This post contains book-destroying SPOILERS for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Here’s the non-spoiler post if you got here by mistake.
Right, then.
The badly mishandled side-plot is the whole Lupin-Tonks thing, which is just so muddled that I refuse to waste any further brain cells on it. Ditto the epilogue, which as numerous people have said already, read like a twelve-year-old’s fanfic.
The mixed symbolism: to paraphrase my LJ post: on one hand, Harry survives the Killing Curse again because the protection of his mother’s love lives on in Voldemort, and then protects everyone else the same way. On the other, he defeats Voldemort because he’s actually the master of the Elder Wand, having defeated Draco, who defeated Dumbledore. That is, the thematic/symbolic elements crucial to the happy ending are love and self-sacrifice . . . and dominance and mastery. I’m not sure this tension is adequately resolved by Harry deciding to give up the Wand.
As I realized later, the Elder Wand accomplishes something else thematic: it allows Voldemort to die at Harry’s hand without Harry killing him—thus preserving that pure heart that’s made much of in books five and six.
Of course, the effectiveness of this is undercut by Harry’s intentionally casting Unforgiveable Curses. Also by the absurdly phallic nature of the whole thing. Also by calling the Elder Wand the “Deathstick.”
The scope: you’ll all be unsurprised to hear that I was disappointed that the fundamental inequality of wizarding society was only gestured at, through the house-elf and goblin subplots. As someone-or-other on LJ said (I’ve lost the link, now), if the epilogue must be the Hogwarts Express (for maximum mirroring of book 1), why not have some non-humans climbing aboard? Likewise disappointed the treatment of Slytherin as a house. Contrary to everyone else, I thought Dumbledore telling Snape that “I sometimes think we Sort too soon” sucked, because it reinforced the idea that only bad people belong in Slytherin, so if someone turns out non-bad, they were improperly Sorted. (Yes, I know it was a reference to bravery, but the net effect was to emphasize that Snape was different than all those other bad Slytherins.)
Some things that weren’t made big deals of, that I thought might be: the Dursleys. Draco. (Though I liked what we did get for both of those.) Pettigrew. Snape, even. I may come around to thinking that the last two are more of a problem than I do at present. Oh, and on a different level, Ginny was off-screen in a really “I am just Harry’s happily domestic ending” kind of way. (I actually found Ron and Hermione somewhat convincing in this book. I’ve never been convinced by the portrayal of Harry and Ginny.)
I was surprised that Dumbledore was finally given some explicitly dark shades of gray, since when Skeeter’s articles were first seen, I thought they were as badly slanted as everything else and would be explained eventually. (Many readers have long argued that the grayness was implicit, based on his treatment of Harry, something that’s also made explicit here—”raising him like a pig for slaughter,” as Snape puts it. (I did like that chapter, despite its being the Infodump of Great Convenience.)) And I was uncomfortable by everyone urging Harry to have blind faith in Dumbledore, because as I said about Chamber of Secrets in the post linked previously, I’d have preferred that plot not to turn on loyalty above all. So I appreciated that in the “King’s Cross” chapter [*], Harry got to hear him out and make a choice about whether he was going to trust him and what he was going to do, for all that it was underplayed.
[*] Whee, symbolism! Do you think that was set up from book 1, why they left from that station instead of one of the others?
I’d really thought that Harry wasn’t a Horcrux, based on Langford’s pointing out that Voldemort couldn’t successfully possess Harry in book five. However, I can rationalize this as the piece of soul not being a true Horcrux, as it wasn’t self-motivated or aware: not a Mini-Me, but a bit of cat hair sticking to the sweater.
To end on positive notes:
- “The Ministry has fallen. Scrimgeour is dead. They are coming.” was the surprisingly ominous and effective bit I was referring to in the non-spoiler post.
- I really liked the fable.
- The return of the dead in chapter thirty-four was what made me sniffle. (The aftermath of Dobby’s death also worked well for me, though on looking at it now, I see the dread ellipsis plague had broken out without my noticing.)
- And to descend suddenly in tone, I was amused by Trelawney throwing crystal balls. (Rowling does do exciting action scenes.)
>Yes, I know it was a reference to bravery, but the net effect was to emphasize that Snape was different than all those other bad Slytherins.
Thank you. Yes. This has been the big thing bothering me all along throughout the series, from the Cup winner switcheroo in the very first book. The problem isn’t that Slyhterins exist. The problem isn’t, necessarily, even the Houses. The problem is that they totally devalue and diss anyone not a Gryffindor. Blech.
Hannah: yes, it’s this really peculiar article of faith in the Harry Potter universe, that Gryffindor is the best regardless. It’s hardly original at this point to suggest that Hermione and Ron seem much better fits for Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff, respectively, but that would have required (gasp!) inter-House friendships. And the treatment of Slytherin seems like a massive blind spot to me in a series that ends up smudging someone _named_ White, after all. It’s disappointing.
This is probably one of the more thoughtful posts that I’ve read and pretty much agree. I read it the first time just for fun. At some point, I’ll go back and do some analyzing.
culfinriel: thanks. I’m glad I waited a little bit to post. =>
It’s certainly over-convenient, but no, most trains to the North leave from King’s Cross station. 🙂 There’s a line that goes up through Peterborough and Stevenage to Edinburgh.
Aw, heck–I was so amused by that, I was half-hoping it was intentional. =>
I agree with much of this post, I enjoyed the book but it required just rolling with whatever JKR decided the rules were at that moment, as in the other books too.
The lack of any meaningful Snape time wouldn’t have bugged me as much if there was less meaningless downtime in the middle.
I think both are ultimately traceable to the decision to have the books stick almost entirely with Harry’s POV. While that decision is understandable early on and for the mystery-plot books, I think increasingly it hampered the story as the series went on–resulting in such obvious workarounds like the vastly inconsistent window into Voldie’s mind and the Pensieve scenes.
A book that had multiple POVs or was told in omni would have looked a lot different, and I think a lot better.
@ #2: Well, inter-House friendships are difficult to manage, given that they really do spend almost all their time exclusively with their own house; In class they occasionally have lessons shared with another House’s year, but you’d never get a group of three together there, and outside class it seems like the vast majority of their time is spent at the House’s eating table and/or in the Common Room of the House — I don’t think we’ve ever seen evidence that either of those are even available to a-friend-of-someone-in-the-house, by invitation. Even the Patils seem to communicate relatively rarely.
Arguably, of course, you could have changed those circumstances if you really wanted, but I think the very-little-inter-House-interaction thing closely mirrors actual British boarding school House setups &c.
Jasper: I believe I’ve seen it asserted (possibly in the Langford book?) that the HP books are pastiches of boarding school _literature_, not actual present-day (or near-present-day) _practice_. But regardless of whether the Houses serve useful functions (literary or otherwise) at the beginning, I’d really hoped to see the series & characters outgrow that by the end.
Rowling’s maddening inconsistency in the workings of her magic system is one of the things that makes me roll my eyes every time. The discussion of wands this time around was surprisingly thorough, but I was taken aback by the purely domination-driven way that ownership was passed on. Perhaps there’s a reason for the phallic symbolism … .
The only reason I can see for the whole Ginny-Harry releationship is that it gives him an instantly huge family, and that’s what he supposedly longs for most. Certainly there’s no chemistry there!
I’ve become increasingly annoyed about the demonization of the Slytherins. Of course slyness isn’t generally admirable, and of course the Slytherins tend to be interested in things that can lead to Very Bad Stuff, but shouldn’t there instead be an emphasis on making sure that the tendencies that make a Slytherin are channelled into the proper outlets? Isn’t it true that sadly, we need things like intelligence agents and criminologists? And doesn’t the wizarding world need much the same? Yin and Yang are both necessary to make the world go ’round, Ms. Rowling.
Chomiji: ditto about the wands, and the Slytherins.
I’d not expected the books to do well at portraying a series romantic relationship, based on prior evidence, and so I was doubly disappointed by Ginny’s disappearance in light of what I thought was a pretty good Hermione/Ron relationship.
I’ve decided that the HP books are somewhat like their protagonist. Just as there’s nothing particularly special about Harry[*], apart from being the Boy Who Lived, there’s nothing particularly special about the series apart from its being The Books That Were Read. Fame happened to them, rather than being caused by them.
Unlike some, I’m not bitter about this. Yes, I would prefer that overwhelming commercial success have struck, oh, Patricia Wrede or Diana Wynne Jones or Diane Duane or any other author of really good YA fantasy. But I will certainly settle for there being some books — any books — that cause millions of kids around the world to voluntarily read thousands of pages of prose and get exposed to a little bit of Latin in the process.
[*]Nothing central, that is. Being a natural at Quidditch is not a mythic ability, just as Rowlings relative deftness with snot humor is not a notable literary ability.
I hate the treatment of Slytherins in the books. It’s always irritated me how all the other houses cheered against them, and how the teachers (except Snape) seemed to have an inherent bias against them. Even the room they get is crappy, it’s in a dungeon. Symbolism much? “Yeah, all the Slytherins are going to end up as Death Eaters or some other sort of criminal, so let’s get them used to a dungeon in their young years.”
I’d say it’s not that everyone who is evil gets put in Slytherin. It’s just that everyone who is in Slytherin gets treated so badly that they have almost no chance of becoming good. They’re automatically distrusted, seen as prejudiced. Hogwarts should just do away with that house and leave the other three. But then they couldn’t just convienently lump a bunch of students as “bad kids” and would have to decide for themselves whether a kid was good or not. That would be too hard.