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The End Of Harry Potter? by David Langford
01/03/2007 . Source: Neale Monks 
pub: Gollancz. 196 page hardback. Price: £ 9.99 (UK only). ISBN: 0-575-07875-8. Buy The End Of Harry Potter in the USA - or Buy The End Of Harry Potter in the UK  ok to recommend unreservedly.
One major flaw to the book is that while it's raison d'être is the seventh book in the 'Harry Potter' series, at the time 'The End Of Harry Potter?' was being written, the name of the book still hadn't been announced. So every time Langford discusses the upcoming instalment, he can't actually name it. Admittedly, he tries to make a virtue out of a necessity by quoting some serious (as well as not so serious) suggestions that were floating about at the time. But this does feel slightly forced and given that the title of the final 'Harry Potter' book is now general knowledge, it is difficult to overlook the fact that the reader now knows more about this particular topic than Langford does.
The other big problem is that as a work of lit-crit, 'The End Of Harry Potter?' can only cover six-sevenths of the entire story. So while what it does cover, it covers remarkably well but in many places the work feels half-finished and unsatisfying. It would be rather as if someone were to write a study of the 'Lord Of The Rings' but only up to the point where Frodo gets nabbed by the giant spider. So it is with 'Harry Potter'.
We've met the characters and weathered the crises, but we're still waiting for the resolution and denouement. Is Dumbledore really dead? Is Snape truly as bad as he seems? Will Harry be able to kill Voldemort? Langford does make some very valiant attempts to face up to these questions, but he obviously doesn't know any more than we do.
These flaws notwithstanding, that which Langford was able to cover, he has covered very well. The depth of his study is really quite remarkable and both adult and teenage readers will find themselves driven to re-read the 'Harry Potter' books once more, just to find all the subtleties that Langford spotted but we missed.
More than anything else, Langford does make it very clear that Muggles and Wizards aside, Ms. Rowling herself is no mean magician. He rather deftly portrays her as a master illusionist, using those old standbys sleight-of-hand and deliberate misdirection to throw readers off the scent. Characters who aren't what they seem (like Quirrell) are interspersed with characters whose very names spell out clearly exactly what they are (like Remus Lupin).
Langford reveals the subtlety at work here, where Ms. Rowling quite literally hides things by putting them right in front of our faces. It is where Langford focuses on the writer's craft that he really excels and entertains. There are goodly chunks of text on issues of names and words, allegories and allusions and these really do help the reader see the hidden depths to Ms. Rowling's world. Like a skilled art critic, he points out things you didn't notice first time round, heightening your appreciation for the work and making re-reading the 'Harry Potter' books all the more enjoyable.
Besides drawing on material from the six published books, Langford has also worked in a great deal of material from other sources, in particular published interviews with J.K. Rowling herself. These are often maddeningly vague alone, but pulled together Langford manages to synthesise a few viable notions with which to entertain the reader.
Oddly, though not entirely unexpectedly given the dangers of prognostication, the weakest chapter is that concerned with predicting what will happen in the seventh 'Harry Potter' book. There's some harmless but not especially edifying frippery in the form of a set of spoof endings, one based on 'Star Wars', another on 'The Lord Of The Rings' and so on.
These don't really add anything to the book and rather feel as if the author was grasping for a way to wheedle out the manuscript to the full 200 pages his publisher wanted. These are then followed by several pages of more or less sensible predictions and then the obligatory empty space for the reader to fill in what actually happens. A joke that rings a little hollow given that the reader already knows more than Langford, at least about the title of the seventh book. Why not leave the entire book empty and let us fill it in ourselves?
So adding it all together, what do we have? It's a book about book without a name except, of course, we now know the name of the book it's about. It's a detailed and competent summary of the story so far but one that is necessarily incomplete as far as the various plots and lines of character development go. An entertaining read that certainly amuses, but doesn't quite satisfy. In short, as a work of literary criticism, it has much to recommend it: except timing.
By the end of the book, the feeling is inescapable that this potentially excellent book should have been written next year, when Longford could have tied up the loose ends and revealed all the mysteries. Really is that good in some ways, but fatally flawed in others. Harsher critics might put this down to a publisher's wish to get something on the shelves before the 'Harry Potter' fad fades out. But for now let it be said that this is a well-written, intelligent book that simply has bad timing.
Neale Monks
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