Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Caution: This entire Book Club contains spoilers.
Dear Polly,
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StumbleUponLet the spoilers begin!
Well, the Battle of Hogwarts is over and it's time to tally the casualties. No, not just which characters got snuffed, though we'll discuss that as well. It's time to count up the embarrassing number of my predictions that I got dead wrong.
I thought Harry would be revealed as the Heir of Gryffindor. He wasn't, though he is the Heir of Ignotus Peverell, for what it's worth. I tabbed Hagrid and Neville for untimely death; they survived. I predicted Percy Weasley would finally explore his evil side; instead, he showed up with a heartfelt apology and fought for the good guys. And most glaringly, I predicted that Harry wouldn't be a Horcrux, because, I wrote last week, there was no way Rowling could write herself out of that corner without killing Harry or coming up with some kind of cop-out.
Well, I was wrong: She did both! Kind of. Harry does willingly walk into the Forbidden Forest to face his own death, unarmed and unprotected, in a truly moving scene in which he is supported by the shades of his loved ones. But because of some craziness involving the Horcrux, Harry's selflessness, and the legal chain of ownership of a superwand, once again Voldemort's Avada Kedavra does not kill Harry, sending him instead into a long and only slightly ridiculous chapter set (maybe?) in the afterlife—which looks exactly like King's Cross railway station, except that the only bearded transient Harry meets is Dumbledore, and unlike the bums in King's Cross Dumbledore only exposes himself to Harry emotionally.
You may be able to tell that my response to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was quite mixed. I found it thrilling—far more thrilling than any of the previous books, with nearly a dozen fabulous set pieces and a constant sense of real danger to our hero and his friends. But I also found it far less enjoyable a reading experience than any of the previous books, with little of the invention and delight those books delivered. And the short shrift it gives so many of the supporting characters I'd grown to love over the course of the previous six novels was deeply frustrating to me. I think this is related to an issue we'd brought up previously: the abandonment of the previous novels' school-year structure in favor of a hero's quest.
In practice, this meant that long stretches of Deathly Hallows—almost 400 of the book's 759 pages—are spent with no one but Harry, Ron, Hermione and whomever they meet while on the run from Voldemort and in search of the Horcruxes. And when more than half your book is spent in tents with three heroic but desperate teens, you're left little time for the thorough resolution of a score of other characters' stories.
Why, for example, would Rowling—knowing how compelling and divisive a character she'd created in Snape—give us only a fleeting moment in which the doomed spy encounters Harry himself? Why would she tell the rich story of Snape's love of Lily—one of the few things I guessed right, incidentally—through a flood of Pensieve memories, the book equivalent of the Keyser Söze montage at the end of The Usual Suspects? And is my sense of story old-fashioned because I wish that she'd allowed Snape the chance to actively redeem himself, not through an early death, but through some dramatic action at the moment of highest crisis?
The novel does feature some wonderful storytelling. Don't discount the power of mortal peril to Imperius us readers into frantically turning the pages. Voldemort's death—as fuzzy as I still am on the particulars of how exactly it worked—is quite well-handled, with the villain enraged when a newly wise Harry offers him a chance to feel remorse. And several heroes' death scenes, especially those of Dobby and Fred, give the kind of bittersweet pleasure that's the hallmark of great adventure writing. (Though I do wish Tonks' and Lupin's deaths hadn't been so offhand.) I'm thankful Rowling was wise enough to set the novel's final battle at beloved Hogwarts, where Harry fights not just for his friends, or his life, but for the place that for six books has offered him a true home, "the first and best home he had known." For an entire generation of readers, Hogwarts was their first and best literary home, forever, and it was a joy to see the suits of armor clattering to life, Peeves the ghost dropping Snargaluff pods on Death Eaters, and professor McGonagall herding a stampede of galloping school desks down the hall into battle.
Whew! There's so much more to discuss, but let's open the floor to you, Polly, and to our new correspondent Will Leitch, editor of Deadspin. Did you love it? Did you hate it? And how exactly did the Sword of Gryffindor get in the Sorting Hat?
Yours in tired eyeballs,
Dan
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Remarks from the Fray Editor:
If you're spoiler shy... If you're following Harry Potter discussions... If you haven't yet finished the book... If you're experiencing all three of these conditions, yet you're reading this article... Then you, my friend, are a foolhardy reader.
There seem to be a lot of foolhardy readers out there.
If you're afraid of spoilers close your eyes. Close this page. Don't enter the Fray. Open your book and get finished already, so that you can join this discussion. Spoilers follow below. The Fray overfills with 'em.—G.A.
Remarks from the Fray:
I find it odd that people seem disappointed that 19 years down the road the characters lead seemingly humdrum lives, about which we don't hear much. [That's] just the point.
Folks, most people don't aspire to be under constant threat of death - mostly people want to live happy, relatively uneventful lives. They want to live in a house they love, do work they enjoy, raise kids, be comfortable. The fact that killing Voldemort allowed this to happen is, I think, poignant - Harry was never comfortable as the Boy Who Lived, and now he can finally get away from it. Maybe as readers we want excitement and adventure and really wild things on the page, but by not making Harry et al want these things, Rowling is respecting the characters she created.
On a certain level, I find it a profound commentary on what most people want out of life - not fame or fortune or power, but love and happiness. Odd that so many readers don't seem to see that.
--brennan
(To reply, click here.)
The continued short shrift that Harry gives Hermione is incredibly frustrating in this book, more than in any other. Perhaps Rowling's one effort to comment on this is when she complains about having to do all the cooking - which is not only immediately dismissed, but also like, come on! The one thing Hermione is going to complain about is something so easily dismissed by the unsympathetic reader as an 'age old' feminist complaint. How about the fact that Hermione does everything and never gets a shred of the credit, other than some astonished expressions and the occasional "Mione that's amazing!"
She is consistently the character who saves Harry's ass and I continue to be frustrated that in the last book Rowling does nothing to really acknowledge or challenge this within her book - it is not just enough to assume that readers who like Hermione are going to get it, especially when Harry remains on such a pedestal, or that the lack of thoroughgoing challenge to Harry and Ron's behavior will be picked up on by readers with feminist sympathies, especially when most readers do not share such sympathies! It is especially important to be challenging this, I think, in a children's book.
It is not really believable that Hermione wouldn't challenge Harry more when she so relentlessly stands up for those who are denied rights, equality, and dignity. Maybe it's that other tendency on her part (or Rowling's?) to view her guy(s) as the only ones who are not sexist - they're my best friends, how can they be sexist? etc
Does Rowling's overall failure to inject a feminist critique into Harry Potter reflect her desire to prevent the boys from having to engage in some serious self-critique, a caving in to popular dislike of feminism, or her own discomfort with feminism?
--heypop
(To reply, click here.)
The Problem with the final Harry Potter book is lack of sex. In books 5-6 the students at Hogwarts slowly start to come to terms with their maturing attitudes to the opposite sex. Rowling deftly negotiates the concerns and fears of adolescence as they begin to date, and finally "snog". Throughout book 6 Rowling has various students, including Ron, Harry, and Ginny snogging constantly as they realize their emerging desires.
In book 7 Rowling starts with a great scene showing Harry's awkward attitude towards himself, his body, and his friends. "He felt like asking them to show a little more respect for his privacy as they all began stripping off with impunity, clearly much more at ease with his body then they would have been with their own." This one line gives much insight into the mindset of a 17 year old and allows Harry and his friends to seem believable.
When you contrast that with the 3 teens spending months living together in a forest, with no one supervising, and no one else to disturb them and yet there's no real awkwardness or tension ever described, you begin wonder why Rowling took her characters and replaced them with figurines. By the time Rowling has the plot moving she's turned each of them into an extreme example of their singular character traits. Never is it more apparent then when each wishes for their favorite Deathly Hallow.
Had she bothered making her characters continuously feel real, she could have actually written an interesting finale to the book...rather than a plot-driven bore upheld by at least half a dozen deux ex machina moments.
--Joschenker
(To reply, click here.)
(7/25)