So I’ve finally finished off the final book in JK Rowling’s absurdly popular Harry Potter series, after nipping away at it for the past 8 or 9 days. I’m not a hardcore fan by any definition, but I have to admit, I got a warm, fuzzy feeling towards the end as I came to reflect on just how much time had passed for the various characters in these books. Harry Potter, as I’ve mentioned before, is a textbook example of the Hero’s Journey story template, and for Potter and his millions of readers, it’s been one helluva journey.
** Warning: lots of spoilers after the jump. **Going into this book, I had a couple of expectations. First, I was quite certain that Harry was to die at the end of the series. I had no reason to believe this other than that it would make for a punchier ending. Second, I was also quite certain that Severus Snape was loyal to Dumbledore and had deceived Voldemort and the Death-Eaters into thinking that he had turned. Stylistically, it made sense. Rowling has traditionally put a lot of effort into making her readers think one thing, then turning everything around at the end, and she’s been building up Snape’s evil nature since Book 1. Clearly he had to be good. Third, as a corollary to my second theory, I thought that Dumbledore had faked his death so that Snape could gain favor with Voldemort, and that he would return at the end of the book to help Harry kick some Dark Arts ass.
Of my three predictions, only the second turned out to be 100% correct. (Technically speaking, Harry did kinda die, in what turned out to be a cliche false-death). Personally, I think a tragic ending would’ve suited this series much better than the feel-good one that we actually got, but maybe I’m just being an unnecessarily vindictive bastard. The fact that Dumbledore appeared to really be dead, meanwhile, thoroughly bugged me. It seemed to me that there was no way to unravel the various plotlines without the mentor character coming back to spell everything out for Harry, and by extension, all of us readers. (This was, after all, Dumbledore’s main role in the first 4 books.)
But as I kept reading, it began to appear more and more as if Dumbledore would never actually resurface and I worried that Rowling would start having to throw new auxiliary characters and extraneous scenes at us just to push the plot along. This turned out to be the case more than once. The most obvious example was the exceedingly contrived conversation with the Gray Lady, who delivered the missing clues concerning the Ravenclaw diadem and then was quickly discarded. Later, Snape’s posthumous pensieve pulled triple-duty by answering a lot of "big picture" questions, proving his loyalty to Dumbledore, and serving as a kind of final memorial to everyone’s favorite Slytherin. Then, of course, there’s the big Dumbledore reappearance, after Harry’s overly-dramatized false-death, which wrapped everything up nice and neat. The final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort after that is essentially just window-dressing; in terms of plot, the story ended with the conversation with Dumbledore, and all that was left for the readers was to watch Voldemort blow the crap out of himself with his own Killing spell.
As you can probably tell, there are a couple of bits in this book that I felt were rather weak. The entire second act, wherein Harry, Ron and Hermione are camping out and travelling to various locales, is a wild, shapeless mess. Rowling has spent the past 6 books writing adventures within very confined locations (Hogwarts, the Forbidden Forest, Hogsmeade, Grimmauld Place, the Shrieking Shack, etc), and her imagination is noticeably thin when it comes to open spaces in the non-magic world. At one point, with the plot grinding increasingly slow, she desperately situates the trio’s camping ground right beside a spot where an ex-Hogwarts student and cohorts have taken refuge, allowing our heroes to eavesdrop on their conversation and gather enough information to get moving again. One wonders how small the countryside of western Europe really is, to afford such a lucky coincidence.
I also found it rather ironic that the whole secret of the Deathly Hallows turned out to be mostly irrelevant to the whole story. After all the hoopla about the Elder Wand being passed on from murdered wizard to murdered wizard, the final twist turned out to be nothing more than the fact that the Elder Wand was originally ascribed to Draco. (Think about it: even if the wand had been some random blackthorn, Voldemort’s spell would still have rebounded and killed him, simply because the wand was still bonded to Harry.) The Hallows legend made for some interesting reading, but ultimately it added meaningless fluff to a storyline that was already burdened with too many sub-mysteries.
These weak points are mostly forgivable though, and would hardly be enough to offend serious fans. Me, I’m just a nitpicking git with too much time on his hands. Overall, I’d give this book a 3.5 out of 5 stars. It’s not the best book in the series and there are entire stretches where you can tell that Rowling is not in her element, but I felt that it was a decent way to end a very engaging journey.