Spoilers?

Obsession is a strange, unpredictable thing. What will obsess people tomorrow? Can we learn from the history of what has obsessed people before and what continues to obsess people today?

In 24 days, at the time of writing, the seventh and final Harry Potter novel will be launched onto general sale. Already speculation is rife all over the internet. Which characters will die? Who will turn out to be the good guys we thought were bad, and the bad ones we thought were good? And what if somebody guesses right and spoils the plot?

What a barrowload of nonsense. This business about so-called spoilers is based on a very silly assumption: the notion that a story cannot be enjoyed unless the reader begins it in a state of ignorance about how the plot may turn out. If the fate of the central character or characters is revealed to the reader before he/she reads the book, then there is no point in his/her reading the book.

If the fallacy of that assumption isn't immediately obvious, let's look at its implications, which fall into a kind of sequence.

1. The story will be ruined if I know the end before I start.
2. Aargh - I just read a web 'spoiler' so I know who will die at the end of the book.
3. Therefore, as I know that there is no possibility of enjoyment, I might as well not bother reading the book.

Now if we accept the chain of reasoning above, we must accept that the only purpose of reading the book is to find out what happens at the end. This follows directly from the assertion that there is no point in reading the story if we already know the end. That means, then, that the author need not have bothered writing the hundred thousand or so words that precede the final chapter. Indeed, the last page would do the job on its own.

If you doubt the truth of the above paragraph's conclusion, I agree wholeheartedly with you. But now, neither of us can escape the further conclusion that there is a purpose in the part of the book that comes before the end. I suggest that the reader's enjoyment of a whole novel is diminished only slightly, if at all, by knowing something of the end in advance. So called 'spoilers' are effective only if we allow them to be.