So long, Harry

A Thai man holds a replica poster of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to promote the book at a shopping mall in Bangkok, Thailand. (Sakchai Lalit/Associated Press)

So it goes, as the late, great Kurt Vonnegut might have put it; the chronicles of Harry Potter end in The Deathly Hallows, a wondrous, sprawling and poignant quest novel steeped in themes of mortality and forgiveness, loss and reckoning.

When we last left Harry, at the conclusion of The Half-Blood Prince, the wizard world was at war. Dark Lord Voldemort and his Death Eater followers had risen again. Double-crossing Severus Snape had killed Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts School and leader of the Order of the Phoenix, an underground resistance movement. And Harry, about to turn 17 and come of wizard age, is on the verge of losing the powerful protective spell cast by his mother when she sacrificed her life for his 16 years earlier.

As The Deathly Hallows begins, Harry and his best friends Hermione and Ron have dropped out of their final year of school. Dumbledore’s last wish was that they track down and destroy Voldemort’s Horcruxes — objects in which he has embedded parts of his soul, in order to live forever. Leaving the cozy but limited universe of Hogwarts adds a level of sophistication to both the narrative and the characters.

No longer coddled by the Weasleys (Ron’s stalwart, Muggle-loving parents), nor under the magical protections of Hogwarts and Dumbledore, the three teenagers must carry out a dangerous mission at a most perilous time: Death Eaters have infiltrated The Daily Prophet (the wizards’ New York Times), the Ministry of Magic and even the once-impenetrable Hogwarts. Muggle-borns (wizard children of non-wizards) and blood-traitors (wizards who marry or befriend muggles) are being rounded up Nazi-style and punished. Torture is the preferred means for extracting information and anyone with a connection to Harry is under close watch. Death is everywhere. By Chapter 5, the bodies have already begun to pile up.

Needless to say, this is not a book for the eight-, nine- and 10-year-olds who first embraced the series a decade ago, but for the young men and women they’ve become. The Deathly Hallows borrows heavily from the The Lord of the Rings (for its treacherous journey structure) and The Chronicles of Narnia (Harry’s destiny as the Chosen One who must battle Voldemort echoes Aslan’s sacrifice in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), but it succeeds because of Rowling’s own unique and now, fully realized gifts as a novelist.

(Raincoast Books)

The burden of Harry’s fate weighs heavier than ever, and it’s made more profound by his gradual coming to terms with all he’s lost and all that he may never have: his parents, his godfather Sirius, Dumbledore, and a future with his brave and beautiful girlfriend Ginny. Alongside him, Ron and Hermione grow up too, moving out of Harry’s shadow and becoming heroes in their own right and finally acknowledging the love that’s blossomed between them. This three-way friendship has always been the heart of the series; by book seven, it’s as lived in and familiar as one’s own longtime relationships. How it changes, as all childhood friendships do, as the characters march from adolescence into adulthood, is one of the novel’s most bittersweet delights. 

Before I go further, a word about all those swirling rumours and leaks about who lives and dies: you won’t get any spoilers from me. I read the book without knowing anything about the end and wouldn’t be so callous to deny anyone else that pleasure. What can be said, though, is that for anyone who has read the previous books carefully, the conclusion is inevitable, but no less satisfying, or sad because of that. Even as I marvelled at how cleverly Rowling had set it up — right down to the reappearance of minor characters like Ollivander the wandmaker and Dobby the house elf — I spent most of the last 100 pages reading through tears.

Over seven novels, Rowling’s dazzling wizard world has grown fantastically rich in its details, history and mythology, and this final novel deepens our understanding of it further still. Mired at times by flabby exposition and too many James Bond-like narrow escapes, Harry, Hermione and Ron’s quest to find the Horcruxes is still riveting and illuminating. Harry travels to his birthplace in the wizard village of Godric’s Hollow and, later, learns more about his mother’s past. It’s what he discovers about Dumbledore, though, via an opportunistic, tell-all biography by yellow-journalist Rita Skeeter that almost dismantles Harry. Can his mentor, the only wizard that Voldemort fears, be a flawed man, too?

Her insistence upon these kinds of ambiguities has always been Rowling’s greatest strength; as a fantasy writer, she almost suffers because of it. The definitive showdown between a good force and a bad one — the bread and butter of fantasy writing — has never been as interesting to her as the internal struggle to be decent, loyal and fair. Harry is much more resonant pining for the girl he loves and wracked by guilt for the danger he brings to his friends, than when he reveals his power to repel Voldemort’s spells and hexes. And truly evil as he may be, Voldemort has never been as chilling as Dolores Umbridge, first introduced in The Order of the Phoenix, as the banally sadistic Ministry of Magic operative who loathes half-breeds and Muggles, and uses the terror created by Voldemort’s return to solidify her power. Even the noire-est of Harry’s bête noires — Severus Snape and the Dursleys (Harry’s nasty aunt, uncle and cousin) — turn out in the end to be something more complicated than Harry ever allowed them to be. 

In a novel that is almost entirely spent in gloom and fear, the few joyful moments are also the most mundane and human: a wedding, the birth of child, a long-awaited kiss. Despite her allusions to the atrocities of the Third Reich — and in The Deathly Hallows there are suggestions of the horrors at Abu Ghraib, too — Rowling is not a political writer. Her agenda, if she has one, is to celebrate the glorious moments of daily life: long lazy dinners with old friends, first love, a good joke, a warm, dry bed on a cold, rainy night. It turns out that all along Rowling was telling us as much about the everyday magic of our Muggle lives as she was about the fairy-tale world of wizards.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is published by Raincoast Books.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca Arts.

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