Jumping off the page

Author J. K. Rowling signs copies of her book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last instalment in the Potter series and one of the most eagerly anticipated books of 2007. (Bill Haber/Associated Press)

Harry Potter. Nathan Zuckerman. John Rebus. It would be difficult to come up with three literary heroes with less in common than the boy wizard, the embattled novelist and the lager-soaked Edinburgh detective. Yet in 2007, they all faced the same fate: retirement.

Unless you are the most clueless of Muggles, you couldn’t have missed the long anticipated/lamented finale of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. The seventh installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, had its global release in July. With more than 300 million Potter books sold worldwide and a billion-dollar movie franchise, the goodbye celebration for Harry felt at times like the mourning of a popular head of state. Although Rowling has happily filled in more details during her farewell tour — namely, outing Albus Dumbledore — she remains firm that the book on her beloved Harry is now closed and that he’ll live on only in fans’ imaginations (and, of course, in DVDs, special edition books, fan fiction and possibly a theme park).

An Edinburgh neighbour of Rowling’s, mystery writer Ian Rankin also bade adieu to a famous protagonist. Detective Inspector John Rebus, star of 17 of Rankin’s novels, officially retired from the police force in Exit Music. While Rankin’s fans might not be as aggressive as those of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — who forced the author to bring Sherlock Holmes back from the dead — Rankin understands the pressure to give the people what they want, and claims he hasn’t entirely shut the door on Rebus’s return.

It’s no wonder that it might be difficult for Rankin to let go. In an era when what happened last week feels like a generation ago, there’s great comfort for readers — and likely authors, too — in getting to witness a character change and grow over large stretches of time and the course of several books. Later installments have instant integrity and pull because the heroes’ and heroines’ flaws and strengths are intimately understood and remembered. Popcorn movies and popular fiction have long understood the appeal of the sequel, that kid-like impulse to revisit favourite characters and find out what happens next. Television picked up on this, too; the last decade has given rise to a golden era of serial shows with long, slow narrative arcs like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and The Wire.

Both Rebus and Potter are genre heroes, where sequels are common, and have peers that include Frodo Baggins and the Pevensie children, Miss Marple and Philip Marlowe. Nathan Zuckerman, though, was a unique and extraordinary character. The alter ego of novelist Philip Roth is an achievement unparalleled in contemporary U.S. literature, arguably outmatching John Updike’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit series. Over the course of nine books, 26 years and 2,500 or so pages spanning Zuckerman’s life from his 20s to his 70s, Roth has been telling the story of a writer plagued by family issues, women troubles and the fall-out from his autobiographical fiction. Fittingly enough, Exit Ghost, Zuckerman’s swan song, examines the disparity between a writer’s life experience and his art.

This past year also marked the loss of some real-life literary heroes. Norman Mailer died on Nov. 10, half a year after the Apr. 11 passing of Kurt Vonnegut. American short-story writer and activist Grace Paley died on Aug. 22 and Jane Rule, the ex-pat American writer and teacher who made B.C.’s Galliano Island her home, passed away on Nov. 27. While these four writers are as dissimilar as the fictional characters named above, they shared a bold imagination and intelligence. Mailer’s interests, in both fiction and journalism, lay in the big themes — war, death, faith, sex — and his life was as outsized, brilliant and controversial as his work. Vonnegut was the great bard of the American counterculture, blending science, humour, politics and metaphysics into his delightfully chaotic novels. In her short fiction — for the most part deceptively small domestic stories full of irony and humour — Paley created a language and style that mixed high-brow literature with Yiddish and New York street idioms. Rule, one of the first literary writers of lesbian fiction, imagined a world where women could love each other, at a time when even suspicion of a same-sex relationship was punishable by law. If there is a literary heaven, it’s bound to have a really fabulous bar where these four greats are toasting each other (and putting their drinks on Mailer’s tab).

Governor General Michaelle Jean, right, presents author Michael Ondaatje with the Governor General's Literary Award for English-language fiction for his 2007 book Divisadero. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)

Of course, any year-end wrap-up must include a nod to the award winners. The most famous of them all is the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is awarded to an author for their entire body of work. This year, it was given to British novelist Doris Lessing, just a week before her 88th birthday. With characteristic frankness and humour, she told reporters, “I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I’m delighted to win them all, the whole lot.… It’s a royal flush.” Another outspoken writer, Dubliner Anne Enright, beat out favourites Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach) and Lloyd Jones (Mr. Pip) to win the Man Booker Prize for The Gathering, a novel about a grieving family that the author herself describes as “the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood weepie.” Enright didn’t just make news for her win. Soon after the Booker announcement, there was much fuss in the U.K. press over an essay she wrote about her distrust of the McCanns, the British couple whose daughter went missing while the family was on vacation in Portugal. The IMPAC Dublin Literary Award — the world’s richest book prize, worth about $150,000 — went to Norway’s Per Petterson for Out Stealing Horses; meanwhile, Denis Johnson picked up the U.S. National Book Award for Tree of Smoke.

In Canada, Michael Ondaatje — a past winner of the Man Booker, the Giller, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and the Prix Médicis — was forced to find room in his house for another trophy when he scooped up the Governor General’s Award for fiction (his fifth!) for Divisadero. He was up for a Scotiabank Giller Prize, too, but lost out to Elizabeth Hay, for her novel Late Nights on Air.

Upon her win, the very classy Hay shared the honour with all her fellow writers. “I’d like to congratulate everyone who has written a book this year,” she said, “because we are all united in the belief that writing books and reading books makes life more meaningful.” And anyone who read and loved books in 2007 can say amen to that.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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