I woke up this past Saturday morning with a peculiar feeling in the pit of my stomach. It felt like a cross between the way I felt on my birthday morning when I was a child, and the way I now feel when I wake up knowing I have to do something difficult, like speak in public.
That odd combination of birthday-pleasure excitement and total nerves came about because of the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final volume in J.K. Rowling's epic fantasy series about a boy wizard named Harry. Like many people, I have enjoyed these books for years, so had reserved my copy and happily but anxiously stood in line to get it. As I waited at the bookstore I noticed how quiet everyone was, and how we sometimes nervously avoided looking at one another. My gut feeling was that no one in that line wanted to risk hearing anything about the end of the story before getting a chance to read the book for themselves.
A Word of Caution
I will go on the assumption that not everyone reading this review will have read the book, and that, like the people I stood in line with at the bookstore, you don't want the ending spoiled either. Though I will, of necessity, recount a bit of storyline from Deathly Hallows, I've chosen to focus overall comments on the story's shape and how it worked (on emotional and aesthetic levels) as an ending to a complex and beloved epic. I will assume, however, that you have read books 1-6. So if you haven't, you may wish to stop here!
No Trip on the Hogwarts Express This Year
Having read and loved the first six books in the series, entering the seventh felt like the first step on a wonderful and terrifying journey. I wanted to know the answers to the many questions raised by the earlier books, how things would work out for Harry and his friends and loved ones, if love would triumph over evil and if so, just how. I also, however, simply wanted to enter once more Rowling's detailed and fascinating secondary world. I think many who looked forward to this book's release were looking forward to one more trip into Harry's world, one more chance to hang out with Hermione and Ron, to laugh at Fred and George's jokes, to sling back a butterbeer, to shake our heads over the Dursleys, to fly on a broom. Maybe even to journey one last time on the scarlet Hogwarts Express from Platform 9 and 3/4.
That last, of course, is problematic. The narrative shape of this book had to be different from the six books that came before it. Harry turns 17 near its start and thus comes of age in the wizarding world. The goal set before him in the penultimate volume was clear: he needed to set his eyes on clearing final obstacles before he could face Tom Riddle, aka Voldemort. The meant finding and destroying the remaining horcruxes (soul containers made via murder) through which Riddle had tried to insure his earthly immortality. And that means Harry couldn't return for his final year at Hogwarts and the mostly comforting pattern of all his previous school years.
So the sixth book set him, and us, on the final leg of a serious quest. Fortunately, Harry doesn't go alone. As they have from almost the beginning, his stalwart friends Hermione and Ron go with him. I love how the presence of the three friends gave the book a deep sense of familiarity, and yet their new challenges in different locales and through bigger hardships helped to show how they have deepened and grown. Just to mention one example: you know how much bookish Hermione has deepened when you realize that not once does she complain or murmur about having left school a year early. The seventeen year old young lady, so strong and committed to Harry's quest, has changed a lot from the eleven year old girl who once declared that possible expulsion from school might be a worse fate than death! And yet Rowling still makes her true to herself: Hermione is able to use some nifty bits of magic to bring more of the Hogwarts library along on their sojourn than you might believe possible!
In essence, the overall shape of Deathly Hallows feels different yet familiar. The saga has turned to more serious business than school books, games and tests. Harry has become a key figure in the wizarding world. He is named as "undesirable number one" and a price is put on his head by the infiltrated and corrupted establishment. But he is a beacon of hope to all those who long to see Voldemort's reign of terror come to an end. Because he has been marked by Voldemort since he was just a year old, and has made a choice to fulfill his calling to face him in an ultimate battle, he cannot go back to the way things were. And we wouldn't want him to.
Despite missing the sense of innocence and magic of some of the earlier books, I think the tone of this one is just right. Harry's story has become much bigger than his own story. He fights not just out of his own sense of call, but for the many people he's come to know and love. We've come to know and love them too, and so this book has an edge-of-your-seat quality to it as we realize how each and every one of the characters is now truly involved in the war.
Even as we travel with Harry and friends to important places like Godric's Hollow (where Harry's parents were originally killed by Voldemort) and through other places and trials that test his mettle, Rowling finds ways to keep us connected to Harry's loved ones and to Hogwarts. This particular story ranges over more inner and outer territory than any of the previous six. While the overall tone is more somber, Rowling's trademark humour is not absent. The moments of lightness, humour and affection between characters remind us of the rich, full life of the community and what's at stake in the final confrontation.
"The Man With the Lightning Bolt Scar"
Harry's mentor, Albus Dumbledore, spent much of the first six books tutoring Harry (implicitly and explicitly) in what he needed to know to help him on the final leg of his journey. Much of Deathly Hallows centers on Harry coming to terms with the knowledge he's been given, struggling to understand why certain things he thinks he needs to know have been withheld from him, struggling to know who and what to trust, and coming to grips with his own memories, strengths and temptations. It's a journey that should look familiar, because it's really the same one he's been on from the start, when as a skinny eleven year old he stood in front of the Mirror of Erised and felt the philosopher's stone drop in his pocket.
In fact, more than any other book in the series, I think this one will remind many readers of the first book, Sorcerer's Stone. Not only does Rowling purposefully give us many echoes and reminders of that book, but she finds subtle ways to show us that Harry has really been on one long journey all along. It's just intensified because he's come of age, and the war is fully engaged, and the final confrontation with Riddle/Voldemort is so near.
Perhaps the biggest challenge Rowling faced in this book was to bring the story to a satisfying conclusion, one that helped tie together the epic storyline of the other books while answering ultimate questions about various characters' allegiances and resolves. In this, I think she she has done a mostly excellent job. With everything else she needed to do, I was amazed that she managed to invest Dumbledore's back story with layers of hitherto unexplored complexity and humanity. I was also delighted that Neville Longbottom, long one of my favorite characters, was also given some significant character development.
However, some of the story "arcs" of important secondary characters felt rushed. Going into this book, I was particularly intrigued by the paths of Draco Malfoy, Severus Snape and Peter Pettigrew, and how those paths would cross with Harry's in the final saga. In the case of each, allegiances were (at least in some respects) up for grabs as we headed into the final volume. Rowling mostly settles the allegiance questions, but I was still left with a sense that there was much more that could have been told about each person's story. I missed the literary richness and complexity that could have been brought to bear by a closer interweaving of the stories of Snape and Harry.
I will not, however, change my five-star rating for this book because of that. The story-telling challenges of an epic this rich, in a secondary world this detailed, must be immense. As I turned the final pages, my ultimate feelings of bittersweet reluctance to say good-bye to this fictional world were much what I expected they would be. I am now quietly celebrating the fact that J.K. Rowling has given children, given all of us, such a literary wonder. She has given us a fictional world and characters we enjoy and care about, especially one skinny, flawed, orphan boy -- excuse me, man -- whose story from start to finish really becomes our story.
Most of all, Rowling has given us a fictional world which affirms so much of inestimable value in a real world which often does not affirm those things at all: selflessness, sacrificial love, the need to fight against evil, the reality of the soul, the worth and dignity of the soul, the growth of the soul through virtues of mercy, and our dependence on community as well as on love and grace from outside ourselves. Those qualities are the golden snitch of the Harry Potter books. They're what make them worth reading again and again. I am so happy that in just a few years, I'll get to start over and read them all again with my daughter.
~befus, 2007
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Year 7
J.K. Rowling
Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic
0545010225
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