Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: The End
Submitted by GerryBot on Sat, 07/28/2007 - 21:27
Somewhere it must be written that with every new Harry Potter book release, the population must rush out and buy said tome (queuing up for bonus points, of course) and then attempt to read all six hundred and something pages in about twenty minutes.
Being the independently minded, well-balanced individual that I am, I bought my copy on the Saturday morning (in fairness, I didn't queue) and proceeded to read it. But because I'm a big boy with grown up responsibilities, I finished reading The Deathly Hallows on Monday evening.
The Plot
I should've probably read The Half-Blood Prince before kicking straight into this new book. I mean, did you know Dumbledore was dead? I must've forgot.
Anyway, we start out at 4 Privet Drive. The Dursleys house. Except the Dursleys are being shipped out for their own protection. The Order Of The Phoenix are moving Harry to a safer location, except it all goes awry. Despite the awesome secrecy involved, and several decoy Polyjuice Potters, Voldemort-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named gets wind of the plan and sets out to capture Potter.
Harry and his bestest fwiends Hermione and Ron decide to go into exile to seek out Voldemort's remaining Horcruxes. What's a Horcrux, you ask? Well, if you're a demented evil wizard who's hell-bent on becoming immortal, you embed little pieces of your soul in inanimate objects and hide them away. Chips away at your already fragile sanity, but that's the price of long life...
Anyway, the gang spends an inordinate amount of time hanging out in various forests around the place with their TARDIS-tent. Time loses all meaning for the reader. Stuff happens, but it's not terribly interesting. I gave myself bonus points for recognizing Griplock, the goblin from Gringotts bank in the first book. Ron had a strop and buggered off for a while, and I had a nasty urge to see Harry and Hermione get it on, but he kept it in his pants. Loser.
Anyway, when they stopped farting about in forests, they visited Harry's parents house, got attacked by Voldemort's snake disguised as an elderly witch, and finally rounded up most of the remaining Horcruxes. Yay!
Basically, you get the feeling Rowling's padding things out a bit. I don't know why - is it to fill out a few more pages so that it sits well alongside The Half-Blood Prince? This is the final Harry Potter book, for chrissakes! Just get to the point!
And finally we get to the point. Dumbledore is revealed to have kept quite a few things to himself over the years. Snape (as we knew) had a creepy obsession with Lily Potter, harbored even after she got married and had her soon-to-be-scarred offspring. Snape had become a henchman in Voldemort's Death Eaters, but He-Who-Yawn-Yawn-Yawn crossed the line when he killed Lily. Snape threw himself upon Dumbledore's mercy and has basically been working against Voldemort all along.
We discover that Snape killing Dumbledore is prearranged, after Dumbledore managed to curse his hand trying on Voldemort's Horcrux ring. Apparently he only had a month to live anyway.
Anyway, Voldemort eventually kills Snape, which Harry witnesses and afterward retreats to Dumbledore's office to see Snape's memories in the Pensieve. Amazingly, Snape is redeemed as the hidden good guy. Did it take you seven books to work it out? How slow are you?
The problem is, Harry also discovers that he is an unwitting Horcrux. Yes, a part of Voldemort is inside Harry and Voldemort cannot be defeated while Potter lives. Boo! But plucky Harry decides to face an almost certain death, as Voldemort fires a well aimed Avada Kedava at him...
The Ending
Needless to say, Voldemort's death blast fails to finish Potter. Quelle Surprise! Cue massive good versus evil showdown, imaginatively staged in the Hogwarts grounds. Crikey, I'd never have guessed it would all end there...
Needless to say, Voldemort's reign of terror is put to an end. But the worst bit is the goddamned epilogue. Not content with tying up all the loose ends and leaving the hero completely intact with only the scar he arrived with, Joanne Rowling insulted our intelligence by providing a sugary sweet ending which - 18 years later - sees Ron and Hermoine happily married and Harry settled down with Ginny Weasley.
Seriously? This guy saves the entire wizarding world and they marry him off to a ginger bird? His best friend's sister? Bill should have stood aside and offered him Fleur Delacour. It's only right. Damn you, Rowling.
The Fatalities
I'd heard that JK Rowling was going to be ruthless with the characters and much loved wizarding types would be put to death in the interests of a grand finale.
So who gets chopped first? Hedwig. A bloody great big owl. My tears stained the next five pages. Then who? Mad-Eye Moody. I couldn't contain my horror. How could she?
She might as well have stuck a knife in my heart with the next death. Dobby, the house elf. Seriously? Dobby was the Jar Jar Binks of the Harry Potter series. Every time I saw him I wanted to rip his ears off. So I was actually glad that Bellatrix Lestrange managed to pick him off. By the way, did you know Bellatrix Lestrange is an anagram of JK Rowling? Well, it's not.
The most unsettling death was that of Fred Weasley. It actually took balls to a) kill off a Weasley, and b) break the symmetry of the twins.
The significance of killing Lupin and Tonks, leaving their child an orphan actually hit me quite hard, especially as they'd asked Harry to be Godfather. No, not an Itallian mobster.
The Summary
All joking aside, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows was a fantastic ending to a legendary series. While there was a lot of dead weight in the 'forest section', there were some fabulous set pieces that will look great when this eventually makes it to the big screen.
My only complaint would be that the ends eventually tied up much too neatly. It would have been nice to discover Dumbledore had expected Harry to die from the offset, but he managed to come back and exonerate himself in a bizarre post-Avada Kedava dream sequence. Snape's redemption was wonderful, and had been hinted at all along.
I still think the epilogue could have been handled much better. Let's wait and see if Rowling releases a 'directors cut' version of the book that tidies the end up...
Comments
I actually think the happy
I actually think the happy ending was put there so that in five to ten years time, If Rowlings purse is feeling the pinch, she can start it all off again... Harry's son may have to face the secret heir of Voldemort....you never can tell!
Doesnt She have more money
Doesnt She have more money than the queen? I dont think she will EVER need her purse padded again.
Gus
Epilogue
I agree that the epilogue was crap. It was a let-down after the rest of the series. I think she just tacked it on because everyone would get pissed at her if she didn't add some sort of closure. It almost seems like she got lazy...
loved it
but am sad that it has ended. it is like losing a friend. well at least it lasted much longer than most relationships, was far more exciting, and had a happy ending.
The epilogue part really
The epilogue part really sucked. At near the end of the book, I felt like 'hell, why did she got so bored?!'. I believe the book was going to be 700 hundred or so pages but she just got bored of writing and just dropped the subject.
There's something wrong about the series of books, actually. Whoever is writing the book, they get bored if they are clear about the book will be end of the series. I felt the same for the series 'Lord of the Otori', she sucked too near the end of the series.
Ending
jk rowling probably wrote an ending where he died and cried too much and wrote the first thing she could think of to change it. whoopdi f***** do, harrys alive
Epilogue?
I was hoping she would have expanded it into a 100 page Appendix, or series of Appendices.
The Whole Shebang
Where to begin, always a problem with things like this. Ok, an overview of the lot first. All in all, the 7 books show to us that Ms Rowling aint no Dickens, that's for sure. The narrative wasn't terrible as the snotty literary hacks from the broadsheets tell us, but, it was inconsistent throughout the series, further complicated by muddy explanations of certain aspects ( Voldo's half life status for one ) and over-contrivances in others, ( eg - use of the pensieve near the end to complete the jigsaw), but, what the hell, what a writer and what a series. I'd sooner have flawed genius than nothing, and this is what we got.
Having said that, I don't believe JK really did have the story wrapped up in her head and then on a notepad in a Scottish greasy spoon, I do think she changed some things mid-series. Unlike the owner of this goodly blog, I don't think Snape was due to be shown as a goody in the end, I think he was going to be Mr Evil-all-along, but, perhaps publisher pressure made JK get with the formula for the genre. ( See the comical breakdown of what trilogies are supposed to be all about in the Scream movie series, for those who would point out this is actually 7 books, then double the advice and add on a 1/3, and if that doesn't do it, shove a Bezoar down its throat. ).
I think there was enough to let us know Draco was - originally - going to turn to the good side; many of his supposed derogatory comments I think were down to his background and teenage immaturity which stopped him from saying he fancied Hermione. but again, I think a little Bonifacing was the order of the day on JKs' part But, what I did love about the stories, was the fantastic result of it being a derivation ( no one can be truly original, or those that are so obcure they disappear up their own cauldron ), I love the in-jokey narrative references to popular culture ( starting with welcome back Potter which must have been inspired by that dreadful US TV show starring Travolta ), there's a touch of Star Wars, Billy Bunter ( yes, as odd as it sounds, either Newton or Cherry was a lad from the wrong side of the tracks not fitting in ) as well as that film where the working class lad got into Eton.
There are also many more, I just cannot recall at the minute.
There is also the fantastic Dickensian style orphanage section, I am sure JK had Kathleen Harrison in mind when writing the character of the woman who ran the place, and of course, Gin, rather than Ginny, had to appear somewhere. I could argue that there's a touch of Mildred Hubble too, but, these type of similarities simply have to be seen as the oft-used framework within a genre.
The real weak link in all this is Order of the Phoenix, one bad book that; it is very like the Tolkien trait of writing a good story but then inexplicably encasing it in an absolute pile of codswallop, it is too long, it is too miserable, it is too angry, I wonder what made JK persist with publishing it? Finally, one other bad piece of narrative and dialogue / plot, surprisingly from POA.
It is one bad thing in an otherwise brilliant book. I will reconstruct it to show the spirit, ( not the words used, so mucho license on offer ), what it seems like to us when reading it. 'You broke Ron's leg and you are trying to strangle me!!' 'Oh sorry about that, now although you may still think I am a mass murderer and I look like death warmed up, other than that, do you want to come and live with me?' 'Yes'.
Post new comment