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'Don't kill Potter'
02/08/2006 07:08 - (SA)
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| Authors John Irving, left, JK Rowling, centre, and Stephen King during a press conference in New York. (Seth Wenig, AP) |
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New York - Two of America's top authors,
John Irving and Stephen King, made a plea to JK 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.
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 Harry.
"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, 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."
'It's a cruel literary world out there'
"We're working towards 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.
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."
- Reuters
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