On Fri, 15 Oct 2010 03:32:51 -0400, Alric Knebel's Rack wrote:
> <http://www.bscreview.com/2010/10/harry-potter-and-the-deathly-hallows-international-dates/>
>
> 19Nov for USA/UK/CA
Goodbye, Harry Potter
Does J.K. Rowling's final installment, "Harry Potter and the Deathly
Hallows," provide the magical ending to the beloved series her readers
so desperately long for?
By Laura Miller
*
This review discusses plot developments in the new Harry Potter novel.
If you don't want to know anything about the story, please don't read
it.
Ask someone what the Harry Potter series is about, and they'll
probably answer, "a boy wizard." But in mulling over J.K. Rowling's
innovative melding of children's fantasy fiction with old-fashioned
boarding school stories, I've concluded that the boarding school
element has the edge. Much as we may love Harry, Hermione, Ron, Hagrid
and Dumbledore, don't we all love Hogwarts just a little bit more?
(Or, let me put it this way: Given the choice between meeting any one
of Rowling's characters and getting to attend the celebrated school of
witchcraft and wizardry, which do you think most readers would pick?)
So brace yourselves, fans: Hardly any of the latest and last book in
the series, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," takes place at the
school.
Whatever the troubles lurking in the richly imagined wizardry world
outside its walls, Hogwarts has always been a sanctum for the forces
of decency, presided over by headmaster Albus Dumbledore. But, with
Dumbledore's death at the end of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood
Prince," Hogwarts can obviously never be the same, and Harry has to be
spirited off into hiding by the remaining members of the Order of the
Phoenix. The influence of the diabolical Lord Voldemort has grown,
infiltrating the press and finally the Ministry of Magic itself. A
Nazi-like racialist campaign to "register" and control Muggle-born and
"blood traitor" wizards burgeons. Harry, Hermione (a Muggle born) and
Ron never get to climb aboard the Hogwarts Express for their seventh
and final term.
Of course, the idea that boarding school offers shelter from the rough
injustices of the real world is a delusion enjoyed only by people who
have never attended one. British writers as diverse as C.S. Lewis and
George Orwell have tried to disabuse the general public of its bizarre
affection for such institutions and the genre of children's fiction
set in them. Lewis was fond of saying that "school stories" fostered
fantasies far more pernicious than any fairy tale because they
actually tricked children into believing that boarding school offered
something more than "raw and sordid ugliness." The writer Neil Gaiman
has called Rowling's depiction of boarding school a "weird and
idealized" vision of something that's "really all about bullying,
torture and [in deference to any children who might be reading this,
let's just say that the last word he mentioned refers to an activity
usually practiced alone]."
Nevertheless, in the Harry Potter universe, Hogwarts has been the last
holdout of the good and true, and by exiling Harry, Hermione and Ron
from its grounds, Rowling is forcing her narrative to grow up. Harry
has that experience so common to people who've just lost a parent (or,
in this case, a parent figure): discovering that the Dumbledore he
thought he knew so well had a past he never suspected, one that
doesn't fit with the memories he cherishes. The protection spell that
his mother cast over the Dursleys' house on Privet Drive expires when
he turns 17, and he's got to leave it and them forever; much as he
hated the place, he's cast doubly adrift.
Harry and his friends are thrust into a perilous society where the
brutality of real-world boarding schools prevails. The omnipresent
dread, the held breath at the closing noose of fascism, familiar from
so many World War II stories, hovers over the whole book. Much of "The
Deathly Hallows" reads like a thriller, beginning with a breathless
broomstick chase in the fourth chapter. After a brief, amusing pause
for a wizard wedding (no less exhausting than the Muggle kind), it
evolves into an extended chase, with Harry and his comrades falling
into the clutches of Voldemort's Death Eaters only to escape by the
skin of their teeth at least a half dozen times.
These action scenes are expertly executed, and if Rowling really does
decide to write more fiction set in Harry's world, she could probably
do worse than inventing a wizard detective or spy as her next hero.
Unlike those of some great children's authors (Kenneth Grahame, Lewis
or E. Nesbit, for three), her prose style has never been especially
graceful or beautiful (one Salon reader really hit the nail on the
head by calling her writing "sturdy"), but it's perfectly suited to
this kind of scene, and her control over the whole novel feels much
firmer and tighter than it did in the preceding two volumes, "Order of
the Phoenix" and "Half-Blood Prince." She does have to resort once
more to the Pensieve (a sort of magical VCR for other people's
memories) to handle some heavily expository flashbacks toward the
book's conclusion, but by then you're so caught up in the narrative
you don't mind.
As for the ending, and the strange, widespread and literarily autistic
obsession with who does and doesn't die in it, suffice to say that
some sympathetic characters are killed and that everything -- the
configuration of the horcruxes, the true colors of Severus Snape, the
final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort -- turns out in the
only way it possibly could if you thought about it for more than two
seconds. But that doesn't detract from the cumulative power of
Rowling's storytelling, because a real story, as anyone with half a
soul knows, is much more than a series of plot points. Even though (as
a grown-up) I did occasionally weary of Rowling's rudimentary romantic
comedy and love-conquers-all moral -- and even though I found myself
conscientiously ticking off her borrowings from a host of other
fantasy classics -- I was still genuinely moved at the end. (Which, by
the way, had already been spoiled for me.)
But far be it from me to ruin the book for anyone whose enjoyment of
it can be so ruined. This is all I have to say to those readers who
have yet to finish "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows": Click on
the link below only if you want to read a discussion of the series
that includes information up to and including the very last page of
the very last Harry Potter novel.
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.
Some critics have objected to an Op-Ed the British novelist A.S. Byatt
wrote for the New York Times in 2003, in which she complained that
Rowling's books lack the "shiver of awe" she expects from superior
fantasy. But you don't have to dismiss Harry Potter the way Byatt does
to recognize that she has a point. The sublime is missing from
Rowling's series, but then you won't find it in "Barchester Towers" or
"A Confederacy of Dunces," either, which doesn't make them anything
less than masterly novels. The sublime and the comic don't mix well,
and to try to squeeze both into a children's book is the kind of
experiment even a master potion-concocter like Severus Snape would
wisely avoid.
Nevertheless, for 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."
None of this is meant as a detraction -- the writers Rowling borrows
from in turn gleaned parts of their fiction from even older works. The
fantasy genre at its best draws from stories older than written
language itself; originality isn't really the point. You could even
say that Lewis and Tolkien didn't write novels at all (they called
their fiction "fairy tales" or "romance," citing much earlier literary
forms). Myth, archetype, allegory -- all of these are literary modes
in which characters, places and objects often stand not for anything
in the real world, but for elements of the human psyche, parts of the
self. That "shiver of awe" Byatt wrote about happens when you feel the
boundaries between the inner and outer worlds dissolve, if only for a
moment. Given that this isn't the register that Rowling usually works
in, it's impressive how well she pulls it off when she has to.
But 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.
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
than the assurance of the book's final sentence, tells us that all
really is well.
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