It just isn't going to end, it isn't ever going to end. There are going to be new Harry Potter books coming out every year for the rest of my life. I just know it.
That blasted Scottish woman promised she was only going to write seven of them and then stop. But she lied. She just rotten lied, purely to push up the value of the ones she has published already. It's like the diamond market. She is the De Beers of literature, hoarding away tons of this intrinsically worthless stock, for which people have an inexplicable and very base lust, and trickling it out on to the market gradually, for billions, under the threat of an impending (and imaginary) shortfall in supply.
And as the price of Potter goes up, so the size of the books comes down (which is, at least, a blessing). Last year there was The Tales of Beedle the Bard, only 157 pages and with a print run cunningly restricted to seven books, of which only one came on to the market and was sold to Amazon (see that? sold to Amazon, not by Amazon) for £1.95 million. That's good business, that is.
After that Rowling clearly decided to see how far she could push the maths, and has now produced a book of only 800 words, written “in minuscule handwriting” on a single piece of A5. Eight hundred words! It's true, I read it in the Daily Mail on Thursday. Rowling has grasped that, with her stock this high, 800 is about as many words as she needs to write. If she has anything in common with her fellow writers (and she doesn't have much) it is clearly laziness. There is not a novelist alive who would not stop writing after 800 words, if he thought he could get away with it.
The book has been produced for a charity auction (I am not for a minute suggesting that Rowling is avaricious, just smart) and is apparently some sort of a prequel. Ooh, how exciting. It's Harry Potter before he could do magic. What is it, a Jennings book? But, come on, 800 words. Where will it end? The original Harry Potter books kept getting longer and longer (the crackhead lit-kids who came out annually to score them at midnight needing bigger and bigger doses to “feel something”) and now she is going the other way.
Will her next great oeuvre contain 400 words? 200? 83?
Laurence Sterne risked a single blank page in Tristram Shandy (as well as one black one). Georges Perec made a bold stab at a full length novel with no “e”s in it (and Gilbert Adair made an even bolder stab at translating it - lipogram intact - from French into English). B.S.Johnson put a lot of loose pages in a box and said it was finished. But the great pranksters and innovators of the past will have to hold up their hands and admit defeat ifRowling truly makes a go of the one-page novel.
And what of all the great novelists who never got around to banging out prequels to their greatest works, for fear that they didn't have much to say about events before the narrative began, or thought they didn't have enough time for such a craven endeavour?
Little did Charles Dickens dream that there might be two million quid in a bit of paper that said: “Congratulations, Mrs Twist - it's a boy!” And perhaps Herman Melville would not have lived such a life of penury if he had had the nous to publish a prequel to his most famous work featuring a single scene, in which a couple walk into a Nantucket bookshop, the wife clearly eight and a half months pregnant, pick up a book of baby names and open it randomly at the letter “I”.
Hell, if they'd followed the Rowling model the blokes who wrote the Book of Genesis could have scratched “It was a dark and stormy night” on to a scrap of papyrus and moved to California.
And who is to say it will end here? Who knows how far Rowling can take this? How short can she go?
When I am asked in future “Have you read the new Harry Potter?”, will my usual defensive lie - “I'm halfway through but not really getting into it, I'm afraid” - be met with a raised eyebrow and the admonition: “But it's only two words long”?
No doubt, as her final great gift to literacy in English, Rowling will eventually produce a novel that comprises a single piece of paper - valued at £90 million - on which is written simply the word: “Wizard”.
And no doubt, as some wealthy but barely literate teenager pores over it for endless hours in her suburban bedroom, her parents will say defensively: “Well, at least it's got her reading...”
Giles Coren