So it's the end of the Harry Potter phenomenon, and I feel I should say something about it. What is there to say, for me? I'd have a hard time calling them great books, and yet I feel like the HP phenomenon is, far and away, easily, A Good Thing.

The creation of fantasy, as a genre, was also its doom: Tolkien's progression from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings. When Tolkien wrote the former - an enormously inventive and wondrous adventure - he did what any other great storyteller would have done. He wrote his story in human terms, probably without even thinking about it. For years JRRT had been making up ancient legends along the lines of the old Norse myths he adored, even writing many of them down, but it was little more than a specialist's private game. When he wrote his great adventure, he naturally drew on all of it - as background. The characters had to have a world to dwell in, and because JRRT knew that world, knew it like the back of his hand, he made it uncannily convincing. Yet the center of The Hobbit is rather out of place in this world - as he should be. Bilbo Baggins is an unadventurous type who secretly longs for adventure - a wish so deeply buried that he spends the first half of the book loudly wishing he was back at home having tea. (Tolkien emphasizes, to an amusing degree, the physical uncomfortableness of having an adventure.) He's so clueless that he rather reminds me of Bertie Wooster. And yet, without breaking character throughout, he ultimately faces down every challenge and returns home a richer character (figuratively and literally). He does, in short, what you or I or Tolkien might well do if set down in his place.

When it came time to write the sequel, however, Tolkien found that he didn't have any more to say about Bilbo, whose character arc was finished. So he began writing, without any particular goal in mind, and sure enough stumbled right into the enormous and untapped universe that had been stirring in the back of his mind since the Great War. And here Tolkien made a dramatic transition. He quit writing a story and started writing history. The distinction is easily explained. The point of The Hobbit is not the hunting of a dragon and his stolen treasure, but that Bilbo Baggins went on an adventure and had his life changed. Whereas the point of Lord of the Rings is not that Frodo Baggins had his life changed, but that a Dark Lord was thwarted and peace restored to a troubled land. What is the difference? Well, the former is a story, but the latter is just made-up history - beautifully conceived and carried out, but essentially pointless.

It's that very (seeming) high seriousness that made LOTR so exciting to discover when I was 12; it seemed so much more purposeful and meaningful and exciting than anything I had ever read. Yet that seriousness is a mirage; it fades away when you try to examine it close-up. Most of it comes from a strange sense of mournfulness that hangs over the entire book - which is, after all, about the end of that imaginary world. LOTR is sort of a masterpiece (though not one I ever need to read again), but it created an awful genre by suggesting that you barely needed a story to write a book; all you had to do was invent things. Not much different from playing a game, really. Here literature ends and wish-fulfillment begins.

In Harry Potter, the "magical" trappings are just so much icing; wipe them off, and what you have is classic mystery: Harry is set with a riddle, puzzles his way through various complications, and ultimately finishes off a villain using his wits. And they are written in human terms. Voldemort does not matter because he is an evil dark lord who terrorized the wizard world; he matters because he is a terrible and intensely personal threat to our hero. The wizard world itself only matters to us because of the people in it. J.K. Rowling's great accomplishment was to return fantasy to its pre-LOTR state by writing a story, not fake-history.

Rowling is, on the word-by-word level, not an exceptionally good writer. She can't stop telling her characters how they should be saying something: "...said Ron heatedly," "...said Hermione anxiously," "...said Harry irritably." Her descriptions never take flight the way they should, never pull you all the way into a palpable physical world. And she's got a terrible sense of humor. The "funny" names and low slapstick might be gently amusing in a less ambitious series, but they don't gibe well with the increasing seriousness of the books. If we chuckle at them sometimes, it's not because they're funny but because they're endearingly stupid. Seeing them pop up again in every new book is like reminiscing about an old school friend.

Yet the books are utterly addictive. I think this is because Rowling has placed at the center of her series not one, but numerous stories. Harry, Ron, Hermione, Sirius, Snape, Voldemort, even Hagrid all have major character arcs that happen over the course of several books. And Rowling has a genuine gift for piling event upon event, complication upon complication, without losing the reader's interest. The later books are like Victorian serials in their giddy careering from one event to the next, one complication after another. You can trot through them at a leisurely pace and enjoy living in Harry's world - the real reason kids aren't put off by their length, I think. They feel as vast and airy and comfortable as the real world.