[Review] Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7)

Saturday morning, while running my errands, I stopped at Target and picked up a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  I was incredibly excited to read the book, and even more excited to dodge the spoilers.  It took me a couple of hours on Saturday and 6 hours on Sunday to finish it - I'm a ninja reader when I'm really taken in by a novel, and this is made easier when it's a book for younger readers.  Usually I read each book twice, back-to-back, before I review it.  But this time around I'm going to review it without reading it a second time. 

Our review will be absolutely littered with spoilers, so I'm going to do the whole "words the same color as the background" trick that I've copied from other websites.  However, it's a bit more challenging to do when a site is white letters on a very dark grey background, so it might take me some tinkering before I get it right.  Keep this in mind going forward, and don't pull a Tom Kim and read the first line of hidden text out of curiosity.  Here we go:

This book was at once satisfying and unsatisfying.  I loved reading it (most of the time), I enjoyed the plot, I found it exciting...but in many ways, I'm relieved it's over.  The conclusion I've come to is that J.K Rowling is an amazing storyteller and world-creator, but a mediocre writer.

Let's get the big stuff out of the way first: I didn't have a problem with the cop-out of Harry being a Horcrux, dying-but-not-really-dying, then returning to life to "fight" Voldemort.  In fact, I thought the plot was intricately and wonderfully conceived from beginning to end.  Rowling drew on tidbits, snippets  and characters reaching all the way back to the first book to tell this final story; many of these seemingly-inconsequential pieces of information loomed very large by the end of the series. 

I also didn't mind the sappy epilogue.  In my initial opinion, I thought this was Rowling's way of trying to slam the door on the possibility of more Harry Potter stories, her confirmation to establish that the characters who drove these stories had no more stories to tell.  But the more I think about it, the more I realize that she left the door wide open for future novels.  Not only did she leave many loose ends untied, such as the final fate of many unaccounted-for Death Eaters -- she also began to tell of an entirely new generation of Hogwarts students.  Down the road, she could justifiably create a new series based on new characters, with the now-adult Harry, Ron, Hermione etc. serving as mentors and parents to the latest generation of students. 

I especially enjoyed the humanization of Dumbledore, who until this book had enjoyed a near-saintlike status in the series.  Here we find that Dumbledore was far from perfect, that he was fully susceptible to the same flaws as the rest of the wizarding world.  For the first time, we learn about his background and the  secret events that led to his demise. 

Major characters did die, and the death toll was incredibly high.  Fortunately, none of the truly essential kicked the bucket, as many predicted.  George's death and Dobby's death were sad, but the twins never really drove the main plot forward in any case.  Rowling did a decent job of making death meaningful, and also offered interesting perspectives on the notion of facing death (this was some heavy stuff, at least for a teen fantasy book).  War is hell, and Rowling is not afraid to say so. 

All that said, I also had a lot of issues. 

The book suffered from the lack of Hogwarts.  It was nice that she changed it up by having the main characters leave school, but unfortunately this cut out a lot of interesting secondary and tertiary characters.  Sure, they met people along the way, but the story was much more interesting when Harry, Ron and Hermione were permitted to interact with many characters instead of a tiny handful.   Also, Slytherin's Locket acted way too much like Tolkein's One Ring.  I was practically having flashbacks. 

Not all the deaths were handled well -- and some were incredibly predictable.  Rowling has made a habit of killing off all the good-guy characters that seem much stronger than Harry -- so I wish I could have laid odds on Mad-Eye Moody's death.  I knew it wasn't a question of if he would die, but when...and she didn't waste any time dispatching him.  Tonks and Lupin's deaths weren't handled very well; it was as if they were simply bodies added to the death toll.  I found this a bit cheap, as they had come to represent an important facet of Harry's life. 

Snape's death was especially fumbled. Was it meaningful?  Yes.  Was it predictable?  I myself accurately predicted how Snape's story would end.  I knew he would end up being on the good side, and I'm surprised throughout the book how slow so many of the main characters were compared to me.  But Snape deserved to go out better than that.  He deserved to go out swinging, and be publicly redeemed -- not killed by a snake-horcrux while trying to talk his way out of the room with the Dark Lord.  I knew he sent the doe to guide Harry to Gryffindor's Sword; basically, nobody else could have.  Also, I thought details of the immediate aftermath of Voldemort's fall was woefully lacking.   There should have been two epilogues.

Here's another major question: why weren't Muggles involved in the final battle?  Why were normal people reduced to cannon fodder and innocent bystanders?  Didn't they have as much at stake?  I wanted a group of muggles to storm the castle along with the thestrals, elves, and the like.  I wanted that wall between communities to break down a bit more.  I kinda wanted the book to end with a muggle blowing Voldemort's brains out.  Or maybe Harry doing it, with a line saying "Protego this, motherfucker!"  Alas, it was not to be.  If the wizarding/muggle wall had broken, it would have eliminated the chance of telling more Hogwarts/Wizarding stories forever. 

But most of all, I feel this book brought to the fore the main critique of Rowling's series: the books end up sounding like a broken record over time.  Books 1 and 2 were virtually interchangeable in terms of major events; Book 3 was only a bit different.  Books 4, 5, 6 and 7 were also strikingly similar: at the beginning, some minor character(s) die.  Then the main plot unfolds over the course of the novel.  A confrontation arises, and a much more significant character dies.  Then (or during that death) there is a climactic battle, and the forces of good rally to win and then mourn the loss of loved ones. 

And woven through these predictable tapestries, always, is Albus Dumbledore.  Even in death he haunts us.  I was almost angry when I got to the King's Cross chapter -- and found even though Harry was "dead", Rowling found a way for Harry to have a plot-revealing conversation with Dumbledore where the old wizard could explain what happened.  FOR THE SEVENTH STRAIGHT TIME.  Enough already.  Oh wait...the series is over.   

Frankly, that's probably a good thing.  As much as I enjoyed these books, as often as I will read them again, and as tense as they made me, and as much as I feared for the safety and final fates of the characters I came to love, they had to end now.  Rowling simply could not permit herself to run in place with the same plot arcs being played out time and again into infinity.  Book 7 ended up being tense, exciting, frustrating, resolute, and ultimately pretty damn satisfying.  But unless there is a Generation 2, this saga is over.  Thank Merlin for that.  (****)

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