{"id":529,"date":"2007-07-23T21:51:12","date_gmt":"2007-07-23T21:51:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=529"},"modified":"2024-02-11T20:27:25","modified_gmt":"2024-02-12T01:27:25","slug":"rowling_07spoilers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2007\/07\/rowling_07spoilers\/","title":{"rendered":"Rowling, J.K.: (07) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows<\/cite> (spoilers)"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post contains book-destroying SPOILERS for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows<\/cite><\/strong>. Here’s the non-spoiler post<\/a> if you got here by mistake.<\/p>\n

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Right, then.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The mixed symbolism: to paraphrase my LJ post<\/a>: 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.<\/p>\n

As I realized later, the Elder Wand accomplishes something else thematic: it allows Voldemort to die at Harry’s hand without Harry killing him<\/em>—thus preserving that pure heart that’s made much of in books five and six.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> by calling the Elder Wand the “Deathstick.”<\/p>\n

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<\/em> than all those other bad Slytherins.)<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

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<\/cite> 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<\/em> about whether he was going to trust him and what he was going to do, for all that it was underplayed.<\/p>\n

[*] Whee, symbolism! Do you think that was set up from book 1, why they left from that station instead of one of the others?<\/p>\n

I’d really thought that Harry wasn’t a Horcrux, based on Langford’s pointing out<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

To end on positive notes:<\/p>\n