On Magic, Mystery and M….Really bad books.
I’m not going to start as I usually do, saying “If you haven’t heard recently…” Of course you’ve heard of this next topic. And if you haven’t heard of Harry Potter, you’ve seriously been living in a cave, without a TV or computer, and how are you on the Internet, that’s really weird. This is the series that brought the wonder of reading back to children of our age, jaded as they were by mind-numbing cartoons and the rise of the Internet (remember, when AOL was fast? Good times). It’s created a fan following of teenagers that mirrors the cult following of Star Wars. The series is the proud owner of movies to all of its books (currently made or future-released), as well as having spawned a number of board games, video games, action figures, journals, candies, costumes, and tons of other products I can’t list off the top of my head.
The seventh and final installment of the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was one of the most anticipated media events in fifty years. I know, for me, at my camp (where I was in July ‘07), I was hard pressed to find one person out of the 800 or so people around me that wasn’t reading it (either owning the book or reading over someone’s shoulder) the first day it was released. Spoiler sites ravaged the ‘Net, followers camped out in front of book stores, Christian witch-burners were out in full force, and the general public, whether fans of the series or not, respected and admired the herald of the new era’s end.
Now, I’ve been a fan of the series since 2001, when I first read Sorcerer’s Stone (Philosoper’s Stone for you British types). I read every book religiously, and I was one of those that couldn’t wait for the last installment to come out. I read it in about 5 hours (give or take, it was broken up over the course of a whole day).
However, unlike when reading 1-6, I felt something… Off. Something different about this book as compared to the other six. Given, it was the series end, but still. The book’s focus, rather than being on Harry and his friends’ adventures in school, took them outside their element into the wilderness. This seemed a lot more like classical Lord-of-the-Rings-type fantasy, with protagonists questing through wilderness to achieve their goals. However, the set-up of the sixth book (to quest for the Horcruxes that held pieces of the antagonist’s soul), while followed for the first part of the book, was then completely ignored through the last half when they abandoned that quest to search for new items, the eponymous Deathly Hallows.
Putting on my critic’s hat for a moment, I really don’t think this was a good end to the Harry Potter series. The writing was significantly different, the characters were thrown into emotional places they wouldn’t have gone in the previous books, and on the whole it was really more like a Harry Potter fan-fiction than a canonical novel.
That said, I do think this was a good beginning to the rest of JK Rowling’s career. This was a departure from her normal Harry-goes-to-school formula, and it really showed that she has a future past the scarred wizarding teenager. Sure, her future books will get more press than they may deserve due to her previous books, and they may continuously be compared to Harry Potter, but this book really showed that her future books will be somewhat good, as opposed to being piles of badness and only getting press due to the Harry Potter novels.
So, while I think Harry Potter deserved a better ending, I’m not worried for JK Rowling’s status as an author. As long as she can avoid writing awkward endings to series, and avoid any other controversy (gay Dumbledore anyone?), she should have her future set.
Not bad from a nigh-homeless clinically depressed woman from Scotland, eh? Kinda gives you hope for the rest of us.
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