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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

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from: Polly Shulman
to: Dan Kois and Will Leitch

SPOILER! The Ending Was a Disappointing Cop-Out

Updated Monday, July 23, 2007, at 6:54 PM ET

Caution: This entire Book Club contains spoilers.

Illustration by Charlie Powell. Click image to expand.

Warning: This Book Club conversation contains spoilers about the final Harry Potter book.

Ha! She did it—she brought in plenty of gray. She gave Dumbledore a complex past and mixed motives, made Snape a wild romantic, turned Kreacher cuddly, partly redeemed the Malfoys, and even taught Dudley to say thank you! The new complexity doesn't stretch to Harry, but otherwise she delivered.

Dan, you totally called the Snape-loves-Lily thing. And I called the death of Tonks and Lupin—they're dead as Dumbledorenails. And we were both wrong about Harry as a Horcrux.

But only half wrong, as you say, just as Harry only half died. Harry may not go through death exactly—Dumbledore's spirit claims not, anyway ("I think we can agree that you're not dead," he tells Harry)—but he does spend a dramatic scene in its waiting room while his body lies lifeless in the Forbidden Forest. I agree, she copped out there. Forgive me for sounding like a Grawp-sized sourpuss, but I disliked like the ending, especially what happened between Harry and Voldemort. The whole business about how Harry and Voldemort's entanglement affects their ability to die felt as slippery as Nagini.

Take that famous prophecy: "Either must die at the hand of the other, for neither can live while the other survives." In fact, both of them live for more than 16 years after Harry survives Voldemort's initial attack, so what could that second clause possibly mean? That they can't both live forever? Well, duh. I assumed there would be some trick answer, but no: It seems to mean that eventually one of them will die and the other will survive—though that's not at all what it says, and anyway it seems pretty obvious, unless you expect them to die simultaneously. Oh, but wait—maybe they do die simultaneously, Dumbledore's assertion to the contrary notwithstanding, when their bodies fall lifeless and their spirits appear in King's Cross Station with Dumbledore's. Or, if Dumbledore is right and they're both alive in that scene, then once again, they both live after Harry survives Voldemort's attack.

So much for the second clause. What about the first? Does it mean that one of them will kill the other (since nothing but Voldemort can kill Harry, and vice versa)? Perhaps, but their fateful encounter—especially as Dumbledore's spirit explains it in the heavenly train station—implies the opposite. Voldemort "took your blood and rebuilt his living body with it! Your blood is in his veins, Harry, Lily's protection inside both of you! He tethered you to live while he lives!" says the dead Dumbledore. "He took into his body a tiny part of the enchantment your mother laid upon you when she died for you. His body keeps her sacrifice alive, and while that enchantment survives, so do you and so does Voldemort's one last hope for himself."

So Lily's enchantment, the magic of her sacrifice, is keeping them both alive. Then why is Harry eventually able to kill Voldemort irrefutably? In the death scene that Dan found confusing, Harry and Voldemort shoot spells at each other while the sun rises. Harry's is the spell to disarm a wizard of his wand; Voldemort's is the killing curse. Harry's spell disarms Voldemort and sends Voldemort's curse back to kill its maker. You might argue that Harry doesn't actually kill Voldemort, since the Dark Guy falls by his own spell (though that seems to contradict the darn prophecy all over again). Still, if Voldemort has Lily's blessing strengthening him through Harry's blood, how is he able to die? Perhaps you'll say that Lily's enchantment doesn't work on Voldemort, only on Harry. But Dumbledore doesn't make that claim, and this seems to imply otherwise: "While that enchantment survives, so do you and so does Voldemort's one last hope for himself" (italics mine). It feels like cheating to me. As does the explanation of why Voldemort has spent the last umpteen thousand pages trying to kill Harry, who's one of his own Horcruxes: Voldemort was so muddled from all that soul-splitting that he didn't notice he'd hidden a seventh fragment of his soul in Harry. You'd think he'd pay attention to the whereabouts of his own soul. But if he didn't notice, then why would Harry's survival preserve his "hope for himself"?

Unsatisfying as I found the mechanics of who could or couldn't kill whom and why, it wasn't half as unsatisfying as the underlying psychology. Here's where the gray didn't go far enough. I continue to feel that if Harry is a Horcrux, a creature containing a piece of the Dark Lord's soul, he should show a little moral ugliness or at least temptation. Yes, he gets grouchy and preoccupied for a few pages while he considers hunting for the Deathly Hallows—three magical objects that together can defeat death—before winding up his Horcrux quest, but that's pretty much it for his dark side.

I don't mean to suggest that Rowling needed to give Harry a dark side. It would have made him more interesting to me, but I'm sure lots of readers prefer him this way, and it's her choice, not mine. Since she chose not to, though, the Horcrux Harry thing felt like a mechanical fudge rather than a deep solution to the mystery of how good struggles with evil.

Not for the first time, I missed the dramatic pacing of the shorter, tighter, early books. I was glad, though not in the least surprised, that Snape redeems himself, but yeah—what was with that peculiar break in the climactic Last Battle? Hold your wands, everybody: We now pause while Harry wanders off to watch Pensieve for half an hour.

Still, on the whole I liked this book more than I expected, more than any of the previous three. Unlike Dan, I found Tonks' and Lupin's off-screen deaths quite moving. I thought it was very effective to let us experience Harry's shock at seeing their bodies and then to rush us off like him without leisure to mourn. I, too, shed a tear for Dobby and enjoyed professor McGonagall's stampeding school desks. I was impressed by how many guffaws Rowling got into such a dark story, in fact—I used up a pack of stick-its flagging funny lines. (When the Weasley twins take on Harry's appearance to act as decoys and confuse the Death Eaters, they drink the potion, look at each other, and say together, "Wow—we're identical!"; when Harry turns 17 and is finally allowed to do magic, he uses his wand to tie his shoelaces—"the resultant knot took several minutes to untie by hand.") And although, like Dan, I missed the scenes at Hogwarts, I thought tearing Harry and his friends from their beloved school gave the story a sense of danger and urgency. And I loved meeting the next generation in the epilogue.

How does the Sword of Gryffindor get into the Sorting Hat? Easy: magic. Actually, that sword stunt was one of my favorite of Rowling's jokes when she first used it in the Chamber of Secrets, a riff on what grouches like me might say about her endings: She pulls them out of a hat.

Am I just mad that it's over? Somebody please convince me that it really was the magical tour de force I longed for.

Best,
Polly

the book club
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

from: Polly Shulman
to: Dan Kois and Will Leitch

SPOILER! The Ending Was a Disappointing Cop-Out

Updated Monday, July 23, 2007, at 6:54 PM ET

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This is Slate's fourth Harry Potter Book Club. In 1999, Polly Shulman and A.O. Scott discussed the merits of reading the first three books as grownups; in 2001, Judith Shulevitz and Jodi Kantor examined issues of morality in the fourth book; and in 2003, Shulman and David Edelstein took on the mammoth-sized fifth installation. The books also have provided ample opportunity for allegorical interpretation: Jesse Cohen found parallels between Lord Voldemort and Margaret Thatcher, and Julia Turner wondered if the wizard warfare reflects the war on terror. Spoiler alert! The last book could end like this.

Dan Kois has worked as a film executive and a literary agent. He writes and edits New York magazine's arts and culture blog, Vulture. Will Leitch is the editor of Deadspin.com and the author of the young adult novel Catch. Brad Meltzer, a novelist and comics writer, is the author of The Book of Fate. Polly Shulman is the author of Enthusiasm, a novel for young adults.

Illustration by Charlie Powell.

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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)

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