NEW YORK - Two of America's top authors, John Irving and Stephen King,
made a plea to J.K. Rowling on Tuesday not to kill the fictional boy wizard
Harry Potter in the final book of the series, but Rowling made no promises.
"My fingers are crossed for Harry," Irving said at a
joint news conference before a charity reading by the three writers at New
York's Radio City Music Hall.
Bestselling authors
Stephen King (L), J.K. Rowling (C) and John Irving take questions from the
audience during an event called "An Evening With Harry, Carrie &
Garp," at Radio City Music Hall in New York August 1, 2006. The authors
are reading from their books on Tuesday and Wednesday as a fundraiser for
Doctors Without Borders and The Haven Foundation.
[Reuters] |
The author of "The World
According to Garp" and a string of other bestsellers said he and King felt like
"warm-up bands" for Rowling, who is working on the seventh and last book in the
Harry Potter series, and who has said two characters will die.
King, who shot to fame in 1974 with "Carrie," said he had confidence that
Rowling would be "fair" to her hero.
"I don't want him to go over the Reichenbach Falls," King said in a reference
to Arthur Conan Doyle's effort to kill off the character of fictional detective
Sherlock Holmes. Pressure from fans eventually led Conan Doyle to resurrect
Holmes, who was found in a later story to have survived.
Rowling, a Briton whose books have sold 300 million copies worldwide
according to her publishers, said she was well into the process of writing the
final book.
"I feel quite liberated," she said.
"I can resolve the story now and it's fun in a way it wasn't before because
finally I've reached my resolution, and I think some people will loathe it and
some people will love it, but that's how it should be."
"We're working toward the end I always planned but a couple of characters I
expected to survive have died and one character got a reprieve," she said,
declining to elaborate.
British author JK
Rowling, who created the bestselling Harry Potter series, wears her
graduation gown at Marischal College in Aberdeen, Scotland, where she
received a honorary Doctorate Of Laws degree from Aberdeen University,
July 6, 2006. [Reuters] |
Asked about the wisdom of killing off fictional characters, Rowling said she
didn't enjoy killing the major character who died in book six -- for the sake of
those who haven't read it yet she avoided naming the victim -- but she said the
conventions of the genre demanded the hero go on alone.
"I understand why an author would kill a character from the point of view of
not allowing others to continue writing after the original author is dead," she
added, leaving the door open to the worst fears of some fans -- that Harry could
die.
King recalled that when he had a character kick a dog to death in his novel
"Dead Zone" he received more letters of complaint than ever, to his surprise.
"You want to be nice and say 'I'm sorry you didn't like that,' but I'm
thinking to myself number one, he was a dog not a person, and number two, the
dog wasn't even real," he said.
"I made that dog up, it was a fake dog, it was a fictional dog, but people
get very, very involved," King said.
Rowling noted that Irving had killed off many more characters than she had.
"When fans accuse me of sadism, which doesn't happen that often, I feel I'm
toughening them up to go on and read John and Stephen's books," she said. "I
think they've got to be toughened up somehow. It's a cruel literary world out
there."
