Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

[naomikritzer]

First, I want to note that we went to Edinborough Park in Edina today and I spotted at least three people with copies of Harry Potter. I love the communal aspect of this book.

Spoilers to follow under the cut.



Overall, I liked the book, even the epilogue, which lots of people have groused about. I particularly loved Snape asking Harry to look at him so that he could see Lily's eyes again as he lay dying; the tour of Snape's memories (info-dump-y though it was) and the discovery that his worst memory was his worst memory NOT because he'd been humiliated by James Potter but because he had, in his rage at James, called his best friend a mudblood; Harry calmly presenting himself to be struck dead, in order to defeat Voldemort forever; and Molly Weasley kicking Bellatrix's psychopathic ass.

As someone else noted on some discussion thread somewhere, I would love to read Neville Longbottom and the Year Without Harry Potter -- clearly the stuff that was happening at Hogwarts was interesting in its own right, and Neville clearly came into his own even before he pulled the Sword of Gryffindor out of the sorting hat and beheaded Nagini while on fire. Whoa. I have liked Neville for a long time (I still think the most heartbreaking scene in the series is the encounter with Neville and his grandmother when they've been visiting his parents at Mungo's) and it was pretty cool to see him take out the final horcrux.

And I loved the line, "Now? Or would you like some time to compose an epitaph?"

Things I found disappointing:

Draco -- and the Slytherins generally. When Pansy Parkinson suggests that they grab Harry and hand him over, it's a wonderful moment to see all the Gryffindors, Ravenclaws, and Hufflepuffs leap to their feet to defend him. But I would have really liked to see the Slytherins split, at that moment, and to have at least a FEW Slytherins side with the good guys. They don't have to be Slytherins we've seen before, even, but it would've been particularly nice to see Draco come over to the good guys. Draco is terrified of Voldemort and desperate to see his family survive, but they were out of favor, and it was clearly just a matter of time before Voldemort fed all three of them to Nagini. I would have loved to see Draco turn up in the Room of Lost Things to help Harry find whatever it was, and then to ask him to protect his family. She could've done this -- she could have still had the crown destroyed with Draco's imbecile friend's cursed fire, because his friends could've shown up uninvited. Draco more or less decided in the last book that he was not, in fact, a killer. I wish that he'd have completed some sort of redemption in this book.

In previous books, the use of the unforgiveable curses was a pretty damn big deal. Harry tried to use Crucio at the end of Half-Blood Prince, and Snape parries it, shouting, "No unforgiveable curses from you, Potter!" He tried to use it on Bellatrix in OotP and it fails; she says, "You have to MEAN it." Harry never uses magic in DH to torture or kill, but he DOES use the Imperio curse. (I think it's Harry, anyway. I suppose it might've been Ron or Hermione -- Ed's got the book, so I can't go look it up right now. It ought to be Harry, in any case, who gets his hands dirty.) And -- he just does it, and it works, and it's no particularly big deal. And it SHOULD be. I wanted to know how it felt. We got a pretty good description of how it felt to be under the curse, in GoF; how does it feel to be the one pulling the strings? And how exactly does it work -- do you get a psychic connection as part of the curse, or do you have to give your orders in a way that sounds casual enough not to tip people off? And how does it feel to know that you're using the dark arts -- is it terrifying, or temptingly exhilerating? Anyway, he uses magic he's seen done but never tried, and it's serious, big-deal, bad-ass, totally forbidden magic, and the magic itself should be a bigger deal than it is.

I found the epilogue fun but wanted to know why no one named their kid after poor Fred. Maybe that's Hugo's middle name. Who was Hugo named after, anyway? And Rose? Also, I wanted to know what Ron, Hermione, Harry, and Ginny were doing with their lives, other than raising kids. Did Harry go spend a decade turning around the fortunes of the Chudley Cannons? Did Hermione go found a wizarding university? Did Ron follow his dad to the Ministry?

Overall, though, I enjoyed the book and found it a satisfying conclusion.

Comments

[aelfsciene.livejournal.com]

You have outlined three of my big problems--I really think Draco should have had some sort of redemption, and that even one or two Slytherins staying behind to fight really would have changed the tenor of the book. Slughorn came back, sure, but it sounded as if the students went to join the Death Eaters after they'd been evacuated, and that was very disappointing.

I was also astonished that the Unforgivables were just kinda...whatever, in the end. One of the reasons Voldemort gained power so easily with so few should have been their willingness to torture and control and kill, while the defenders stunned and disarmed and jinxed. But the teachers, the Order, and even the kids were throwing around Crucio and Imperio with impunity.

Especially after HBP, when Harry used Sectumsempra and it was a huge thing, darkening his soul, his self, even making him more like Voldemort...I thought we might see more of that here. But there was nothing.

I also ranted about no "walking memorial" for Fred or Tonks (though someone suggested that George would have named a son Fred; of course, we weren't given those details), and that all of the Potter kids were named for Harry's people, not Ginny's, and that was weird. And no jobs, what?

I dunno. I was overall dissatisfied by the book, although there were some fun bits. I'm going to reread it before long (we read it aloud the first time, so I likely missed things) and take notes on both sides, see where things shake out. ^_^

[naomikritzer]

Well, I'm sure they do have jobs; she just doesn't tell us what they are.

But yeah, that's the other thing about the unforgiveable curses. There should've been some internal struggle. There's a great opportunity when Harry gets his "don't disarm people! they know it's you! just kill the motherfuckers!" lecture to talk a bit about what becomes OK when you're facing down people who want to kill you, kill your friends, kill your family, and oh yes, take over the world and subjugate the non-magical people while confining magical people from non-magical backgrounds to concentration camps guarded by the embodiment of clinical depression. I mean, if the ends EVER justify the means, they do here, but since it's very clear that murder exacts a terrible price even when it's justifiable... well, they wax philosophical and expository on enough other subjects, surely they could've spared some thought and angst over this rather key set of questions?

There were some really interesting comments on the Harry Potter open thread over at Making Light about how the Slytherins are all apparently evil and why this is, and how fundamentally fucked up the whole concept of Sorting is. Frankly, I was disappointed that the Sorting hat survived Voldemort's setting it on fire.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly. (And also, everyone spent so much time and effort in the previous book learning how to cast spells without speaking them, but here again everyone -- Death Eaters included, and you'd think they'd take any advantage they could -- is shrieking their spells at the top of their lungs. What's up with that?) I've always wondered about the mechanism of the Imperius Curse, and now I wonder how Harry was able to make it work so efficiently on his first try. Well, okay, maybe he got to practise a little under the regime of Fake!Moody, but that was three books ago.

There is a moment somewhere where Harry says, in effect, "So-and-so [Bellatrix?] was right, you do have to mean it". But that's about all the thoughtful contemplation of Unforgiveable Curses we get, and I think that's a dropped ball, a missed chance (as you point out) for a thoughtful discussion of ethics in war.

[yankee-in-texas.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I was bummed that they were still Sorting people in the end. After all the Hat's own commentary on how the Houses needed to work together and so on, too.

And it goes right along with the Slytherins all deciding to leave rather than fight Voldemort. I agree there too. Why didn't any of them stay? I have to conclude that it's because the division of students into Houses is an important division. Even if Harry had been a Ravenclaw, most of the people who would have stayed to defend him would have been Gryffindors (who all have that thing about saving people). Not that Harry could have been a Ravenclaw.

[twinotter.livejournal.com]

I was pretty happy with the book. The long running from the Death Eaters and trying to figure out what to do was handled well. The explanation for why Dumbledore couldn't tell Harry made some sense - though it seemed to me he had faced this question before in most of the books' climaxes.

The new "Dark Side Dumbledore" concept was good. There's always more to people than you see on the surface and this new wrinkle to his character was done very well.

The book tied up a lot of loose ends in good ways.

The explanation of why Snape had done what he had done held water in my mind. I didn't really like the oozing memory approach - I think it would have been better to find a carefully prepared vial with a note that said "View me, Harry." The highly edited, clipped scenes that the critics are all calling "expository" seemed a bit too polished to just be his last thoughts. And yet, it did get the message across pretty well.

This book did seem like a tour off all things Wizarding, though. Almost everything from the previous books had to make a cameo in this book - and often they only felt like cameos - not actually useful to the plot. Heck, even Querrel poked up his ugle head. "Oh and keep an eye on Querrel."

Overall, my biggest complaint with the book series is that I don't buy JKR's "I had the whole thing planned out" line that she tows. The writing always seems to be "Just In Time." Some aspects of earlier books were clues, some were red herrings. But it felt more like she was flipping through her own published books while sitting in that fancy hotel room with that unopened bottle of champaign. She was flipping through the books looking... "Oh, I can use that." "Yeah, and then there's something I can do." Perhaps she just took a stack of fan mail with her and searched through it for nuggets that they latched on to. The introduction of concepts like the Trace and Taboo at this late stage in the game just seemed wrong - like "Midicloreans" in the Star Wars universe...

Sigh.. I guess in my ramble above I just made a lot of complaints. I still liked the book. In the end, I believe in the coming of the Good. It was nice to see Neville and Harry fulfill their destinies.

Rudy
(just found your blog, Naomi)

[naomikritzer]

Hi Rudy! I didn't know you were in LJ.

Regarding the Trace, I swear I read a FAQ or an interview or something where she said that the Ministry of Magic knew when Dobby blew up the cake that a spell had been performed in Harry's house, but not by whom, because their surveillance on underage magic was imprecise. Harry was at a distinct disadvantage for having been raised by Muggles, because all magic in Privet Drive was assumed to be him. Ron, of course, lived with a bunch of adult wizards and thus the Ministry of Magic didn't really keep tabs on him but instead let his parents keep an eye on things. Given that Harry almost got expelled for magic he didn't even do, this seems more than a little unfair. The Trace didn't make a whole lot of sense given the whole Dobby situation. Maybe it was a new technology that they'd come up with in part because of Harry's complaints about being blamed for Dobby's magic...

[twinotter.livejournal.com]

I wasn't here until I found your blog. :)

Yes, I remember that as well. Sigh.. continuity in a movie isn't that big a deal. continuity in a book is paramount.

That lack of imprecision also makes it hard to believe in the Taboo... It didn't really move the plot and should have been dropped. They could have just as easily been caught by any other slip-up and taken to the Malfoy dungeon.

This is the interesting thing: when you're relatively unknown, they edit the shit out of your writing. Witness the first three books. After you're richer than the Queen, they let you write whatever the hell you want. JK could probably have just copied the back of her cereal box... they pay by the pound over there, don't they? ;-)

[chrysoula.livejournal.com]

I am curious if this is actually true. If so, is the writer is really to blame, or the editors who don't want to stab the golden goose?

[naomikritzer]

Oh, I think this is definitely an issue with JKR's books, although I think the issue is biggest with OotP. Editing varies a ton by house anyway. I had a really good editor at Bantam -- very insightful. if Anne Groell were JKR's editor, there'd have been a lot more about the impact of using unforgiveable curses, because that's precisely the sort of thing she notices and makes you fix. There are publishing houses that do a lot less editing, though. Also, once someone gets really famous, there are a couple of things that happen. (1) They no longer have to listen to their editor if they don't want to. (2) No one wants to make them mad. (3) (I think this is the biggest issue, actually, with these books, as I've never gotten a prima donna vibe from JKR's interviews) The publisher wants to get their books into print as fast a possible once the author turns them in.

The biggest continuity issue in the book was the memory charm. Hermione has used it on her parents and sent them to Australia. Then later in the book she says she's never done it, right before she uses it on the Death Eater in the coffee shop. That honestly didn't bother me all that much, though -- it was a dumb mistake, rather than something that was really missing.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Then later in the book she says she's never done it, right before she uses it on the Death Eater in the coffee shop.

I missed that one! I did notice, though, that she tells Ron and Harry about sending her parents to Australia a second time, even later in the book, and they both act as though they were hearing this information for the first time.

I've had the same theory about the editing of bestselling authors for many years now ...

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

I actually thought that explanation turned up in one of the later books -- because I know I've read it, and I don't think I've read any JKR interviews.

[tg2k.livejournal.com]

I agree with just about everything that's been said here.

I was mostly satisfied with the book, though. I understand that some of the "cameos" were probably just to act as refreshers for us (it's been a long time since I read some of those things, so it helps to jog my memory). I would have liked to know what the characters did end up doing, but heck, I was ecstatic that she skipped a ways ahead. Lots of authors would just tie it up, maybe have a few months later so you know for sure who's getting together, but her ending was so much better. Completed the circle, I guess.

It was too bad not to see any development with Draco--he didn't really ever development much as a character. I was glad for his mother's behavior though.

The Trace doesn't really work that well, when you think about it.

And the Houses...that never worked very well for me. But this is supposed to be geared for kids, and for kids, the Houses helps simplify the characters somewhat, I think.

[waterfall8484]

But I would have really liked to see the Slytherins split, at that moment, and to have at least a FEW Slytherins side with the good guys.
This was my biggest problem with the book. Apart from that I'm a lot more satisfied than I thought I would be, which is nice. :~)

(I'd love to comment more on this post but I'm in a public library and don't have the time - don't you love holidays without the Internet?)

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

But I would have really liked to see the Slytherins split, at that moment, and to have at least a FEW Slytherins side with the good guys.

No kidding. Because otherwise all we have is Slytherin=Evil, and if Sorting is that reliable a process and all Slytherins are just baby Death Eaters, shouldn't someone have done something about that a long time ago? Like, I don't know, an intervention of some sort? :P

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Rats. Hit "Post Comment" too soon.

If I'd been writing the epilogue, I think I'd have set it at a wedding or other big party, and thus worked in organically the answers to such questions as What happened to Luna? and What is it that all these people do for a living these days? and How has George coped without Fred all these years, and did he keep the joke-shop going or ...? and Did Hermione become Secretary for House-Elf Relations at the Ministry of Magic? ...

And so on.

I understand why we go back to Platform 9 3/4 for the epilogue, but I'd have liked more information about people other than Harry, Hermione and Ron.

I also felt that the tight Harry!POV limited this book in a way it didn't the earlier ones: I got positively claustrophobic during those months in the tent, and wanted very much to know -- more, to see -- what was going on everywhere else, because you know it's got to have been more exciting. The glimpses we got of Neville and Luna and Ginny, particularly, made me wish we'd spent more of the book with them and less in the tent with the depressing Horcrux. (I felt the book needed more Ginny overall, really -- that is, more Ginny qua Ginny, rather than Ginny-as-sidekick or Ginny-as-girlfriend. I know she's under-age and all, but I couldn't help thinking at several points in the narrative that the Ginny of HBP would have been a lot less ready to stay out of the action.)

I keep criticizing the book more and more every time I start discussing it, but I really did enjoy it, and I'm really glad that Harry didn't actually die. The Snape/Lily relationship I found surprising and touching; I cried when Dobby died, and again when I thought Harry was going to his death, and I totally teared up during the Battle of Hogwarts (I'm a sucker for besieged-and-outgunned-good-guys-rally-to-defend-the-fortress), especially at McGonagall leading her charge of galloping desks and Kreacher at the head of his house-elf army.

But I don't see why Hedwig had to be killed off (I know it wouldn't have been practical to take her all over the UK looking for Horcruxes, but surely she could have stayed at the Burrow with, one assumes, Crookshanks), or Remus and Tonks. And, to be honest, it bothered me that Harry never visibly thought about Hedwig for the whole rest of the book.

[(Anonymous)]

I am currently rereading the book and he did think about Hedwig a couple times during the book. For instance when dobby dies he is thinking about hedwig as well.

Longbottom

[twinotter.livejournal.com]

All over the net people are talking about how cool Neville Longbottom is. Heck, even I want a T-Shirt with some pithy Neville slogan on it. "Neville Longbottom and the Year Without Harry Potter" sounds like the best to me so far (and I book that I would be ecstatic to buy).

And people seem pretty happy with Mrs. Weazley (Mollywobbles) kicking the crap out of Bellatrix. It was a cool scene and I'm very glad that she got to show off that she's a very powerful witch.

However, I really felt like Bellatrix was Neville's job. After the build-up, I really expected him to be downfall of Bellatrix. Now, I'm all for beating cliches... but after the emotionally powerful scene in St. Mungo's, it seemed necessary...

R

re: community nature

[allochthon.livejournal.com]

Have you seen this?
http://flickfilosopher.com/geekphilosophy/2007/07/stephen_colbert_1.html
(contains no spoilers)
((via fer))