I’ll come back from vacation briefly to confess that I spent most of yesterday reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Verdict: I thought it was quite good, not without the inevitable rough patches but overall probably the best book of the series. Harry himself is still an insufferable git, willing to think the worst of his closest friends at the slightest provocation, but the teenage-angst stuff is kept to a minimum.
Best line, at least in context:
“NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!”
I got a bit misty in places, including that one. Rowling does a much better job at tugging on heartstrings here than in previous installments.
Let’s allow spoilers in the comments, so don’t read them if you don’t want to be spoiled.
All I can say is that Hermione actually utters the following line:
“Ron, come over here so I can do you.”
Should I be ashamed for snickering when I read this?
Woops – that should be “C J Sansom”
I just finished the book, too, and loved it despite frustration with the meandering plot. Did it really need to take 370 pages before they destroyed the first frickin’ Horcrux? Sheesh. Also, even though I was rooting for Harry to end up with Ginny Weasley (who I agree ought to have played a bigger role in this last book), I found the epilogue flat and disinteresting… I’d have preferred seeing more of the immediate aftermath. Too emotionally difficult to go from watching one’s favorite characters fall one by one to happily-forever-after… even readers need time to grieve a little…
gfl, I’m curious as how someone who is “not a fan” would know so much about what happens in a book s/he supposedly despises?? I mean, I managed to avoid every single spoiler all weekend long with very little effort, and my own fiance was reading it.
While I, too, occasionally get annoyed at all the Potter hype, the books always win me over in the end. (Rowling’s a gifted story-teller, plain and simple, however inelegant her style might be at times. And ultimately, it’s all about the story.) What I don’t understand is the compunction to bitterly spoil everyone else’s fun. Thanks, gfl, for resisting it and allowing your higher nature to hold sway. Although you may very well have been lynched on the spot for such a transgression. 🙂
>> gfl, I’m curious as how someone who is “not a fan” would know so much about what happens in a book s/he supposedly despises??
Easy – I went looking for the spoilers to wind up my mates – took 5 minutes to find a movie which flashed up the key spoilers and when they occured.
I thought the epilogue was setting up a second series, where we will find out what happened in the intervening years.
I figured out that Dumbledore had ordered Snape to kill him, so that was not a surprise. But I expected Snape to die heroically in the final battle.
I liked the books, but honestly.. CS. Lewis, Lloyd Alexander and a host of others have done the same gist much better years before this ever came out.
They are just as readable for young kids, and theres more substance to them.
I also can’t help but feel that the latter versions of Harry Potter still keep the main protaganists with the mental age of 11 (probably b/c Rawling is still writing for young children and not adolescents)
Would have been better if Snape had lived to tell Harry himself, and then survived (against the typecasting) to continue as Headmaster in the post-Voldemortian age.
I know many people like the 3 novels comprising “His Dark Materials” partly because of alternative universes.
I would like to offer your readers a scifi novel that relies heavily on string theory. It can be found at:
http://www.fmstories.com/stories/scifi/Kimmay.txt
It is an “amateur” novel, meaning that it has not been proofread by a professional, and because it is fiction, some scientific liberties must be taken.
It is offered only for your entertainment and it has no significance beyond that.
GLH
More epilogue: Luna became a mathematician.
The epilogue returns us to life itself, the sort of life you and I lead. Freed from the exigencies and constraints of a world with Voldebush, Harry and the others must find whatever love or meaning they can in the moment, in the day-to-day and, some might say, mundane. No more hype: what is there really?
CS Lewis’ Narnia chronicles did not, IMO, “do it better” than Rowling. They’re didactic, simplistic, and heavy-handed in their overtly Christian symbolism, with little of Rowling’s whimsical humor and sharp characterizations. His characters are barely recognizable as human. Where Lewis shone most brightly was his least-known novel, TIL WE HAVE FACES, which I’ve always mourned being lost to near-obscurity. There, he managed to leave easy allegory and didacticism aside to produce a genuinely beautiful mythological retelling of the Cupid and Psyche story from the perspective of the ugly older sister.
Pullman can certainly match Rowling. Tolkien, frankly, needed a editor. 🙂
Oh, the various and sundry.
First, I thought it was quite good. To anyone who is like ‘Oh, this series or that series is better’; certainly you’re allowed to think so, but I think that Rowling drew on certain things Lloyd Alexander, Pullman, and Most Certainly Lewis and Tolkien do not.
In specific – and my major objection to any of the comments stems from this – Rowling never, ever resorts to ‘a higher power’. The entire plot of the books comes from real people living in a world with natural laws, and never is there even the hint of some deity pushing things along and forcing poor ‘good guys’ to suffer for some obfuscated morality. In this way Voldemort tops Sauron; he has no Morgoth he’s serving, he’s simply a product of his environment and acting as energetically as he can upon those personality traits. I love this about this series. It makes it real in a way those others simply aren’t.
And, frankly, I hate it whenever a main character is compared to Jesus. Harry doesn’t die in DH. Straight up. Near death, sure. Near death experiences are a long-recorded phenomenon. But he didn’t die, so he can’t resurrect. Even if he had, come on! Just because there is one story about a person resurrecting doesn’t mean that all stories with resurrection are that story! Also, he’s not a prophet.
Finally, Neville resisted Voldemort not because he had a plan or was willing to work hard to defeat him, but because he was a Gryffindor, not a Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff. He had a wand (for a moment anyway), and the will to resist – the latter being the important part. Whatever else is said, I think that Rowling does a good job of having her characters act as they would act; it makes sense in the context she presents. This is strong storytelling, even if you object to the earthier tone of her writing. For me, though, it worked quite well – I would have gladly absorbed another 800 pages to fill in all those things I wanted to see but was not allowed to; Tonks and Lupin’s death, for instance. The aftermath. Draco’s redemption (which one must infer from the epilogue). I think that for this book, at least, she would have done well to break away from the Harry-centric viewpoint a bit and explore those other lives that were in the crucible. Alas.
I too gave up my weekend for the sake of Harry Potter.
The story is wrapped up beautifully.
I cannot decide whether the H.P. books or the Narnia books are the best children’s books ever, but certainly as regards plot, and imagination, J.K. Rowling is top of my list.
I suppose the best thing about Harry is that he is not all that special; he’s an ordinary boy with ordinary talents, ordinary virtues and ordinary vices who achieves something extraordinary just by facing the problems the Fates have posed him with determination and courage.
There is a lesson here for all of us.
I hate to quibble having enjoyed the books so much, but I agree with Alejandro’s points in comment #11. It was all a bit convenient: Harry finding Snape dead while Voldemort had nipped out for a leak (or whatever it was), and then siphoning off his memories. This could, I think have been done better. She could have shortened the beginning and middle for the sake of a longer post-Voldemort section.
I do not agree with Jennifer about Tolkein in comment #36; some it is sheer poetry, all of which is lost in the films. But I do agree about Till we have faces, which is easily the best thing that C.S. Lewis ever wrote.
As I have posted on other discussion of Potter, a much better series, and much funnier, is Jonathan Stroud’s “Bartimaeus Trilogy”.
http://www.bartimaeustrilogy.com/about.html
The last book is the most accomplished, but of course you should begin from the beginning to get to know the characters and for the entertaining plots and comments.
Much more cynical that Potter.
Have to disagree about the Snape comments. Snape could not have lived with the thought of the James half of Harry knowing the truth, but needed the Lily half to hear it directly from him. I think the Pensieve was the only way to achieve this goal.
On the Pullman series, I loved the first two, but thought the third one wandered off, with the philosophy and metaphysics overpowering the story, much like with L’Engle and the Narnia books.
I thought the climax of the book was the escape from Gringott’s on the back of a dragon. Up to that point the book was truly excellent. After Gringott’s it was good, albeit a little bit predictable. The epilogue, however, was a big disappointment. I think she should have described how the protagonists coped with their loss, because with so many dead it was not a happy end.
Oh, and Ginny should have had a bigger role.
Most people seem to think that the book was pretty good — and then go on to list the ways it could have been better. And I basically agree. If I could have improved one thing, it would have been Snape’s role. He should have been a bigger presence in the middle of the book, and certainly deserved a more nuanced and active ending.
i did not get a harry potter book….. for one … i was having sex alot on the weekend and n e one that would go for sex instead of harry potter …. give me a” hell yah!! “
Athough religion does not play an overt role, neither is the book atheistic. The characters use phrases such as “Thank God” (Page 74). Rowling considers body and soul separate, each capable of continuing without the other. We have living bodies without souls (those who have received a dementor’s kiss), and souls with no bodies (ghosts, Harry’s dead parents, Horcruxes, and others). While the existence of differentiated bodies and souls could be held without an accompanying belief in a deity, ancestor worship, or any such, soul-body distinction is a typical element of religious belief systems.
Harry is referred to as “The Chosen One.” Chosen by whom? Before you dismiss this as a mere linguistic quibble, consider the situations in the real world in which people use similar expressions. Most or all such phrases arise in contexts presupposing a conscious group or entity “choosing.” The phrase cannot allude to the choices made by Voldemort because most of the people using the phrase, along with those who apparently coined it, do not know the details of the prophecy or Voldemort’s response to it.
Finally, Harry is, to put it mildly, extremely lucky. In retrospect, the deck seems to have been stacked in his favor to a thoroughly implausible degree. For instance, on page 61, Harry’s wand acts totally of its own volition to break Voldemort’s borrowed wand right in between Voldemort’s “Avada” and “Kedavra.” How unusual was this? On page 495, Ollivander, the expert on wands, says, “I had…never heard of such a thing. Your wand performed something unique that night.” If you have read the book (or the whole series), you can supply numerous other examples yourself. It’s hard to believe that nobody’s cheating.
As far as the religious themes go, I really liked this particular statement describing Harry’s thoughts on page 185:
“He looked away, trying not to betray the resentment he felt. There it was again: Choose what to believe. He wanted the truth. Why was everybody so determined that he should not get it?”
Granted, this statement was in an entirely non-religious setting (talking about Dumbledore’s past), but I always like it when I see somebody uphold evidence over emotion when it comes to what to believe, something the religious are frequently loathe to do when it comes to their own religion.
Terry Pratchet’s 25 or so book Discworld series is much better than
Rowling’s cliche-ridden books. He has the advantage that he both can write
and has a sense of humor. (See Harold Bloom’s review of the Potter series).
I couldn’t just leave this page without my two cents. A few people mentioned Tolkien in their reviews of the Potter series. (By the way – THE best example of “I can’t wait for the next book to come out” during my lifetime – and I’m still waiting for Stephen King to bring out his next Dark Tower novel…)
Well here it is: If Tolkien had never written LOTR then Rowling would never have been published.
To me, what is most remarkable about J K Rowling is that she vividly remembers what it was like to be eleven years old, and twelve years old, and thirteen years old, and so on, in a world that is similar enought to ours to be recognizable, and then gets it down on paper. This is, in my reading experience, extremely rare. None of the other authors mentioned so far in these comments that I have read (and I’ve read most) comes, in my view, anywhere close to pulling this off. I think her ability to do this is why Rowling has become the first billionaire artist in history, and I think it’s well deserved.
Two reviews, both from Salon, of the first and last books in the series do a good job of capturing what is great about them all:
http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/1999/03/cov_31featurea.html
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2007/07/20/harry/index.html
(To get past Salon’s ad page without having to watch the ad, first go to
http://www.salon.com/news/cookie756.html )
Just to add some balance to Mark’s links and encomiums, here is
Harold Bloom’s review of an earlier Potter:
http://wrt-brooke.syr.edu/courses/205.03/bloom.html
Bloom is the grand Pooh-Bah of the Western Canon, and
super grinch when it comes to Rowling’s writing skills.
On Religion and Potter.
Brian: I really can’t call the book less than ‘agnostic’. In essence, while you can stretch a little and suggest there may be divine forces, they’re not explicitly written in. Phrases such as ‘Thank God’ hardly suffice as evidence; plenty of people who are areligious use that phrase, because it’s a common phrase. It would be *odd* not to hear it, because it is part of the culture.
The issue with souls I really can’t see as anything but an expression of the natural world, when you’re including in that world a nebulous but scientifically explored notion of ‘magic’. I don’t think the book lacks religion because the existence of souls and their natures are not attributed to a higher, divine source. Nothing is. All actions in the world are attributed to people within the world.
Regarding ‘The Chosen One’ moniker; I admit I’m a little hard pressed to suggest why it was Rowling chose to use that, other than Harry was clearly held up as a hero. But never was he held up as a hero backed by God, or Gods, or some divine power, or indeed ‘chosen’ by any other virtue besides the fact that he was The Boy Who Lived. I think the issue of his ‘luck’ ties into this; he is the protagonist of the story. Nearly every story’s protagonist suffers from something of a protective shield cast by the writer. The protagonist, by definition, cannot leave the story until the end of the story – so of course for the duration of the story they’re going to seem abnormally lucky.
But therein lies the crux of the matter; it’s not that the story does not require a suspension of disbelief – it’s a story after all. But nowhere, as an element of the story, does a divine presence come into play. All the morality derives from the world in which they live. All the motivations and rewards come from that world. And what is beyond that world is explicitly left beyond it; even in Harry’s near-death experience, when he is talking to Dumbledore it is explicitly suggested that he is in his own head, and what is beyond the veil of death is beyond it.
Lee; One last thing, you totally cannot prove that Rowling wouldn’t have been published if Tolkien hadn’t written LOTR. I suspect it would be hard to even substantially support the claim. She draws from too many sources to attribute it all to Tolkien; I particularly liked, for instance, her allusions to the Song of Roland, and the taking of Durandal from the stream of poison. There is truly nothing new under the sun, only new perspectives on it, so I don’t think you can get down on her for drawing from any number of sources, ancient, modern or even contemporary. (Does anyone else think the latter books were influenced by the acting performances in the first movies?)