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.
Since everyone else has done a great job of commenting I only have a few things to add from a non-Western cultural point of view.
The scene when Harry goes to meet Voldemort in the forest to allow himself to be killed reminded me of the scene in “Shogun” when Blackthorn is about to commit seppuku but is then reprieved. It is also, to some extent, reminiscent of the scene in “The Last Samurai” when Katsumoto is dying and says of the cherry blossoms that “they are all perfect.” Charles Taylor’s review of “The Sorcerer’s Stone” is spot on in regards to these stories being deeply rooted in the here and now. Just the act of breathing is a miracle that is thrown away in our daily lives until we know how few breaths are left. Harry’s recognition of this, whether Rowling knew it or not, is very Buddhist in its syncretism with East Asia.
For those who keep insisting that something “otherworldly” or “sublime” must somehow be part of this story, well, people see what they want to see unless they have learned to see what is. I truly believe that Rowling is showing how none of that is necessary in order for good and evil to exist in the world. As Dumbledore says at the end of Chamber that it is our choices that determine who we are when Harry so desperately wanted to be in house Gryffindor rather than house Slytherin. Voldemort exemplified all that is evil by killing Harry’s parents. For what?
And in the explanation of Voldemort’s life in Half-Blood Prince, we see that it was the events and circumstances of his life that created the monster he eventually became. And in Buddhist (karmic) fashion the hallmarks of house Slytherin were of a propensity to cruelty and indifference born from a wizard who thought himself superior to others. As the recipient of that legacy born from the most egregiously authoritarian circumstances of Tom Riddle’s mother and the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father…..well, one does not need Satan to explain the stupidity that humans are capable of. All that is needed, as Mencius says, is for there to be a lack of empathy and commiseration for a human to not be a human. Dr. Gilbert during the Nuremburg trials bears this out when he realizes that evil is the absence of empathy. The creature under the chair at the end of The Deathly Hallows shows precisely what a life born without the benefit of and without the capacity for love and empathy looks like.
If there is indeed a God, what people need to understand about it is that it is not the name or the book or the words that matters. What matters is whether we follow what God (if there is one) etched in our hearts about liking kindness over cruelty. The Malfoys, Narcissa particularly, makes that point very deeply at the beginning of The Half-Blood Prince when she begs Snape to save her child’s life. Bellatrix provides the counter-point to emphasize those who do not know what to truly value in the time we have been given between birth and death. The curt nod of Draco on the platform in the epilogue is the recognition that his own son would not exist had it not been for the defeat of Voldemort.
In the end, this story is in fact a morality tale stripped of unprovable dogmatic belief systems in favor or the more practical realities of living in the here and now and what we do with the time we are given. It will provide the surest method of critical judgement for a whole generation of children (and perhaps some adults) to know whether a doctrine is worthy of following or not.
Think about that the next time you vote. (My apologies. I just had to throw that in there.)
Wow. I am amazed at the amount of plot analysis here.
Anyway, I’m with all of you who said that the epilogue was disappointing. It was too happy too quickly, so I put it down after the first sentence and read it the next day. I was left wondering how George got on without Fred…
And having made it to the end of the comments (although I expect there are more by now), I must say that I appreciate the perspective that NeoLotus offers on a series that is, at least on the surface, thoroughly Western.
I appreciated that deities were not invoked in the struggles and perceived that the characters were acting and reacting to one another rather than some grand scheme. “The Chosen One” was a comforting notion that other characters had adopted. While his life and Voldemort’s were deeply entwined, it was due to their first encounter rather than some outside force choosing him.
JK Rowling is supposedly not finished – she is writing an accompanying encyclopedia (presumably akin to the appendix in the LOTRs) which, I am hoping, will answer many of the questions left unanswered in final chapter.
[That Bloom article is hilarious. I had no idea he had a gift for self-deprecating humour].
I adore all the Harry Potter books, but can’t understand why. When I started book 7, just like all the others, I could not put it down.
There are loads of wonderful childrens authors, all as good as, and some much better than J.K. Rowlands, so what is the secret?
Wanting to read more of them becomes an obsession. Could it be that there is real witchcraft hidden inside the pages which mesmerise you as soon as you read the first book?
Nothing else explains the Harry Potter hysteria. It must be magic.
Okay, I don’t get how Neville got the sward after it had been “confiscated” at the bank?!?!? If the hat gave it to him, how did the hat get it back from the Goblins?
Okay, carry on.
Geoff: The hat is *magical*. It belonged to Gryffindor originally as well, and it has the property of being able to summon Gryffindor’s sword when any member of the house has urgent need of it. A deus ex machina, of course, but it had been established long before book 7. Harry did it in book 2 to kill the basilisk (the sword was not in the hat when the phoenix first brought it to him, if you read carefully; it appeared magically afterwards in the moment he needed it to kill the beast), and Neville does it in book 7 to kill Nagini, thereby mirroring what Harry did before and proving himself a “true Gryffindor”.
I think I might have missed something in the book but at the end when Harry’s son is concerned about ending up in Slytherin house, Harry says something about him being called “Albus Severus” after two great headmasters of Hogwarts, one of them being in Slytherin. So how was Snape a Hogwarts headmaster? And in naming his son after Snape, has he therefore forgiven him for everything that happened in the previous books?
Hi Emily: Snape was made headmaster by the ministry in the process of the Death Eaters gradual takeover of the Ministry and Hogwarts. Harry found out through the pensieve that Snape had been acting as a very deep mole indeed, and had done almost everything he did at Dumbledore’s order, and for love of Harry’s mother. Besides that, Harry had gradually found out over the course of several years preceding what a jerk his dad had been to Snape when they were in school together.
Also, it says that Harry understood what Dumbledore saw when he looked in the Mirror of Erised, is this his family back together?
Greatly shortened version of what I submitted earlier today which was not accepted as a comment, perhaps because I’m nerdy and verbose even by the standards of my alma mater Caltech, and have published a lot of fantasy and Svience Fiction professionally?
The main things that my JPL friends and I previously agreed we needed to know to be satisfied in hard SF/Fantasy mode that were NOT resolved in Deathly Hallows:
(1) How were house-elves enslaved, and Goblins beaten, and maybe giants?
(2) is Muggle-world OUR world or not (i.e. an alternate history world)? If so, when and how did split occur?
The best plot summary of Harry Potter 7 (snarky
version, but quite accurate, including pointing out
plot lacuna):
http://diogenes-sinope.blogspot.com/2007/07/potterdammerung-mega-spoilers.html
Okay, just before the International whatchamcallit
of 1689, when Wizards went into hiding, what
was going on in what was either the Muggle World or
the Muggle-not-yet-separated-from-Wizard world? I previously listed several Isaac Newton and King/Queen of England events from that decade, from my little Science Fiction/Fantasy/Science web domain that gets over 1.5 x 10^7 hits/year, that might be related.
We’ll see when J. K. Rowling (with whom I spoken, face-to-face) publishes the Encyclopedia of Harry Potter that she’s started. Might be a lot of backstory, in the mode of the lengthy appendices to The Lords of the Rings. Rowling is somehwere between Tolkien and Dickens, but has a better sense of humor than Tolkien.
My comment is to all those that are discussing which series books are better.
To me, writers such a Tolkien and Rowlings are brilliant in their own right. But to me the “bigger picture” is that these books get people to READ! In the world of computers and computer games, to see people (especially children) get as excited about Harry Potter as the newest Xbox coming out is nothing short of amazing! Not only this, but parents have also read the books. Family time is precious in todays busy world. As one man stated about his daughter, it eventually lead to them also having LOTR as a common interest.
These books get boys to read. A group that is very hard to write for from what I have heard writters say. I am in my late 30’s and have heard so many men state “Oh, I never got into reading”. My favorite was “Men don’t read. They are too busy keeping up with sports”. I feel so sorry for them. I wish everyone got the “rush” of a personal journey through reading a great story.
I love the fact that books, such a Rowlings, make the kids use their imagination and “take them to another world”. How I would have loved such a series as Harry Potter when I was a kid. I think it speaks volumes to hear of children who have “grown up” with Harry Potter. I have read that these books have inspired many kids to try things they may never have. It is not that these books have to have symbolism in religion or undertones of the story of Christ. It is the typical “good-vs-evil”, or you could say “the underdog” we so hope wins, that draws us to such characters as Frodo or Harry. We cheer on the good guy and boo when the bad guy gets a leg up. This is where we “mortals” loose ourselves in a story.
I have to confess that I have yet to read a Harry Potter book. See, I have two (soon to be three) young children and want to experience these books with them. To me this is where the “magic” lies. My kids enjoying a wonderful story and Mom getting to share the fun. I “tip my hat” to a writer that can not only bring a great story to light (as I can’t fathom how they do it) but to give such gifts as getting people interesting in reading. Knowlege is everything. Reading is the “window” to knowledge.
What about the Molesworth canon, chaps? Hell, even the name of the place, Hogwarts, was gleaned from the annals of St. Custards. Homage or rip-off, who can tell. Like the heretic Bloom, I never got past the Philosopher’s (Sorcerer’s in the US) Stone effort, so I shouldn’t critcise too much. Perhaps the later books got better, with prose that did not limp along and plots and characterisation that were somthing more than exercises in cut and paste.
in the goblet of fire i remember the line where there was a ‘glint of triumph’ in dumbledore’s eyes when he found out that voldemort had taken harry’s blood. Now i understand why!!
brilliant book. absolutely superb. best of the lot and wrapped up beautifully!!!
made me laugh out loud, cry my eyes out and scream in excitement at the book about a thousand times.
THE BEST BOOK I’VE EVER READ!!! (and i read a lot)
JK Rowling is the Shakespeare of our era!!
mark my words in a few years time all schools in the UK will be teaching Harry Potter as part of the curriculum!
hey emily,
my theory is that when dumbledore looked in the mirror of erised he saw grindlewald killing his sister ariana instead of him because you know how dumbledore doessnt know which of them it was.
Well, Lila and Emily, consider for a moment that it is revealed in the last book that Dumbledore never took power because he was afraid of what he would do with it. So perhaps what he saw in the Mirror of Erised was not nearly so nice as either of those suggestions, but was instead his dream with Grindelwald: that he had united the three Deathly Hallows and become the ruler of wizard, witch, and muggle alike (though I’m sure he envisioned himself a benevolent ruler).
Remember, after all, Dumbledore’s astonishment that Harry’s look into the mirror was so simple as having a whole family. It seems plausible, I think, that Dumbledore was always afraid of where his most deep-seated desires would lead him, were he to give them free reign. He recognized, I think, that his desire could never be realized as he conceived it, that it would lead to much suffering and death instead. And even if he wanted power, he didn’t want that.
This is the first book that has really honestly excited me in so, so long, in fact I’m not sure I can think of an equal. No matter how “rough” sometimes, or those few months/years that you got kind of sick of Harry Potter and shoved him on the back burner… There’s something about actually having an “ending”, rounding it all up, that never happens in life even though it’s the one thing that should. Anyway, it touched me; saying goodbye to Harry Potter is a hell of a thing!
Although, there’s a couple of bits that I didn’t get, which is annoying. What was the baby thing at the “death” King’s Cross? That was the major one, could somebody please have a stab at explaining? The other bits I can’t remember, will think of them in time.
The thing is, it’s all very well fighting over narnia and lord of the rings etc etc, but does it really matter? Can’t it just be a book that some people loved and some people didn’t? Some writers are better at some things than others, it just goes round and round. Let Rowling have her moment.
Katylou, my guess as to what the baby thing was is that it was the part of Voldemort’s soul that resided in Harry, and was killed when Voldemort sent that killing curse at him.
*sigh* All was well…
I love a happy ending. But I hate when good things have to end. At least the magic of Harry, the magical world, fierce love, friendship and all the many good qualities people need will be alive in our hearts and will never end. I’m so thankful to J.K. for the wonderful times spent reading the book. It has enriched my life and imagination, and has given me many thoughts on life and many aspects of it. Although at this moment the ending of the book and the atmosphere of it will leave me with an almost sad feeling that everything has ended ,later on I’ll always look back with a shining smile to the books series and re-read them ( with my children, wife, grandchildren, or just friends ), to enter the grand world of Harry Potter, because it will keep amusing people for generations, just like any other book, that has become a must-read classic. The most important thing is that he book has made me think about life, appreciate my loved ones, fight for my friends, make people happy.
Everything that has a beginning has and end… but not the circle. The circle of life, love. I believe that Harry Potter has sealed that circle of needed qualities for the humanity and will be used as a mean of hope and inspiration. Harry was my companion from the start of the book, when I was 11 (just like Harry). Now that I’m 18 I feel that a part of Harry will always live on with me, I’ll try through Harry to inspire people to love, and to live their lives. For what it’s worth…
The next stage:
http://media.universalorlando.com/harrypotter/
What a shame that it is not going to be in England or Scotland.
What was your favourite part of the book?
I think mine was either when Harry was talking to Dumbledore in the King’s Cross place or when Harry told Voldermort why Snape’s patronus was a doe.
what happends to luna in it
Thanks all of you for your insightful commentary!
I loved Harry Potter 7 but I had these problems (many touched on already):
1. On finding himself free of Voldemort, Harry didn’t run to Ginny, sweep her up in his arms, and kiss and squeeze her. Didn’t he love her? wasn’t Voldemort the ONLY obstacle to their being together? I would have grabbed a broom and flown her up to the top tower for a makeout session.
2. When Voldemort died, there should have been some little introspective discourse, like, “this one evil man, the reason for all of it, the struggles, and death, and fear, lay dead, right here in the Great Hall. Harry looked down at the twisted, lifeless face, the reptilian skin stretched over that skeleton that hadn’t been human for so long. He felt the smallest bit of pity, in spite of himself, for this man who couldn’t feel love because he had never felt it, never seen its value. But most of all he felt more free than he ever had, because Lord Voldemort, You Know Who, the one who changed his whole life, was really dead, finally, and Harry would never have to chase, or fight, or run from Tom Riddle again.” Instead, Harry just walks away, ho hum, another Main Antagonist Dispatched, what’s for dinner?
3. None of the main characters deaths seemed appropriate in their contexts. Hedwig was just sitting there, caged. Moody, Tonks and Lupin die “off-camera” and Fred is just near a wall that explodes. Dobby is too magical to suffer a non-magical death by a casually thrown knife; his death plays like an afterthought that is only in the book to jerk tears gratuitously.
4. NOWHERE NEAR enough flying. Didn’t Harry say, repeatedly, that he hates Apparition? Wasn’t he the best flyer at Hogwarts? In a single page or two, Rowling has him lose his broom and his owl, and that seems more like cheap plot contrivance than any real contribution to the story’s narrative or emotional flow. Afterward, no owls are used, and no brooms, either, except for the brief escape from the burning Room of Requirement. I think at least there would be flying warriors in the Battle of Hogwarts. Fred and George were good at Quidditch; surely they would be able to summon their brooms again, and Harry too, since it worked against the dragon in GOF?
5. Why wasn’t Harry raising Teddy Tonks? He was made his godfather right at his birth, and when his parents died, that would make him the default dad, right?
6. The book didn’t wrap up the rest of the story properly. What happened at the Ministry of Magic, namely, how did they get rid of Umbridge? And did she finally, FINALLY get her comeuppance for being so evil and delighting in others’ suffering?
7. My biggest problem of all: Neville Longbottom didn’t kill Bellatrix, or even punch her in the mouth. To me, as surely as Harry’s destiny was to finish Voldy, so Neville’s was to avenge Bellatrix’s torturing his parents into madness. If he wasn’t going to kill her, he should have at least been more instrumental in her undoing.
Thanks for reading this and for all your amazing comments! Long live Harry, Hedwig, Hogwarts and Mad-Eye Moody!
John Nations – Re your point #7: Actually, none of the kids (Harry, Ron, Hermione, Luna, Neville, Ginny, or Draco, for instance) ever kills anyone in any of the seven volumes). Voldemort killed himself.
I just finished reading the last Harry Potter book. Over the last five years, I’ve read all of them aloud to my wife and daughter (who is now ten years old). They’ve given us all a huge amount of pleasure—thank you very much, Ms Rowling. Anyway, here are my thoughts on the series:
Essentially the saga breaks down into two parts: the first three are essentially children’s books; the last four are the Potter epic. I think Rowling’s great idea is the attempt to follow a central character year by year through the steps of his maturation from child to adult, and to write those books so that they accompany her readers—at least many of her original readers—through the same process. It’s a wonderful gift for a writer to have given a generation. Obviously, the last ten years have seen Rowling go from an obscure nobody to one of the most wealthy and successful women on the planet. I think she should be credited with having kept faith with her readers all the way through that process.
The first three books are very entertaining and successful. Hogwarts is a great place to go, full of wonder and mystery and just the right amount of danger. Rowling has a really great gift for comic dialog that makes it a pleasure to participate in the Harry-Hermione-Ron relationship. As I detail below, I think that the last four books in the series are really flawed, but if there was an eighth, I’d read it happily, because Rowling has succeeded so well in making me care about those core characters—love them and think about them as real people. Obviously, that’s a great thing for a writer to have accomplished.
I think that the transition between the children’s books and the epic books is poorly handled. Goblet of Fire is the transition book with its long account of the Tri-wizard Tournament being our last taste of simply escapist daily life at Hogwarts. That book is followed by Order of the Phoenix which seems to me the weakest book of the series. The “climax” of the book is the revelation of the prophecy that merely tells us something we all know anyway: that Voldemort and Harry are destined enemies only one of whom can survive. The attempt to complicate this non-revelation with some ambiguity centered on Neville Longbottom is pathetic, and Rowling seems to pretty much drop it in the final books.
It seems to me that it would have been desirable to combine the main events of books four and five into a single book. The Potter epic half of the series has three great moments: Voldemort’s return, Dumbledore’s death, and Voldemort’s defeat. Combining books four and five would have tightened that story arc and created a nice three and three balance between children’s books and epic books.
The series rebounds a bit with book six, but even so, I don’t think the Potter epic is nearly as good as the first part of the series. I would site two main reasons:
First, as the series expands Rowling has to leave the clearly defined confines of Hogwarts School and paint an ever more ambitious portrait of the wizarding world as a society. She never really succeeds in making that portrait believable. We’re led to believe that this world is wracked by something like civil war, but all of the conflicts in the book remain purely man to man. It’s simply Dumbledore versus Voldemort or Harry versus Voldemort. In the final analysis, the Ministry of Magic, the Order of the Phoenix, and the Death Eaters as a group do nothing except provide background noise to the really significant and all deciding acts of individual combat. That seems to be Rowling’s sense of how the world works—she even hints, I believe, that the Second World War, properly understood, was just background noise to the confrontation between Dumbledore and Grindelwald.
Notice how the head of the Ministry of Magic is always afraid not of Voldemort but of Dumbledore—that he will simply decide to take it over. If we think in the books’ own terms, the Ministry seems right to be afraid. The wizarding world seems to work like a pack of dogs, run by the strongest animal. In human terms, they’ve barely emerged from Hobbes’ state of nature, and all forms of communal authority are tenuous. This situation itself might be interesting if the books reflected on it, but they don’t. Rather it seems that Rowling’s imagination, so wonderfully fertile on the level of detail, has simply failed on the higher level of social abstraction.
Other symptoms of this failure include the annoying non sequiturs and ambiguities of wizard society. Does it make sense that Wizard political units seem to simply mirror their muggle counterparts? I mean, is there a Spanish Ministry of Magic, and do Basque wizards feel oppressed by it? Why does the Hogwart’s calendar include both Christmas and Easter holidays? Are Wizard’s Christian? And if they are, shouldn’t that be evident in some of Dumbledore’s endless talk about love and the soul? Judging from the books, these questions don’t seem to have even occurred to Rowling, and I think she must have a pretty limited conception of how something as complex as a society works. Like a lot of people, I imagine that she assumes that many social arrangements are simply natural, when a little thought shows that they are not natural at all.
There’s a real contrast here between the Harry Potter series and the Lord of the Rings. I’ll admit up front that I really love Tolkien, who of course provided me with my own Harry Potter like reading experience when I was much younger. In Tolkien, of course, everything is obsessively thought out. More importantly, in the Lord of the Rings, the actions of large communities do have important consequences. If the Ents don’t rise against Saruman, the Rohirrim will be defeated or delayed, and if the Rohirrim don’t come to Gondor’s aide, Frodo will either fail or be too late to do much good. To be sure, Tolkien presents us with noble characters who make a difference, but their destinies are believably dependent upon larger social forces that they cannot hope to completely control. Rowling seems to feel that individuals are completely free to forge their own destinies—a belief shared only by Americans and the other eternally immature people.
The second important weakness of the Potter epic is Voldemort; he’s a bad villain. He’s too simply and obviously evil in a scenery chewing, mustache twirling manner. Why would anyone follow a leader who is so manifestly cruel to and uncaring about his subordinates? The answer is supposed to be that all the Death Eaters want immortality. But Voldemort’s only gesture toward immortality is the horcrux gimmick, and it doesn’t appear that any of his supposed followers have tried to emulate it. Furthermore, it’s not clear how Voldemort’s desire for immortality is furthered by his plans for conquest. Quite the opposite actually—the plans for conquest make a significant number of people intent on destroying him. The horcrux thing might actually work if he just kept a lower profile! And what are those plans for conquest anyway? Despite the fact that his people have supposedly taken over the central institutions (such as they are) of the wizarding world, Voldemort seems very little interested in consolidating or furthering his gains. All he’s interested in doing is finding Potter; it’s the man versus man thing again. Voldemort is simply too obviously a mere foil for the hero rather than a force in his own right.
Finally, of course, Voldemort’s simply not very bright. Dumbledore is a really successful character—morally complex, suffering from pain and regret, always trying to balance the present moment’s need for human decency with the complex demands of future, general good. In some ways the Potter epic should be a chess match between Dumbledore and Voldemort, but the latter is not a worthy opponent. There are stunning gaps in Voldemort’s knowledge, and Dumbledore is always several steps ahead of him. As I’ve said above, in the final analysis Voldemort is bad in the same way that a big mean dog is bad, and the wizards are just lucky that there’s a bigger, nice dog to put him in his place.
Once more, with regard to the villain issue, there’s an instructive comparison with Tolkien. An effective aspect of the Lord of the Rings is that the high level villainy is split between Sauron and Saruman. Sauron is the big, abstract principle of evil, and he doesn’t need to do much other than exist. Saruman, on the other hand, is the active principle of evil and is allowed to be a bit more complex. Indeed, Saruman, in his descent from one of the “great and wise” to being just a petty thug, is one of the best things in the book, showing how ambition, envy, and despair lead to human evil. Along with Dumbledore, Snape is one of Rowling’s best creations, and like most readers I was happy that the final book brought him in on the side of the righteous. I wonder, however, if it wouldn’t have been a better choice for Rowling to have made Snape her Sauraman.
Bitch, bitch, bitch . . . that’s all I seem to be doing. The fact of the matter is that my voice broke as I read the final pages to my wife and daughter. Not because of what was happening in the book, but because we were reaching the end of such a long and enjoyable experience—a real life experience. Like I said, if there was an eighth book, I’d read it. But I know that the first three are the only one’s I’ll ever consider re-reading.