Fiction allows us to come to terms with the emotions, such as the terrible outrage in Kes
IS J. K. ROWLING going to commit Harry-kiri? Is she planning some appalling act of Potter-cide? The publishing world has been abuzz ever since Britain’s most celebrated children’s author insisted that the seventh volume of her series would, definitively, be the final one. And some of the characters, she suggested in an interview this week, would be coming to a sticky end. “One got a reprieve,” she confided, “but I have to say, two die that I didn’t intend to die.”
Rowling refuses to reveal anything more. And, if her last book is anything to go by, pre-publication secrecy will prove impenetrable — which will only whip up more frenetic speculation that it is the eponymous boy wizard himself who is about to perish.All over the country, muggle parents are already growing panicky.
They foresee tear-spotted pages. And how will they cope with all those
broken little hearts? “It’s such a betrayal of loyalty,” a friend of
mine railed before confiding her plan to kidnap Ms Rowling — like the
mad woman in Stephen King’s Misery — and force her at knifepoint to begin a rewrite.
But why? For the sake of our children we should look forward to
the death of Harry Potter. His demise seems a natural conclusion — and
not just for an author who is unwilling to see her creation resurrected
to some tacky commercial afterlife.
Death used to be an integral part of family life. People
prepared for their end at home, surrounded by those whom they loved.
They still do in many cultures. Once I stayed in the Amazon for a year
or so. When the grandmother of the family I was living with fell ill
she made a trip to the doctor. It took her a week to walk with her
stick through the forests. But as soon as she had arrived, she turned
round and came home. It wasn’t what the doctor had said, she explained.
It was that she had suddenly been frightened that, if she didn’t hurry,
she would never make it back.
So she spent her last month as a faint curve at the bottom of
a hammock. And on the night that she died, it was her 12-year-old
grandson who was sleeping beside her. And it was he and his sister who
helped their mother to wash her, who kept her corpse company until it
was buried.
But in our modern world death has grown lonelier. Too often
our elderly seem all but abandoned. Their little flats smell of urine
and solitude. When they fall ill, they are bustled off to hospitals: to
a strange world of hard surfaces and suffocating heat. Death is kept at
an antiseptic distance. And we seem to have derived a whole vocabulary
to obscure it. Granny doesn’t die: she is lost, or she passes away; she
is no longer with us, or she is called to God.
And yet children are instinctively fascinated by the subject.
You have only to watch the toddler fixated by the road-kill. You have
only to listen to all the brutally blunt questions of the “When you
die, Mummy, will Daddy cry?” sort. Death to a child is something solid.
It is something to be prodded at with a stick — or at least it is until
they realise that the adults around them are side-stepping the
question. Then they find it disturbing. Sometimes, in not talking, we
are communicating at our clearest. The child starts to sense all the
distressing dangers of taboo.
But literature can offer an arena in which, uncramped by
social expectations, children can discover and explore their emotions.
That is why all great children’s literature is preoccupied with death,
from the fairytales that first flirt with its possibilities to the
tragedies that encounter it in full-blown form. Fiction has a peculiar
power. It can create characters who feel as real as life; who become
our friends; who speak to our childhood imaginations in all their
hungry ferocity — as C. S. Lewis did to me, as J. K. Rowling clearly
does to another generation.
Like any child, I encountered death everywhere: in the
stillborn calves in the farmyard with their tiny blue tongues; in the
poisoned rats that turned to leathery mummies in the barn, in the
wounded wood pigeons whose slow deaths I presided over so attentively.
But as we retreat alone into the secret world of books, such
experiences gradually settle, find a context in life’s wider story.
Slowly we come to terms with all the emotions they arouse: lonely
abandonment (Babar’s mother), pained anger (Ginger in Black Beauty), unbearable outrage (Kes), heartbreaking disappointment (Midge in Ring of Bright Water). Slowly we draw towards some realisation of sad resolution.
Only when this is denied are we troubled. How many children, as I did, picked up Animal Farm
imagining it was some simple barnyard tale? I can remember my
bewilderment at the departure of Boxer. Was he killed or not? The lack
of certainty haunted me. It was as if some family pet had died and we
had never held the funeral.
Adults often fear that children are too fragile to face the
reality of death. But the only certainty of life is the thing about
which we seem most uncertain. It is better for our children to confront
death directly. Let Harry Potter be killed. It would be less confusing
than for him to grow up to become an accountant. Besides, as his
headmaster Dumbledore put it: “For the well-organised mind, death is
the next big adventure.”
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