Profile JK Rowling: The sixth Harry Potter book is launched next week - JK Rowling and her family owe much to the wizard's magic touch, writes Fionola Meredith
Starved of all but the faintest clues to the contents of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, millions of diehard Potter fans will finally get a chance to dive into the sixth and latest novel when it's launched at midnight next Friday. The zealously maintained secrecy around HP6 (as aficionados call it) has only served to heighten excitement.
While fans savour the deliciously anticipatory Christmas Eve feeling in the days before the book's release, Potter publishers Bloomsbury have gone to unprecedented lengths to keep the book hidden away till then. They have threatened newspapers with legal action if they reveal details of the plot before the publication date, shifted operations to Germany and employed a 40-strong team of security guards to patrol its printing plants.
Apparently Amazon.com is processing orders for The Half-Blood Prince behind eight-foot barriers. And two men faced charges after alleged attempts to sell a copy for £50,000 (€72,700) to a tabloid newspaper in Britain.
Harry Potter's creator, JK Rowling, is almost as elusive as an advance copy of The Half-Blood Prince. Always fiercely protective of her own privacy, for many years she used the genderless anonymity of her initials to shield herself from the burgeoning interest in her own background. (Famously, the origin of "JK" dates back to advice from Bloomsbury that boys might turn their noses up at the adventures of young wizard Harry if they knew he'd been created by a woman.) But once a fascinated public discovered what she terms "the old penniless single mother thing", it became the cliche that defined her.
It was a classic rags-to-riches tale of a poverty-stricken young mum, scribbling feverishly away in an Edinburgh café because her own flat was unheated, producing a manuscript that would eventually make her a globally celebrated author, wealthy beyond her wildest dreams.
Last week it emerged that it was an eight-year-old girl, not an 11-year-old boy wizard, who rescued JK Rowling from life on £70-a-week (€102) benefits. Nigel Newton, the chairman of Bloomsbury Publishing, added a well-timed extra dimension to the JK Rowling fairy tale when he revealed that it was only down to the pester-power of his daughter Alice that the first Harry Potter manuscript - which was rejected by all of his major rivals - was accepted. Newton duly made out a cheque to Rowling: one of the smartest investments in publishing history, since the first Potter book - Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - is on its way to becoming the world's best-selling novel of all time.
Since the cover of her "JK" initials was blown, Rowling has skilfully used the Cinderella-esque mythology of her life-story as both a marketing tool and an effective smokescreen for her private life. She admits as much herself: "There was a point where I really felt I had 'divorcee lone parent' tattooed on my head. You couldn't read about Harry Potter without seeing that somewhere in the piece. So I thought, 'Fine, let's take that and use it'."
Despite the rigorously-maintained facade, glimpses of the real Joanne Kathleen Rowling fleetingly emerge in her increasingly rare interviews. (The duplicitous journalist in the Potter books may give some indication of Rowling's opinions of the profession.)
In her role as president of the British National Council for One Parent Families, she has spoken out passionately about prejudices against single parents. Her own first marriage (to Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes) collapsed shortly after the birth of her daughter Jessica.
"It's this universal human desire we have through history: if we demonise them, we don't have to help them. It's undeniable - there's a stigma attached. But I was the most unashamed lone parent you were ever going to meet. I'm very impatient with the idea that any of us should be ashamed about it."
None the less, she found "the endless little humiliations of life on benefits" a challenge. "I remember reaching the checkout, counting out the money in coppers, finding out I was two pence short of a tin of baked beans and feeling I had to pretend I had mislaid a £10 note for the benefit of the bored girl at the till."
The increasingly glamorous writer, who has now amassed a fortune of £500m (€728m), turns 40 on July 31st. She married her second husband, anaesthetist Neil Murray, in December 2001, and the couple have since had two children together - David, born in March 2003, and Mackenzie, born in January 2005. The family have homes in Edinburgh, Perthshire and London.
Rowling's own aversion to fame is intensified when it comes to protecting her children from the excesses of celebrity life.
"I never wanted [to be famous] and I never expected it and certainly didn't work for it and I see it as something that I have to get through, really. I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen. Being able to sit at home in the parsonage and your books would be very famous and occasionally you would correspond with the Prince of Wales's secretary. You know, I didn't think they'd rake through my bins; I didn't expect to be photographed on the beach through long lenses. I never dreamt it would impact my daughter's life negatively, which at times it has."
THE CHARACTER OF Harry Potter himself "simply strolled into my head fully formed" during a train journey to London, says Rowling. Although this anecdote too has been meticulously woven into the JK Rowling mythology, the evident affection Rowling retains for her young hero shines through the marketing artifice.
"I had been writing almost continuously since the age of six, but I had never been so excited about an idea before. To my immense frustration, I didn't have a functioning pen with me, and I was too shy to ask anybody if I could borrow one. I think, now, that this was probably a good thing, because I simply sat and thought for four hours (the train was delayed), and all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn't know he was a wizard became more and more real to me."
Critics have praised Rowling for inspiring children - especially notoriously novel-shy boys - to get reading. And her exuberant linguistic ingenuity and page-turning plots mean that almost as many adults as children enjoy her books. Yet in 2003, Booker Prize winner AS Byatt took a rather snooty approach to Rowling's popularity with adults when she dismissed the fourth novel, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, as "written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip".
And it's not just those who don the mantle of high culture who take exception to Rowling's literary creations. Christian fundamentalists claim that Rowling offers "fantastic images of hell", and presents witchcraft in an attractive light, thus desensitising young people to its dangers.
Some US baptist groups have gone further, burning thousands of copies of the Potter books - or "the Devil's latest manuscript" - in church car parks. Ahead of the publication of The Half-Blood Prince, Co Antrim-based Democratic Unionist Party councillor Roy Gillespie has warned that the book is part of a satanic plot to corrupt young minds - and has urged parents to ensure that their children are "tucked up in bed with their prayers said" at midnight on July 16th rather than whooping it up at "Potter-parties" inside bookshops.
BOTH JK ROWLING and her fictional creation Harry are inseparable from the global marketing machine that shapes and maintains the Potter brand. In a recent book called Wizard! Harry Potter's Brand Magic, Stephen Brown, professor of marketing at the University of Ulster (and a Potter fan) argues that Rowling, far from being the innocent victim of scheming marketing Svengalis, is a skilled media-manipulator herself. Brown believes the books are a lesson in marketing excellence - full of imaginatively invented brands, corporate strategies and advertising campaigns.
JK Rowling is taking media management to ever more stringent levels with the publication of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. She won't be giving a single interview to an established UK journalist, instead giving child "cub reporters" the opportunity to ask her questions at a press conference at Edinburgh Castle. Her American publisher Scholastic has arranged only two US interviews while she is in Edinburgh , but neither will appear until after the publication date.
JK Rowling is a woman who insists on iron control of her own carefully-crafted public identity. As such, she is almost as much a fictional creation as Harry Potter himself.
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is published by Bloomsbury. To coincide with the book's launch, many bookshops throughout the country are opening at midnight next Friday