Rowling's Revelation, Heard Round the World
By Diane Roback -- Publishers Weekly, 10/22/2007 6:25:00 AM
J.K. Rowling finished her week-long Open Book Tour this past Friday night at Carnegie Hall, intending to say goodbye to her American fans. She did, but she also made national news. After reading a section of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows aloud, she answered questions from selected members of the audience, many of them about specific plot points in the books, and why she made various choices for various characters. In answering a query about whether Professor Dumbledore had ever fallen in love, she said, “I always saw Dumbledore as gay,” causing screams and a standing ovation. Noting the reaction, she added, “If I had known it would make you so happy, I’d have announced it years ago.”
Her statement confirmed some long-running Internet speculation about the Hogwarts headmaster, and ignited a new round of Net chatter, both on possible hidden clues in the text and on whether the author should have been more explicit about this within the books themselves. Wire reports flashed around the world, as those who thought they had seen the last bit of Harry news woke up on Saturday morning to one more revelation.
Rowling also spoke about.her decisions to kill off or not kill off various characters (“the last three books would have been very different if I had killed Arthur Weasley”) and how making Teddy Lupin an orphan at the end of the story paralled the very beginning. “It starts with an orphan and ends with an orphan,” she said, adding that she wanted to specifically show war’s effect on children.
Finishing the final book felt “like a bereavement,” Rowling admitted, and reiterated what she believes are the books’ pleas for tolerance and the end of bigotry. She also entreated her young audience to question authority, saying, “You should not assume that the establishment or the press is telling you all the truth.”
She then sat down in front of an artfully arranged mound of 2000 books, and signed them for fans, after having signed 1600 copies at a Carnegie Hall event earlier in the day. Another possible world record, for a writer who has already set many others.
For booksellers, said Elizabeth Bluemle, co-owner of Flying Pig Bookstore in Shelburne, Vt., the revelation about Dumbledore is a nonissue. “Who among us (barring writers of fanfic and slash),” she said, “has given Dumbledore’s love life more than a moment’s thought, if that?” She did add, tongue in cheek, that “the implications for children’s literature, however, are vast. Now that Rowling has inspired millions of children to stretch hundreds of pages beyond their prior self-imposed book-thickness ranges, she is clearly hoping to nudge them into literary theory and semiotics.”
