My Harry Potter Mission

I decided to embark on my own Harry Potter quest of sorts before the release of the seventh and final book of the series - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - on 21 July 2007. Inspite (or perhaps because) of the enormous popular appeal of the Harry Potter series, I have only ever finished reading the first book - Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone although I have seen all the five movies. As is often the case though, movies are often a poor substitute for books in terms of wealth of detail and character development.

The goal was to attempt to finish the first six Harry Potter books before the release of the seventh and final book, enabling me to join in the mass fervour, excitement and speculation (or to sum it up generally - mass hysteria) over how the series would end. Considering the fact that I only had a week to the launch of Deathly Hallows, this necessitated reading a book a day up to the launch date.

The going was relatively smooth to begin with, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban were completed in two days flat. However, from that point onwards the books stopped resembling normal paperback novels and started to resemble massive printed doorstops (with the capability in hardcover form to do serious damage to one's foot). Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire still raced along quite nicely - I particularly loved the excitement of the Quidditch World Cup, but I definitely found the Order of the Phoenix far too indulgent and long winded. In the end I failed in my task - I was still at the beginning stages of the Half Blood Prince when Saturday the 21st swung around.

I dutifully bought the Deathly Hallows on the evening (as opposed to the morning) of the 21st, not wanting to join in the mayhem of overnight queues and squalling children. I dutifully resisted the temptation to even glance at it while I laboured through the remainder of the Half Blood Prince. Admittedly, the sixth book got more exciting as it went along, and its conclusion was quite a cliffhanger.

What I should have counted on was my sister coming by my house and asking to borrow the Deathly Hallows first, so she could read it. As I was still part way through the Half Blood Prince I decided to give in to the pressure and pass it to her. However, my sister in her usual fashion, didn't have much time to read the book (but decided she still wanted to have it anyway) and by the Tuesday afterwards had barely gone through 100 pages.

I had completed the Half Blood Prince by then and built up a considerable head of steam and was by then desperate to read the Deathly Hallows - the entire point of the Harry Potter enterprise being to read the first six books in anticipation of the final one. I at first resorted to reading the majority of the novel in Borders. To this day I still haven't seen the hardcover copy of the Harry Potter that I had purchased.

Being very conscious of the fact that the great appeal of the Harry Potter series lies in the intricate plotting and fully formed characters (it certainly isn't the brilliance of Rowling's prose) I won't give any details of the plot away here. Suffice to comment that the Deathly Hallows definitely picks up the pace, and does a pretty good job of tying up loose ends, bringing together numerous plot details hinted at in the earlier novels. It is proof, if ever it were needed, that the entire series was conceived as a unified whole, and testament to Rowling's ability to create such a richly detailed imagined world.