New Stuff - a review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

This review was originally published by me on LibraryThing.com. There's a link under the books on the left. Yeah, down there somewhere. Keep looking...


This book, like so many recent books, has fallen prey to some sloppy copy-editing: wrong words, incorrect articles, misplaced modifiers, and one glaring error of consistency (in Bagshot's house when she speaks from the parlor). While this book is by no means rife with such errors, the fact they exist becomes distracting. One would think that with such an anticipated book the publishers would pay stricter attention to such details.

In this final installment of the series, Rowling delves into the darkness further than she has in the previous six. There is death and dying and war and rumors of war on almost every page, and in the midst of it all is Harry, who is finally using his brain. There are those moments, almost obligatory in light of the heaviness of the story itself, where there is happiness and homecoming. These small bits of light do indicate that there is life still happening out there.

I found that in this book, as in the previous books in this series, there is much detail in the moment with long interludes passed over with little mentioned except the passage of, "a few weeks," or some similar placeholder. While this does, indeed, mirror real life, I can't perceive of the long intervals of time where these particular characters are just hiding out doing nothing and not getting caught while doing it. Sure, it is a lot like war, long intervals of doing absolutely nothing punctuated by instances of extreme brutality, but I can't believe with all the resources brought to bear on them that they could elude capture. (Osama is doing it, but we don't have magic.)

Hermione and Ron really take a back seat to Harry in this one. Harry calls all the shots and the other two are riding as support. While this may have been strictly true for the entirety of the series, I would have thought that it would have been more of a blending of talents in this final book. There doesn't seem to be the cohesion or melding that I felt should happen in order for the three to complete their task - namely to defeat Voldemort.

The whole of the story deals with death and is quite reminiscent of the strictures of mythology as set forth by Joseph Campbell. It is the quintessential Hero's Journey with the highs, lows, love, hate, birth, death and the aftermath of death that our three must deal with. It is this archetypal journey that Harry takes in this book.

The final chapter is quite disappointing. I would have expected a chapter before it describing the colossal clean-up after the war. The cost on lives is not the only cost of war; the society itself is often changed. Questions are left unanswered. While we can surmise some things from what we are given, such as the continuing schism within the wizarding world, what of the other magical creatures with which they deal? Since this is the last book, we may never know. ( 4 stars )