Finishing the seventh and final volume of the Harry Potter series over the weekend, I was struck by the fact that a generation of children has grown up immersed in a morally complex world in which the traditional epic battle between good and evil is clouded by questions. The discussions on the many Harry Potter fan sites bear out this view that J.K. Rowling has exposed her readers to some of the most important and difficult dilemmas of our own age. That these discussions are often awkward and sometimes illiterate does not detract from the real passion and sense of enquiry with which they are entered into.
New readers start here. If you have never read a Harry Potter book (and in excess of 350 million people have, in 64 languages), you need to know that its world is divided into two occasionally overlapping realities. The first is our own, the world we live in, inhabited by people like ourselves, the Muggles - ordinary people who must make do with such imperfect devices as electricity, computers, gas cookers, etc., to perform the simplest tasks. The second is the magic world, populated by elves, goblins, giants, ghouls, centaurs; and as humans are in our world the lords of creation, in this one wizards and witches with magic powers are at its apex.
Wizards and witches may be magic-born, they may be the offspring of mixed marriages between a wizard and Muggle woman, or they may be Muggle-born but find themselves to be possessed of magic powers. At the age of 11 they will receive a visit from the Ministry of Magic, advising them of their 'special' qualities and inviting them to attend Hogwarts School, where they will learn magic. The Ministry liaises with the Muggle prime minister over matters of mutual concern, particularly in times of national emergency.
Harry Potter, the hero of this book, grows up an abused and friendless child in the suburban semi-detached home of his aunt and uncle after the death of his parents when he was one. Aged 11, he discovers that his father was a wizard, his mother a Muggle-born witch, both of whom died to save him from being murdered by Voldemort, the villain of this story, its Hitler or Bin Laden. Over the course of the following six years, until he turns 17 and enters the wizard age of adulthood, Harry Potter will repeatedly do battle with a resurgent Voldemort.
In the final volume, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, released on Friday, the Ministry of Magic has fallen to Voldemort's forces and the totalitarian state is emerging. The plan is that the magic world will take over the Muggle world which is to be a vast slave labour camp. Muggles (ourselves) are the lesser breeds - the Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, blacks. Those drawn to Voldemort's cause are obsessed with ideas of racial purity, they pride themselves on being 'pure-blood' (entirely magic) and despise those 'half-bloods', the products of mixed-marriages (though ironically Voldemort himself is a half-blood) or worse, the 'mudbloods', those wizards and witches who are Muggle-born.
In one of the most horrifying sections of the book, Voldemort introduces Nuremberg Laws. Families are investigated for potential half-blood ancestry and the 'mudbloods' are accused of having stolen their magic powers from real magic people. Deprived of their magic wands, the source of their power, they are reduced to pitiful beggars in Diagon Alley, in scenes reminiscent of the Warsaw Ghetto.
But what of the 'good' wizards, those who have heroically fought the takeover? They are not without the taint of evil themselves, for they are slave-owners - of the degraded house-elves who are under an oath of loyalty to the family who owns them, whatever the orders. One scene, towards the end of the book, shows the burial of a house-elf given his freedom, and the simple inscription on his grave: 'Here lies Dobby, a free elf.' In order to defeat evil, dubious alliances must be made: for example, with the goblins, the makers of swords and the guarders of gold, who regard all property as owned by the maker of it, and only 'leased' to others for their own lifetime; at the point of the leaser's death, it must revert to its maker. The wizards' cheating of these rules is, says one character, something on which they should reflect. Many species will not ally with the wizards because of bad relations, old grudges and grievances.
One of the great revelations of the series has been its reflections on the nature of heroism and hero-worship. The orphaned Harry worships the memory of his dead father, who was sacrificed in the first struggle to defeat Voldemort. James Potter was the handsome, charismatic champion of the wizard world's equivalent of football, Quidditch. Years later, Harry is terrorized at school by the behaviour of one of his teachers, Professor Snape, who evidently loathes him, yet bafflingly goes out of his way to protect him from harm, leading the reader to constantly question both his motives and his loyalty. In one of Harry's own moral awakenings he discovers that his father was a school bully, and one of his victims was his school contemporary - Snape.
As the fan site discussion boards show, it is Snape who is at the moral heart of the series: is he good or is he evil? Harry's protector is the headmaster Professor Dumbledore who, we discover, has himself been corrupted by the lure of power. Snape, on the other hand, has joined Voldemort only to betray him and become a double-agent. Why? Not because of ideology, but because the love of his life was Harry's mother, who went on to marry the very man who made him suffer during his schooldays. Repelled by the boy's close resemblance to his father, hating him for having been born, yet Snape hates Voldemort more for having killed the only person he ever loved, or indeed, who loved him.
In America, the Christian right has condemned the Harry Potter books. They regard them as leading their children to Satan. Perhaps they should be more worried that the real danger in these works lies in their sophisticated and empathetic account of the grey areas that exist within both good and evil, and the hard choices we all have to make to find a path through the darkness. (Linda Grant)
