Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows - My favourite books (and why they suck)
Wow, that’s a mouthful of a title.
The seventh book of the Harry Potter series (which you may have heard of, it's a little popular) is the biggest, densest, most brutal and emotional book in the series. It's my favourite book out of all the titles.
It's also, easily, the most flawed book in the series.
Maybe it was inevitable. Six books of consistently high quality was pretty sweet, but everyone expected Rowling to pull out all the stops and deliver one of the best literary accomplishments of all time, to fall in line with their expectations and yet surprise them. The pressure must have been immense, even to someone as immaculate in plotting entangled threads as Rowling. Did she succeed?
Well, can that question be answered by two very opposite statements at once?
Before the book was out, a lot of people were fearful (and yet very big on foresight, it was going to pleasure them immensely if they were right) that Harry Potter, the boy who lived, would die at the end of the book. Ask anyone who witnessed the hype leading to the run, the way all fans suddenly turned to fanfiction to speculate about how the trio would die taking down Voldy, and how all of Hogwarts would definitely die in a DBZ-spirit-bomb equivalent attack to finish him off.
Rowling also seemed to know it. Start up the book, and you're greeted with two pretentiously ominous poems on death. The huge shift in tone in the book was also far beyond the gradual increase one usually expected from the series, with people dropping like flies left and right, and the very first chapter showing a character (only mentioned once before) being tortured and murdered by the Death Eaters for fun. Hedwig gets killed off in a single paragraph and her death isn't dwelt upon as much, leaving us to wonder whether the symbolism of the loss of the first magical relic Harry ever had was worth it.
It's also surprising how much infodump is present in the last book of the series, clearly meant to make up for the great, but slow rate of information doled out to the readers so far. Characters, in a lot of cases, get the short end of the stick. Take Tonks, for example, who gets very sad at Mad-Eye's death in particular, and it's only then that Harry has to tell us that she was close to him because he was her protege.
Even worse offenders, though, are the titular Deathly Hallows themselves. We have to learn about the Deathly Hallows, three objects of great importance to various people in the book, redefining (actually, mostly defining or tacking on additional because-I-told-you-so qualities about) the objects we've already seen. Dumbledore revealing that Voldemort's diary is a Horcrux made sense, because it was far too malevolent and powerful for a mere magical diary, but to suddenly claim that Dumbledore's wand is totally the best one ever, or that Harry's cloak is special because no one told the readers up until now that cloaks really do fade in power quicker than the Ron-Lavender storyline outlasted its welcome in book 6, sounds too much like an attempt to settle plot threads by pretending two of them were actually one all along.
The progression of the story is quite nice, thankfully, right up until the middle. A lot of criticism is aimed at the aimless wandering of the trio (that gets shortened to the duo) for far too long, but here's the thing. The aimless wandering was never the problem.
I'll take this moment to digress for a bit. What comes into your mind when you think of a commonly abused, stupid trope? For me, it's the Misunderstanding. I've covered it once before, but just to reiterate, take a rom com, any rom com. What is the portion of the film with the least rewatch value, the one point where you keep yourself on tenterhooks purely because you want to see the part that comes immediately after? If my clairvoyant abilities still work, I can predict that it's probably the part immediately before the ending hookup, where the two characters cease talking to each other because of some manufactured problems related to jealousy, ego issues, or just plain stupidity. It's the most boring part because you know that, to resolve it at any point, the leads just need to talk to each other, and then they'll find out how everything they were fearing was so unfounded. But they won't, because the story needs to be padded for a while.
Coming back to the book, the reason the camp portions of the book drag so much is because of the Misunderstanding. Ron's jealousy and anger and restlessness drag everything down, and the situation is exacerbated by the fact that he's unwilling to talk about it to Harry unless it's too late and he needs a fight. Yes, the problem is worsened by the locket he's wearing, but in terms of narrative purposes, it simply acts as a generator of conflict. So, for too long, we have to settle with the group down in the dumps because they have too much resentment buried, and despite knowing each other for six years (and having similar problems before, like Ron and Harry's fight after the Goblet gave the latter's name), they can't settle it with a discussion.
Lastly, we have Slytherin. The house of Slytherin, which, from the first book, has always been shown as an evil house that is a breeding ground for terrorists and supremacists, has no justified reason for existing. The founder of the house literally kept a chamber with a deadly magical monster for his heirs to use for Darwinian murder purposes. None of the students have anything redeeming about them. Even by the seventh book, despite a small attempt, Rowling fails to show anything good about Slytherin.
We have two examples that might be brought up to disprove the above point, so I'll have to rebut them, of course. The first one is Draco Malfoy, the spoilt brat deified by fans and fanfiction, glorifying him as confused and depressed and misunderstood. Draco, the poor boy who was proud to join ranks with a powerful murderer, who was happy imagining dead Muggle-borns at age twelve, who faltered at the task of killing Dumbledore because he couldn't look past him as Headmaster of his school (and, to be fair, Dumbledore can bust out some mean rhetoric when he needs to). Did the last book do anything to develop and redeem him? Seeing how he tried to trap Harry to deliver him to ol' Voldy (and couldn't even do that properly) and tried to survive after that by joining up with any Death Eater he could find in the Hogwarts hallways, I'd say no.
The second example should be harder to disprove, what with Snape being the star of the best chapter of the book, and arguably, the whole series. Then again, take away the great prose and direct your attention to his story, and what you're left with are... questionable motives. Snape is, essentially, an overgrown man child with a million grudges and an attitude so corrosive, students actually picture him as their worst fear. His backstory amounts to mean parents, the object of his obsessions reacting negatively to his other obsession (terrorism) and leaving him, and his bright career in serving racist Nazi-like murderers cut short because one of the people murdered by his boss turned out to be his former flame (killed because of his own eager help). If, in that fateful night he told Voldemort about the prophecy, Voldemort would have come to the conclusion that the Longbottoms needed to be eliminated, would Snape still be the same tortured soul on Dumbledore's side, or a cackling murder-happy lackey?
With such angry skewering of the book, it might seem that my answer to the above question of Rowling's success might be no. Recall, however, that I did mention Deathly Hallows to be my favourite book in the series. Even with all the flaws, the gut wrenching moments, Dumbledore's backstory, the heart stopping action, the bravery with which it tore itself away from the format established by the last couple of books, all culminate in a supremely satisfying end to the series, one that will be remembered as the Lord Of The Rings of our generation. And isn't it so exciting to have been part of this making of literary history?
Cheers.