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Give Harry Potter a second chance to find happiness
By John Sutherland
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If Rowling wants the wizard to be with Hermione, she can make it so, says John Sutherland
JK Rowling remains the most interesting writer Britain has. She is even more interesting just at the moment, after a judicious leak concerning some second thoughts she has had about her great work. Normally Ms Rowling is also the Howard Hughes(legendary American business magnate, aviator, engineer, film maker and philanthropist) of her profession: intensely private. News hounds and paparazzi get short shrift with the creator of Harry Potter. But occasionally she throws teasing morsels to keep the fans slavering. A lecture audience in New York, for example, is informed in passing that Dumbledore, his creator now suspects, is gay. A closet door swings half-open. Quidditch, Ms Rowling elsewhere confides, was inspired by a row with her boyfriend. With her latest revelations, she has thrown her fans another dripping chunk of red meat.
In the epilogue to the seventh and last Potter novel it was revealed that Hermione, the series’ most eligible female character, was destined to marry Ron, the hero’s less gifted (magically) sidekick. This elicited howls of joy from the “Harmoniums” – those who wanted this outcome – but confounded the fairytale convention that the hero always gets his girl. Harry would have to settle for Ginny, Ron’s sister, instead.
Ms Rowling says she did this “for personal reasons”, although she does not reveal what they were, and now thinks she was wrong. She predicts marital breakdowns. Emma Watson, who plays Hermione in the movies, agrees: “I think there are fans out there who know that too and who wonder whether Ron would have really been able to make her happy.”
Ms Rowling’s afterthoughts have not gone down well. She has been accused of meddling with her own creation, as if Michelangelo had picked up his pot and had a second go at the Sistine Chapel ceiling. But there is another explanation.
As with the Jesuits, if Potter got you as a child, you are Pottered for life. The sequence began in 1997. Harry was introduced to the reading world as an abused child, cowering under the stairs in 4 Privet Drive. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was cannily marketed by Bloomsbury, its publisher, as a children’s book, which is what it was. But unlike other children’s stories, Harry has grown up, and his readers have aged with him.
That much was vividly clear in the loyal midnight crowds who waited in their wizard finery outside bookshops until the witching hour, when the doors were flung open and the awaited volume was released to the thundering horde. Those once-upon-a-time children, who cowered with him in their imaginations in Privet Drive, are now marriageable adults.
I suspect William Hill (a lottery firm) is already shortening the odds on the emergence of not just a second epilogue, to follow the one given to us at the end of the last volume, but another whole cycle dealing with the life complications of the grown-up band of Hogwarts alumni. At two years short of 50, Ms Rowling is in her prime. Her attempts at other lines of fiction have not been entirely successful. Fifty years (at least) of Harry’s un-narrated life awaits, temptingly. And, with more than half of marriages failing in modern times, who knows what exciting things may happen.
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My guess though is that Ms Rowling might give us another Potterian cycle and, who knows, there might be another Mrs Potter at the end of it all. The right Mrs Potter. Place your bets with Mr Hill now before the odds shorten.
The writer is professor emeritus at University College London
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