Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

by JK Rowling. (2007) Published by Scholastic. 759 pages.

28 July 2007

I went out and picked up my reserved copy of this book the day it was released, and I finished it on the evening of the day after. It was an odd feeling, knowing that except for a few people on the other side of the literary curtain, I was among the first to find out all the little secrets of this last chapter in Harry Potter’s adventures.
Some have complained that Harry’s long trek from campsite to campsite with his friends Ron and Hermione got a little boring. I think it is true that JK Rowling had to stretch the plot a little to make it fill out the usual framework of a full academic year. But each time our three fugitive magicians come out of hiding, there’s so much action that I felt I needed the long stretches of tedium to be able to catch my breath, and also to take a step back and appreciate just how far this series has come since its beginning.
I remember in 2000 I picked up the first Potter book. I read through it quickly and felt a little embarrassed to be reading what seemed to me a faddish kids’ book. As Harry took his first shopping trip for a wand and magical tomes, as he visited a deep underground bank run by goblins, as he took the train to Hogwarts and entered the great hall with an enchanted sky for its ceiling, I started to get sucked in by the concept. I thought that in terms of creating a fantastic world, Rowling had written herself an enormous blank check. But I expected the characters to be little more than action figures moving through this fantastic world.
There’s a point in this final book where Harry Potter breaks out into a fit of rage at a father on the verge of abandoning his wife and child. “Parents,” he says, “Shouldn’t leave their kids—unless they’ve got to.” It’s one of the best parts of the book, the whole series, maybe Harry Potter’s truest moment of heroism. One reason the Harry Potter series has worked so well is because of Rowling’s miraculous restraint with her own imagination. Though her world is awash with wonders, none of them could ever fully distract from the sadness at the heart of the story: the orphaning of an infant child. In his first few books of the series, Harry is able to enjoy his childhood, making friends and playing sports and spending a realistically minimal amount of time soul searching. But as his adolescence progresses, old phantoms and longings from his past come to haunt him.
JK Rowling avoided letting her series descend into hollow fantasy, but she also avoided making the novels too precious. True, sometimes Harry’s fireside chats with Dumbledore seemed a little bit like therapy sessions. But though each book contained it’s neat little life lesson served up at the end, it never dominated the plot, never consumed it. Rather, it was always the feelings and emotions that tripped him up as he was looking to concoct a potion or tame a hippogriff. We as readers never had to deal with “Harry Potter and the Journey of Self Discovery” or “Harry Potter and the Battle with Substance Abuse.”
Using the miracle of teleportation, Rowling takes us on a wonderful final tour of her magical world in this last book, whipping up some first class adventure scenes at Gringots Bank, the Ministry of Magic, the home of the wicked Malfoys, and of course Hogwarts Castle. Deftly as ever, Rowling paints the encroaching regime of Harry’s enemy Voldemort with traces of racism, fascism, and the love of torture: her most deliberate touch is the wizard Grindelwald, defeated by Dumbledore in 1945, infamous for building the Nurmengard prison, above whose gates stood the slogan “For the Greater Good.” But we also get a realistic look at the dynamics of blacklisting and hate campaigns as we see the Ministry of Magic come under the sway of the dark new regime.
There’s not much else for me to say here that you won’t find elsewhere. I’ll just tell you that this is an excellent conclusion to a wonderful series. A hundred years from now, people will look back at this time period and find many things confusing and confounding, but they will certainly understand the success of JK Rowling’s “Harry Potter.”