Tolkien, Lewis, even Philip Pullman. The locket horcrux that weighs down whoever wears it, sapping their initiative and hope, is one of the more obvious quotes from "The Lord of the Rings," along with the thunderous last-minute arrival of centaur troops at the Battle of Hogwarts (the Ride of Rohan redux). Above all, reading the emotional turning point of the "The Deathly Hallows" -- Harry's solemn walk to the Death Eaters' camp, his willing surrender to Voldemort and the taunting, capering glee of the evil wizard and his minions -- induces (in me, at least) an LSD-grade flashback to the sacrifice scene in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."

None of this is meant as a detraction -- the writers Rowling borrows from in turn gleaned parts of their fiction from even older works. The fantasy genre at its best draws from stories older than written language itself; originality isn't really the point. You could even say that Lewis and Tolkien didn't write novels at all (they called their fiction "fairy tales" or "romance," citing much earlier literary forms). Myth, archetype, allegory -- all of these are literary modes in which characters, places and objects often stand not for anything in the real world, but for elements of the human psyche, parts of the self. That "shiver of awe" Byatt wrote about happens when you feel the boundaries between the inner and outer worlds dissolve, if only for a moment. Given that this isn't the register that Rowling usually works in, it's impressive how well she pulls it off when she has to.

But Rowling is most definitely a novelist; she writes about people and stuff, not about elemental forces and unconscious urges. Like all true novelists, she is the champion of the specific and the domestic, the often unsung pleasures and perils of a good lunch, a crush, a ball game with friends and a little gossip about machinations at the ministry -- which is why the doings at Hogwarts and in the Weasley household were always the best parts of the series. Her books, for all their spells and incantations and magical creatures, have never been the stuff that dreams are made of. Instead, they're the stuff that life is made of.

That's why Harry's great reward isn't something otherworldly, like Frodo Baggins sailing into immortality with the elves in the Uttermost West. He gets married, settles down with a good woman and has a few kids. His fate is to make many return visits to platform nine and three-quarters, even if he never again boards the Hogwarts Express. He gets to feel that twinge, that "little bereavement" that every parent feels on his child's first day of school; time passing, life going on. It's a very ordinary, unheroic sort of feeling, and that, more even than the assurance of the book's final sentence, tells us that all really is well.

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