‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ blogging: initial reactions

Hedwig and Dobby.

Snape.

Bloodbath. Freakin’ bloodbath. And those names are but the highlights. Rowling starts killing off characters from the get-go and doesn’t stop. I mean: Crap. Did she really have to kill Hedwig? Dobby? *sob*

Did she really have to make us care that Snape was killed? Damn...

Okay, and Dumbledore’s still dead. It wasn’t a trick -- okay, it was kind of a trick, his colluding with Snape and all -- but still: Dumbledore is still dead, and Snape still killed him, though it was a kindness both to Dumbledore and to Draco Malfoy, saving the boy from a horrible life. But we didn’t learn -- as some speculation was having it, as a way for Dumbledore not to be dead and for Snape not to have killed him -- that it was actually Albus’s almost-twin brother in disguise as Albus who died; it wasn’t someone using Polyjuice Potion to look like Snape doing the killing. Dumbledore is still dead, and Snape really killed him.

And wow: it’s almost as if Draco was in a similar position the young Albus had been in as a boy, on the edge of a life of evil and snatched back from it. What Rowling did with the characters of Dumbledore and Snape could be the most profound aspects of these books, looking at them as children’s books: she’s letting kids in on the sad knowledge that you can’t ever really know everything about a person, that our preconceptions about people can be wrong, that everyone is more complicated that we’d like to believed. The worst thing for Harry at the end of all this may be that he never got to see Snape again: Would he have apologized to Snape? They’d never be friends, probably, but perhaps they would have come to some sort of accommodation of each other? Will that haunt Harry for the rest of his life?

Oh, and right: Harry’s not dead. A lot of us were right in guessing that Harry himself was the final Horcrux, but it turns out he didn’t have to die in order to kill Voldemort. I’m still not sure if I don’t think this was a bit of a cheat on Rowling’s part. Maybe it was, and maybe she acknowledges as much with the Deathly Hallows business, which was all about the foolishness of cheating death. I don’t know. I need to think on it more, and read the book again. Probably the most important thing for Harry, as a character, was that he was ready to die, ready to sacrifice himself -- that was the moment when I finally burst into the tears that had been threatening for a while: when Harry told the Golden Snitch, “I am about to die.” That’s when I lost it.

Still: there were weddings amidst the horrors. And a baby. Poor Teddy, another orphan... *sigh*

I folded down lots of corners of pages as I was reading, struck by directions Rowling dared to go in or ideas she dared to touch on. Like this, from the bit when Harry, Hermione, and Ron visit Xenophilius Lovegood. They’re talking about the Resurrection Stone:

“Well, how can that be real?” [Hermione speaking here.]

“Prove that it is not,” said Xenophilius.

Hermione looked outraged.

“But that’s -- I’m sorry, but that’s completely ridiculous! How can I possibly prove that it doesn’t exist? Do you expect me to get hold of -- of all the pebbles in the world and test them? I mean, you could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist!”

Is that a bit of prep for us readers, after a decade and seven books worth of magic, to go back to the real world, full of far less fantastical things but many people who insist on believing in nonsense anyway?

Then there’s Harry, digging Dobby’s grave. Actually digging. Harry says, “I want to do it properly. Not by magic.” Interesting that even after all this time, after finding his true home in the wizarding world, Harry’s still a bit of a Muggle at heart, still unable to accept that magic is a “proper” way to do something.

And just as we learn here that Dumbledore was never quite the unsullied great man Harry had seen him as previously, we learn, too, that the wizarding world has a dark side, too... and I don’t mean Death Eaters and Voldemort. Goblins hold wizards in disdain for not sharing their wand-magic with other creatures. Wizards -- even the “good” ones -- hold onto their secrets jealously. Though, we learn at the same time, it looks like people like Harry, an “odd," “unusual” wizard, as the goblin Griphook calls him, and Hermione, a proud Mudblood and champion of house-elves, may be on the verge of changing that.

That’s what’s missing from the epilogue. Sure, it’s nice to see that everyone’s happily married and sending their own kids off to Hogwarts, but what -- if any -- changes have happened in the wizarding world at large? Is there a better relationship between wizards and goblins? Have house-elves been liberated? What impact have Harry and Hermione had? What about Draco?

I really love how Rowling deals in this book with lots of things we knew she’d need to deal with -- the truth about Snape, whether Harry was a Horcrux, and so on -- but did so in ways that I don’t think anyone foresaw. So I’d like to hear her take on those final questions: How has the wizarding world changed in the wake of Voldemort? It seems like she set up all sorts of possibilities for all sorts of revolutionary changes, and I wanna know what happens.

Okay, so Harry survives. What next?

(Technorati tags: Harry Potter, Deathly Hallows)