Anyone who hasn’t read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and plans to, should read no further because what follows gives important bits of the plot away. That warning safely out of the way, the last book was an enormous relief. I wasn’t looking forward to Deathly Hallows because the three instalments of Harry’s adventures that came before this one, had begun to read (despite their bulk) like gigantic plot-summaries for a Mahabharata-length TV serial.

I can recall the shape of the first three books without effort and when I think of them, their denouements pop-up on cue: the creepy finish of the first, where Voldemort turns up like a spare face on the back of Quirrell’s head, the flourishing climax in the second when Harry kills the diary and Tom Riddle with the Basilisk’s fang and the intense fraternity that makes The Prisoner of Azkaban the best of the seven, the backstory of the doings of Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs. After Azkaban, the books became shapeless and hard to remember. They were still intricately patterned and plotted, but to what narrative purpose, it was hard to tell. I read them for their set-pieces: the Tri-Wizard tourney, the Quidditch games, Snape’s elaborately scripted malice and the reliable anarchy of the Weasley household.

The other difficulty with reading the saga after the third book was the way Rowling set about stoking expectation in the lead-up to each volume from the Goblet of Fire on. She would let drop hints that were meant to a) underline the growing maturity of Harry and his friends, and b) encourage the reader to read the saga as an extended coming-of-age story with all its attendant life-lessons, not just a schoolboy romp with broomsticks and wands. Rowling’s preferred motif for maturity was Death. Starting with Goblet of Fire, she sent the books on their way with little hints that important characters whom readers might have become attached to, were likely to die.

I found this annoying because it changed the way I read the later books. I read them with a fixed anxiety about someone I liked, dying. Luckily no one I really cared about died till Book 6, The Half-Blood Prince, when Dumbledore was killed by Snape. I was unmoved by Cedric Diggory’s death in Goblet of Fire, as, I imagine, was everyone who read the book, and Sirius Black seemed so capable of taking care of himself that when he fell out of the story in Order of the Phoenix (by some distance the worst book in the series) I just assumed that he would turn up again. One of the reasons why the later books seemed less pleasurable was that I tore through them at a furious rate just to make sure that the characters I liked were present and accounted for. The pre-release gnomic utterances must have been great for sales, but on the reasonable assumption that Rowling couldn’t be strapped for money, she should have held off. Author- inspired teaser-trailers before a book release is a novelty we can do without.

Having said that, one of the reasons I liked the last book was that Rowling’s oracular mutterings about gloom and doom and death came to nothing. She had wound me up into believing that one of the central characters would die in the last book and for me that boiled down to Harry, Hermione and Ron. Snape was central too, but she couldn’t have meant him because nobody would have cared if he died. Ginny, Ron’s sister and Harry’s sometime sweetheart, was a possible candidate along with Hagrid, but by the time I began reading the last one, I’d persuaded myself that Rowling was gunning for one of the threesome. I even knew which one: Ron. My reasoning was that in a gang made up of two boys and a girl, no author would dare kill the girl off.

I was thrilled that I was wrong but I’m pretty sure that Rowling, possessed as she is by the idiot idea that good people dying equals grown-up fiction, considered killing Ron off. Someone sensible must have told her that this would be the most unforgivable authorial whim since Louisa M. Alcott married Larry off to Amy instead of Jo, so she changed her mind...but not completely. When it’s written, Rowling’s authorized biography will reveal (just remember you read it here first) that having spared Ron, she went looking for a really likeable character she could kill off instead and picked Fred. Why Fred? If she wanted a member of the Weasley family, why didn’t she, having re-admitted Percy into the family fold, let him redeem himself by dying for his collaborationist sins? I’ve designed a T-shirt which reads “Fred not Dead” in front and “No Mercy for Percy” at the back. If we march up and down in large enough numbers in front of television cameras maybe she’ll write us an alternative ending?

Still, she didn’t kill off Ron because she realized in good time that she had spent years writing a buoyant epic that had as its substance not the simple-minded darkness that she periodically injected into it via murder, in the hope of giving it literary heft, but the lightness that happiness brings.

In the same way, she did a good job suggesting Hitler and the Nazi subversion of Weimar as Voldemort took over the Ministry of Magic, rounded up the mudbloods, and let his stormtroopers kill a few. But she didn’t allow a mudblood Holocaust because she recognized that that would be tragedy on a scale that her chosen genre couldn’t bear.

Which brings me to the final chapter of Deathly Hallows, the one called ‘Nineteen Years Later’, in which Harry and Ginny bring their children to Platform 9 ¾ to see them off on the Hogwarts Express. Ron and Hermione join them there with two children of their own. It’s the happiest of happy endings, shamelessly designed to twang big nostalgic heartstrings, to make our eyes prickle for young Harry and Hermione and Ron. For children who grew up with the series, it’s like a flashback to the magical childhood they never had.

I keep hearing grown-up readers moan about how bourgeois and suburban this coda is, how dispiriting that after seven hectic books, Rowling chooses to hold out domestic wedded bliss complete with children as the consummation her readers should aspire to. There are two things to be said about this. One, the trajectory of the entire series, leads to this conclusion: this isn’t a tacked-on end. Harry, in case anyone’s forgotten, was orphaned early, fostered by horrible surrogate parents, then forced to spend his young life fighting the Devil in several incarnations: given the context, a ‘happily ever after’ made up of domestic contentment seems a reasonable aspiration. Two, the politically correct trendies who find Rowling’s take on married bliss a little infra and banal, ought to remember that Hermione’s a mudblood and Ron, in wizarding terms, is highly pedigreed. In their union, they symbolize hybridity and miscegenation: what could be more radical than that?