Harry Potter: The End Is Here
What a lot of commotion over a book. Not since 19th-century New Yorkers anxiously crowded the Manhattan docks to be the first to discover the serialized fate of Dickens’s Little Nell have people gotten so excited about fiction. For weeks now, the rumors have flown over the Internet: Harry lives! Harry dies! Last week the excitement reached a new pitch as the hoopla soared to unprecedented levels that not even the well-oiled publicity machinery of publishers could have ignited. Books fell into the hands of eager fans despite the closely monitored embargo of the 12 million copies —when you have 12 million copies of anything, sooner or later something’s going to fall off a truck. Once the novel was on the streets, photocopies were quickly posted online. Spoilers went to work revealing the fates of various characters—and got a lot wrong. Even more-diligent fans got busy retyping the entire book to put online. Most astonishing, someone posted a bogus version of the novel that ran to well over 600 pages. That it wasn’t much good is beside the point. Has anyone ever done this: sat down and composed an entirely fake version of anything on the eve of the real thing’s debut
No book, no matter how wonderful, could live up to that sort of expectation. But let’s say it right here: "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" comes as close as any novel could. It’s not without its flaws, and at 759 pages not without more than a little windiness. But when set against this final installment’s achievements, its imperfections seem mighty inconsequential. Writing a decent sequel to a good novel is hard. Writing six of them is almost unheard of. Each of the "Harry Potters" deserves to stand on the shelf with its mates, and the last one more than fulfills the promise of the first six.
After a leisurely start, including a wedding scene at the Weasleys that goes on and on, Rowling hits the accelerator and never takes her foot off the floor for the next 500 pages. "Action packed" is a pale description of this novel’s many battles between the forces of good and evil. Rowling is not especially gifted with dialogue or subtle characterizations. Sometimes she explains things too much or too often. But she is refreshingly unsentimental—well, almost always: there’s no explaining what made her write that cloying, too-cute epilogue. And she has a true storyteller’s knack for incident and plot twists and what may modestly be described as a genius for fleshing out her magical world with a host of details that make it seem more real than the reader’s own. To cite but one example: the "pensieve," a bowl into which one may submerge oneself to see the memories of another. Even readers too young to get the pun built into that word will be taught unconsciously to look more closely at words, to look for meanings beyond the obvious.
More than that, though, Rowling succeeds because she refuses to condescend to her readers (most of the time: there is a moment, as the final climax approaches, when the younger students at Hogwarts are shooed away because they’re "underage," but wait—this is to be the battle to see if good or evil will triumph, and we’re worrying about kids being underage Or is this another wry joke from Rowling at all the overcautious parents who worry about what young readers are being exposed to
Never underestimate this cagey author). The last installment is a fitting cap to the series because it does not merely tie off loose ends but extends the scope of the story. It is darker, as she’s promised, but more significantly, it goes deeper. People die, yes, including a few whom readers care about. But the series is not about whether Harry survives, but about how he faces life and death. More specifically, it is about growing up—about the pains of growing up. In the last installment, Harry faces life largely on his own—he even comes to doubt the motives of his mentor, Albus Dumbledore. Most important, he comes face to face with his own mortality, with the necessity of seeing life and death as intertwined.
The sadness that many readers will experience—oh, all right, the tears they will shed—when they close the cover on this novel has nothing to do with the fate of the characters and everything to do with maturity. "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" is about, more than anything else, the end of childhood. The readers who have grown up with this series—who have read it, as it were, in real time as it unfolds —are themselves at that end. Saying goodbye to Harry is like saying goodbye to a piece of themselves. Rowling has honored their patience with a work as sincere and profound as anything they could ask for, with the bonus that’any time they want to relive that childhood, they only have to pick up volume one and begin again. And if that’s not magic, what is
The following adjectives can be used to describe the novel with the EXCEPTION of ______