Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows marked the ultimate conclusion of JK Rowling’s wizarding epic.  She promised it would bring Harry’s journey to a logical conclusion, and largely it does.

The seventh book in the series, it is more than a single story, for while it could conceivably be read in isolation the assumption must be that most readers have at least some prior knowledge. If you missed out on the previous books, or you simply weren’t paying attention, this is not a good place to start. There is little explanation of who the main characters are, what they do, what Rowling’s own invented spells do, and how wands might work, or any effort to ease the reader in. For those of us who have been with her all the way, that’s a good thing.

It picks up from the end of book six, directly, with a pre-credits sequence worthy of a fantasy Bond. A lead character is dead within the first 20 pages, and your interest is snared. But then we descend into a lengthy diatribe about life in the Weasley house, preparations for a wedding and seemingly endless truncated discussions between Hermione, Harry and Ron, which you wish they’d conclude so they could get on with the task in hand.

While book six tied off a lot of loose ends and explained the inclusion of countless seemingly pointless asides in the five earlier volumes, Deathly Hallows unravels them once again, throwing the story on its head with an enormous twist we should all have seen coming, while at the same time avoiding the temptation to make Harry some kind of invincible super hero.

In this much darker, more violent instalment, his coming of age sees him transformed from powerless schoolboy into true fighter. It’s largely believable - in so much as a book about school-age witches and wizards ever could be - despite two set pieces in which Harry and friends quite easily achieve feats that have foxed countless great wizards for several centuries before them. Indeed, so vehement was Rowling in previous instalments that one of these feats was impossible (it was even enshrined in rhyme) that to have her leads perform it here in the space of a dozen pages smacks of laziness and of cheating the audience.

But the greatest problem lies in the conditions under which Harry must perform his ultimate task. Anyone who has read an earlier instalment or seen one of the films will know that the series is a seven-volume telling of his quest to defeat the evil Lord Voldemort. Whether or not he achieves that here is a well kept secret that, unless you hunt it out, seems not to have leaked onto the net (and won’t be here), but in this final instalment the task is given greater urgency through the revelation of an inescapable condition that must be fulfilled if he is ever to succeed.

Through what Harry sees and hears we are told that finishing off Voldemort would be impossible were this point not taken into account, and a very important point it is indeed.

And yet Rowling finds a way around it that should never relally have made it into print. She promised much when she came up with that shocking condition, and then explored in great detail over subsequent pages, so does it get quietly dropped before it ever comes into play?

Rowling claims that Potter’s story is fairly comprehensively told and closed off, and it is, and for anyone who has read any of the previous books, this is a must-read addition to the series. But - and there’s always a but - only if you’ve read book six.

Rowling described books six and seven as two halves of the same story, and indeed they are. Neither can exist without the other; polar opposites of Harry and Voldemort themselves.

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Harry Potter, JK Rowling

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