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.

Background

• One eye on Harry

• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - Sunday Times review

• The fifth element

• Actresses are 'insane', says Daniel Radcliffe

• Potter magic at premiere turns out to be illusion

Background

• Digital DNA could finger Harry Potter leaker

• Asda starts Harry Potter price war

• Early Potter reviews provoke Rowling outburst

• Harry Potter book leaks on to internet

• Harry Potter and the supermarket sweep

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

First review of fifth instalment: fails to cause stir of earlier films and feels like a chore

Related Internet Links

• Watch Screen Online - Harry Potter special

• Visit Times Online's Harry Potter topic page

• Order Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows online

Related Links

• The missing member of the family

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.”

Times Recommends

• A new kind of western conservatism
• Georgiana is the wrong role model
• Alaska, where cops don't bother you