Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

[igenlode]

Disinterred from email comments I made back in 2008...

I did eventually finish "Deathly Hallows" -- and it wouldn't be quite fair to say that it was that which put me off the whole Harry Potter scene, but I haven't felt any urge to reread the other books since :-D

I'm afraid that "Deathly Hallows" does tend to play to Rowling's weaknesses. Her Voldemort comes across as neither particularly frightening nor especially intelligent -- not much of a threat (compare to the version evoked in The Prefect's Portrait, for example, which is equally consistent with canon but comes across as considerably more capable and dangerous). She can't depict either romance or grief convincingly, and the use of CAPITAL LETTERS does not convince this reader at least of the intensity of the characters' feelings ;-p

The sudden introduction of the Deathly Hallows is both almost pointless (they really aren't necessary for the outcome of the plot) and feels like 'cheating', since they give the impression of having been made up on the spot to be sprung on the reader after seven books -- it is not a revelation which suddenly makes sense of everything else in retrospect, as it should be, but an unnecessary extra which appears to have been bolted on to satisfy the requirement for a fresh magical gimmick in every book. They also offend my sense of the shape of the story since they really serve only as a detour -- basically, as a time-waster for Harry & Co.

The attempt at developing the Malfoys is too little, too late ("Spinner's End" was much more promising in that respect) although even the attempt is welcome. A lot of good characters are wasted: Slughorn, Snape of course, Lupin, Tonks, Ginny. Dobby's death is wildly overwritten -- I don't feel it at all, and consequently don't find Harry's supposed reaction credible. *Telling* us /ad nauseam/ what he is allegedly feeling is not an adequate substitute for evoking the actual feelings! (In fact, this goes for all the other 'deaths' -- it's like being battered around the head with a large club labelled "Oi, Look Here, Harry is Feeling Emotion".)

The whole 'Dumbledore is homosexual' business (which is *not* part of the book) strikes me as a shocking piece of misjudgement to put it charitably (the uncharitable conclusion would be that it was a publicity stunt/piece of special inclusivity pleading) -- for Dumbledore to be fascinated and led astray by the other boy's *ideas* is a far more powerful and thought-provoking concept than the implication that he was merely interested because he fancied fondling his handsome contemporary :-(

And of course, the long-promised final paragraph, supposedly written long since (the one ending with the word "scar"), is not in evidence. Instead, we have a decidedly limp epilogue which reads like a lame piece of 'when they were all grown up' fan-fiction...

The most plausible explanation of the problems with "Deathly Hallows" that I've seen put forward is that the book was indeed planned at the same time as "Philosopher's Stone" and as a result has little more depth or maturity -- but that the subsequent books in between had developed characters and sub-plots to a degree that simply could not be squeezed neatly back into the strait-jacket of the original concept. In other words, by the time she came to the planned ending it didn't really fit the story any more and had to be shoe-horned on. I find this plausible because I've had that experience myself!

Frankly I don't find the climax at all satisfactory: she is not terribly good at writing action scenes, the whole Harry's-blood-in-Voldemort thing is terribly convoluted, the enemy are not written as particularly threatening (compare "Water-horse" for example :-p), and the bits that are supposed to be highly emotional just fall painfully flat. I find the climax of "The Prefect's Portrait" a considerable improvement -- even though of course Harry couldn't possibly have defeated Voldemort in only his sixth year ;-) (And in that decidedly female-oriented version, he doesn't have an awful lot to do with the defeat, really...)

Rowling's talent was always in creating fascinating background details of how her created world actually worked. Emotion and ambiguity were never her strong point. That said, it's rather dispiriting to compare how much better she was at evoking the affections, excitements and resentments of the 11-year-old Harry -- perhaps the trouble is that she really is a children's writer and not an especially good teenage writer :-(

(Yes, I liked "The Prince's Tale" -- but it's ironic that I found myself thinking 'Good, she's got Snape right' as one does with a piece of fan-fiction! She completely wastes the character in the end, though: it's both unsatisfactory that his death is more or less coincidental given the amount of development that has been put into the character over the previous 5-6 books -- you expect him to achieve something significant -- and decidedly unconvincing as a piece of planning by Snape/Dumbledore. It is basically only by coincidence that Harry ever finds out the truth, since he happens to be around at that precise moment -- not much to hinge the supposed big reveal of your plot upon.)

Comments

[erimia]

I've been having problems with JKR from the fourth book on (or, considering that I didn't find the first and second books all that interesting, the third book is the only one I didn't have many problems with) but, being about the same age with the main character during the whole my reading of the Harry Potter books, was unable to put my finger on what was wrong. Your review describes quite accurately many of these problems. For the amount of characters and plot in her books, she's not that great in developing either, and yes, the worldbuilding is one of her strongest skills (and it was one of the main reasons of my interest, because I tend to get interested in this aspect of the story). Besides not holding her writing skills in high regard, I also have a lot of disagreements of more, eh, ideological character with her books. I think I'm not going to overload my comment with the things that others have already said better, and just say that I'm surprised to see that so many fans were interpreting the Wizarding World as some kind of a progressive utopia and now are heartbroken that some author's opinions seem to contradict this; I've never seen this place in that way.

I'm not sure if Dumbledore's sexuality cheapens his relationship with Grindelwald's ideas. It's quite possible to be influenced by the views of the person one is attracted because of the reasons not related to the attraction. I think romance just adds additional dimension to Dumbledore's and Grindelwald's relationship but not defines them primarily; if anything, it's very underplayed in the book. My main problem with the "Dumbledore is gay" is that it seems that the author didn't do much to establish this in the book (the last book is the most open in this aspect but still super oblique) which in combination with her "Word of God" looks like a dishonest attempt to have her cake and eat it too, to not deal much with negative reactions from the people who don't want to have a gay character in the very famous children book (and in the time when it was written it surely would have been a big controversy) and still receive positive reactions from the people who do.

The fanfiction examples are interesting: I've never read much of HP fanfinction, both because it's hard to navigate such an enormous amount of stories and because the average quality of writing wasn't satisfactory in the places where I looked. Now I think that I may have missed a lot of works that were of better quality than the canon.

[igenlode]

I've been having problems with JKR from the fourth book on (or, considering that I didn't find the first and second books all that interesting, the third book is the only one I didn't have many problems with)

I came to the series early on (after the second book was published, I think, and before the whole "Harry Potter phenomenon" really got going), and I remember being more and more impressed by the first three books; the fourth one was a bit of a disappointment, and Too Long. Then there was a massive hiatus before the next book (apparently JKR got married and had a baby at that point..!), which was the golden age of Harry Potter fanfiction, really, as all the fans who couldn't wait to find out what was going to happen next started writing their own theories along the same principles, picking out bits of mythology and adding them into the world, putting more depth into what we knew so far about the characters, and so on.

Of course, the fifth book, when it did come, couldn't live up to the amount of anticipation that had built up by that point. It was a welcome development to see Sirius Black brought back and explored further, but then she just kills him off in a rather unsatisfactory way (so unsatisfactory that many fans assumed that, since he was never seen to die and didn't go out in a particularly dramatic manner, the author must instead be intending to reveal what had really happened to him at some subsequent point!)

"Half-Blood Prince" was quite promising (Slughorn was a really interesting creation, the Malfoys get some much-needed character development, as does Ginny Weasley, and the book was shorter, which was a good sign), but I couldn't believe that not only does Harry jump to the snap conclusion in the finale that Snape is Evil (as he has done for pretty much every book this far), but every single adult character takes his word for it -- I was confidently expecting McGonagall to step up briskly and tell him what an idiot he was being. Frankly, by that point she had played the Snape is Evil card so often that it didn't even occur to me that we were apparently expected to take it seriously. And angry, shouty Harry is never a good thing, because Rowling doesn't write him very well...

Of course, Snape turns out not to be evil. As usual. I mean, he isn't stupid, and he has nothing to gain from Voldemort's victory (or, as it turns out, from Voldemort's defeat; another character killed off for no very clear plot achievement).

The interesting thing about Snape was always the (rare) concept that being nasty isn't the same thing as being evil. Severus Snape is personally unpleasant, gratuitously unkind, and not a team player, but that doesn't mean that he automatically wants to plot the demise of the multiverse.

I never understood the howls of "Dumbledore is Evil" when the nature of the prophecy was revealed. I actually got someone commenting on one of my stories saying 'Did you regret your characterisation of Dumbledore [as the wise old mentor] now that we know more about him?' -- um, no, I thought he was written quite consistently throughout. It's Harry's perceptions of him that are all over the place, and Harry is frequently shown to be an unreliable narrator; it's one of the literary devices Rowling uses to misdirect the reader, in a series that owes a lot to the conventions of detective fiction.

I think romance just adds additional dimension to Dumbledore's and Grindelwald's relationship but not defines them primarily; if anything, it's very underplayed in the book.

It's completely non-existent in the book, which is one reason why the idea comes across as counter-productive authorial fiat ("Word of God"). Not, to be frank, that I would have preferred it if she had written in a homosexual romance between the characters...

There is potentially a powerful story there (and one that the fan zealots might do well to take to heart!), about a young man who believes something passionately and without question, assumes that the ends must intrinsically justify the means, is gradually forced to confront the darker implications of his ideals, and ends up working to bring down and destroy someone who was once his greatest friend and who has remained constant to beliefs that he no longer feels able to share. (After all, from Grindelwald's point of view, Dumbledore is presumably a despicable traitor...!)

But it's all very much brushed over as minor backstory of a plot that is already far too complex, then -- to my eyes -- degraded by saying 'oh, it was all sex and he couldn't help himself'.

The fanfiction examples are interesting: I've never read much of HP fanfiction, both because it's hard to navigate such an enormous amount of stories and because the average quality of writing wasn't satisfactory in the places where I looked. Now I think that I may have missed a lot of works that were of better quality than the canon.

I don't know about 'a lot of'... it's years since I read much HP fanfiction (or wrote it, though I still have an unpublished story that exists only on Wattpad), and the fandom has changed a lot. Back in my day, it was all about deducing from the clues in canon where the series might be going next (a possibly unique situation, in which the story was known to have a predetermined end and number of volumes, but nobody had any idea in advance what the existing end was going to be!) Since then we've had a whole set of films and also a lot of 'fanon' that is virtually unconnected to the original: 'The Golden Trio', 'Mione', Ron-the-Death-Eater, Draco-in-Leather-Trousers, and the whole bizarre Daphne Greengrass phenomenon (who is she? You may well ask). The stories I recall enjoying will all be wildly AU by now and probably no longer exist on the Internet, and to be honest I don't remember a lot about them other than that I remember thinking 'this is actually better-written than the original'; it was twenty years ago.

But there definitely is fan-fiction out there that is more sophisticated (and to be fair, more adult -- Rowling was not writing for the adult market) in terms of characterisation than the original books. Finding it amongst the heaps of dross might be another matter. Here's a random intelligent one-shot that I encountered once: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/3848700/1/Platform-i

[betweensunandmoon]

My biggest problem with Deathly Hallows, besides everything you mentioned above, is that it introduced the character I can relate to more than anyone else in the entire series...and I have no idea why she exists.

Seriously, I don't know what purpose Ariana Dumbledore served other than to inform the readers, "See, Albus Dumbledore is flawed! He makes mistakes! Except not really, because he wouldn't have made any of the bad decisions that resulted in his sister's death if it hadn't been for that nasty Gellert Grindelwald, so it's okay for Harry to trust him blindly!"

My second-biggest problem is the treatment of my actual favorite character, one Ronald Weasley, who's lived in his siblings' and friends' shadows his entire life and is never given an opportunity to prove his own worth; instead, it's Harry and Neville who get all the glory. :(

[igenlode]

My biggest problem with Deathly Hallows, besides everything you mentioned above, is that it introduced the character I can relate to more than anyone else in the entire series...and I have no idea why she exists. Seriously, I don't know what purpose Ariana Dumbledore served other than to inform the readers, "See, Albus Dumbledore is flawed! He makes mistakes!

So far as I remember, I don't think she did serve any other purpose ;-p

She was pretty much a nonentity in terms of the story; she exists solely as a plot point. I'm sure the author didn't expect the readers to become passionately invested in her (any more than anyone was supposed to become a fan of Meg Giry in POTO, who from the composer's viewpoint exists solely in order to give Christine someone to soliloquise to :-D)

My second-biggest problem is the treatment of my actual favorite character, one Ronald Weasley, who's lived in his siblings' and friends' shadows his entire life and is never given an opportunity to prove his own worth; instead, it's Harry and Neville who get all the glory. :(

Ron does get a few decent moments in the course of the books, but not that many (his main function, from the story point of view, seems to be to serve as Harry's -- and hence the reader's -- interface with the 'pure' wizarding world; you can see why the movies decided to turn him into a comic sidekick, and fan-fiction tends to write him off as simply an obstacle for 'shipping' Hermione). To an extent I think that is deliberate characterisation, in that Ron's relationship with Harry is coloured by the fact that he has always been second fiddle... and "Deathly Hallows" makes an attempt at giving him a chance to redeem himself by taking the lead in their quest and later coming back to rescue Harry. But he doesn't have much of a role in the finale.

But then it isn't somehow all that successful a finale... I think partly because Voldemort isn't all that successful as a villainous creation, and because throwing multiple deaths around isn't the same as making the reader care about them. (Come to think of it I'm not sure Rowling ever handles death well, from Cedric Diggory onwards -- and I remember what an anti-climax that was, after all the hype about 'someone dies in this book'! Also, the fan annoyance when, after we were told the "Harry is a Horcrux" theory was wrong, it turned out that Harry really was a Horcrux after all.)

It's always difficult to have an end that justifies a massive build-up, and I suppose that goes for the book as a whole. We have the grand battle of Hogwarts, and Voldemort being defeated by the power of love and self-sacrifice (and at this point I can't even remember exactly how that worked), and I don't know what Rowling could have done differently. Other than be in some undefined way 'a better writer' -- and she was good enough to get an awful lot of us invested in wanting to know what happened...