posted by Damozel |
If The Washington Post and The New York Times can review Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, so can we.
This review contains SPOILERS. Don't click on the protective link if you want to remain unspoiled!
What can I say? A lot happens.
That I ended up feeling a little disappointed probably made it easier for me to say good-bye to Harry and his friends. At The Washington Post, Elizabeth Hand confides:
I cried at the end of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." It's that rare thing, an instant classic that earns its catharsis honestly, not through hype or sentiment but through the author's vision and hard work. One gets the feeling that J.K. Rowling is as relieved and joyous as we are to reach this point at last; that she's grown and suffered and struggled through the last 10 years, just like Harry. Just like us.(Washington Post)
I was too exhausted. This book, unlike the others, goes all over the damned place. Unlike the others, it’s episodic. It would make an excellent comic book series, filled with hairbreadth escapes, near misses, miraculous escapes from death, daring rescues, and a liberal use of coincidence, lucky breaks, and unexpected “twists.”
The pace is hectic, except when it’s glacial.
"Deathly Hallows" is exhilarating but also exhausting: Rowling's prose suddenly shifts into high gear, and the spectacularly complex interplay of narrative and character often reads as though an entire trilogy's worth of summing-up has been crammed into one volume. The novel's breakneck speed is reminiscent of John Buchan's fervid "The 39 Steps." (Washington Post)
On the other hand, it takes forever to get to the curiously anticlimactic
wedding between Bill and Fleur, and for Harry, Hermione, and Ron to explore
. The final battle (which does take place at a tragically changed Hogwarts) goes on and on and on. Again: comic book stuff, for the most part, filled with back story, clunky exposition, and intermittent violence. It is certainly the darkest of the Potter books, but it’s a bit of a stretch for me to see it as “adult.” A lot of it is the stuff of adolescent fantasy: revenge, magical swords, duels, stolen kisses, dim yearnings for acceptance, angry rebellion against fate. . Only the themes of redemption---blessedly developed along the way---redeemed it for me. My favorite chapters appeared at the end of the book and consisted of Snape’s back-story and the unraveling of a “surprise twist” concerning Albus Dumbledore, who turns out to have his own complicated past.
In fact, there was entirely too much embedded “prequel” in this book. Dumbledore’s story---an unexpected past “scandal” and a hint that he’d not been as nice at 17 as he someday became---didn’t really engage me, partly because we’ve had so many accounts of Harry’s feelings of mistrust and abandonment. Furthermore----and more important---to interject a new mystery in the midst of all the loose ends that needed to be pulled together was---to use an expression of one of my British friends-- “over-egging the pudding.” It wasn’t necessary and it wasn’t even that interesting. And---to paraphrase James Thurber's young friend---it told me more about wand technology than I wanted to know.
Get on with the search for the Horcruxes so we can get back to the characters that made the series so entrancing: Lupin, Tonks, Luna Lovegood, Neville, McGonagall, Slughorn, Hagrid, the Weasely twins, and---of course---Severus Snape (would he be redeemed as expected? Was he acting under orders?)! I’ll say it again: there were plenty of loose ends that needed to be tied up. I didn’t need new characters (an unexpected brother of Dumbledore).
I especially didn’t need to see more of Lord Voldemort. In fact, the more I read about him or saw of him---and the plot device giving Harry renewed access to his thoughts ensures that you see a lot of him--- the duller he seemed:
Rowling's gift has always been for boisterous, jolly ensemble scenes and for cooking up zany and prankish magical creatures, spells and devices -- there's as much Fred and George Weasley in her as there is Hermione Granger. From Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans to the gnomes in the Weasleys' garden to the Whomping Willow, the texture and color of her imaginary world is earthy (but not lusty), homely, grounded, irreverent, antic, perfectly suited to the audience of 10-year-olds she first devised it for 10 years ago. Her voice, tone and imagination are rooted in social comedy and observation, not in the metaphysical and transcendent, which is why her more realistic bad guys -- the loathsome Dolores Umbridge, who makes a most-welcome cameo appearance in "Deathly Hallows" -- are more vigorous and chilling than her supreme antagonist, Voldemort. Umbridge is a bureaucrat, a petty tyrant and semi-closeted sadist allowed to run amok in a wizarding world gone wrong. We've all met people just like her, even if they don't come equipped with enchanted torture pens. Voldemort, by contrast, is a melodrama villain, a device. Sauron, he ain't. (Salon)
Both Laura Miller at Salon and Elizabeth Hand at The Washington Post noticed the heavy reliance on Tolkien and C.S. Lewis both in its themes and its manner of resolving them.
Miller:
[F]or the final, climactic confrontation in a seven-volume series that has become a cultural phenomenon, people expect something epic, momentous, archetypal. So it's no surprise that the closer Rowling gets to that confrontation, the more heavily she relies on borrowings from writers with a natural gift for that sort of thing: Tolkien, Lewis, even Philip Pullman. The locket horcrux that weighs down whoever wears it, sapping their initiative and hope, is one of the more obvious quotes from "The Lord of the Rings," along with the thunderous last-minute arrival of centaur troops at the Battle of Hogwarts (the Ride of Rohan redux). Above all, reading the emotional turning point of the "The Deathly Hallows" -- Harry's solemn walk to the Death Eaters' camp, his willing surrender to Voldemort and the taunting, capering glee of the evil wizard and his minions -- induces (in me, at least) an LSD-grade flashback to the sacrifice scene in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."(Salon)
Hand:
"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" is a far bleaker, unapologetically adult novel than its predecessors, which now have the feel of a long, picturesque prologue, rather as "The Hobbit" is a prelude to "The Lord of the Rings," with subplots involving goblins and warring factions who behave like orcs quarreling over the injured Frodo. But the echoes of Tolkien and Lewis are sometimes too obvious. The locket that is one of Voldemort's Horcruxes exerts a malignant power over its owners, inevitably evoking the One Ring, and the story owes too much to "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." (Washington Post)
This is why I found sections of the book a bit tedious; I’ve already read Tolkien and Lewis. Perhaps I’d have been less impatient if Rowling had departed more from the outcomes in those books, but she doesn’t. True, there was an initially fascinating twist at or near the end---was Dumbledore using Harry (himself the seventh Horcrux) with full knowledge that for Voldemort to die, Harry would have to sacrifice himself? I was rather thrilled and greatly impressed at Rowlings’ courage in revealing at the eleventh hour---as seemed to be the case---that Snape (acting under Dumbledore’s orders and together with him) recoiled from the notion of sending Harry to his death while Dumbledore viewed the outcome as a grim necessity. In fact, that he deliberately set Harry up to die in order to ensure the demise of Voldemort.
This gave dignity and lent a truly ominous note to Harry’s decision to see his mission through. Alas, it all came unraveled. Instead of ambiguity we get a touching scene in which Harry---in a dream or in a vision after being "killed"----encounters Dumbledore, who sorts him out and sends him back….leading to the inevitable FINAL final battle. (I did like it that also present in the vision, in the form of a flayed and dying creature resembling a wizened baby, the maimed part of Voldemort's soul that Voldemort inadvertently killed when he tried to finish off Harry and that Rowlings left it to the reader to work out that this is what the presence of the dying creature---"beyond our ability to help", said Dumbledore--- signified).
As noted, we get one daring escape and one cunning plan after another. The previous books don’t push the suspension of disbelief so far, partly because they stay focused so much of the time on the daily life of the characters and on the details of their world. And it is this, not the underlying story of Harry’s encounters with Voldemort, that made the Potter books so appealing (and inimitable by the usual writers of fantasy).
Rowling is most definitely a novelist; she writes about people and stuff, not about elemental forces and unconscious urges. Like all true novelists, she is the champion of the specific and the domestic, the often unsung pleasures and perils of a good lunch, a crush, a ball game with friends and a little gossip about machinations at the ministry -- which is why the doings at Hogwarts and in the Weasley household were always the best parts of the series. Her books, for all their spells and incantations and magical creatures, have never been the stuff that dreams are made of. Instead, they're the stuff that life is made of. (Salon)
Even so, despite a certain amount of disappointment, there were things about the book I liked, especially the themes concerning redemption. Dudley Dursley is briefly redeemed; Snape is redeemed; even Percy Weasely is redeemed. Other characters die, but Rowling makes the fate of the good who die untimely deaths very explicit and extremely reassuring.
I am relieved in a way that this book didn’t fascinate me like the previous three (Half Blood Prince, Order of the Phoneix, Goblet of Fire), all of which left me longing for more. It does provide you with closure and, finally, with a return to the world that made the Potter books what they were and are.
That's why Harry's great reward isn't something otherworldly, like Frodo Baggins sailing into immortality with the elves in the Uttermost West. He gets married, settles down with a good woman and has a few kids. His fate is to make many return visits to platform nine and three-quarters, even if he never again boards the Hogwarts Express. He gets to feel that twinge, that "little bereavement" that every parent feels on his child's first day of school; time passing, life going on. It's a very ordinary, unheroic sort of feeling, and that, more even that the assurance of the book's final sentence, tells us that all really is well. (Salon)
BONUS LINK [fun]: Jon Swift, Harry Potter is a brat
· Michiko Kakutani, An Epic Showdown as Harry Potter Is Initiated Into Adulthood (New York Times)
· Elizabeth Hand, Harry's Final Fantasy: Last Time's the Charm (Washington Post)
· Laura Miller, Good-bye, Harry Potter (Salon) [http://www.salon.com/books/review/2007/07/20/harry]
I enjoyed this book, but I wasn't expecting much. One of your quotes calls Rowling a novelist... I would call her a storyteller. And the biggest problem I have had with her writing (in the past few books, anyway) is the way her stories take on tangents that seem to serve no purpose. I agree with you that this 7th book had a lot of unneeded prequel. I think the book would have been better for starting at the wedding, and I agree that there was way more in here than I ever wanted to know about wands.
Thanks for the review! You pull in some good links and references, too.
Posted by: Nicole | July 30, 2007 at 12:08 PM