Some comments about Deathly Hallows

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lavendertook has written up some good (spoilery) comments on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and I wrote down a few of my own reactions in a comment to her. I've included my comments here after a cut-tag; they're spoiler-y, but not catastrophically so. (I don't, for instance, discuss Harry using the Imperious curse to have Snape work out some of his sexual tension on Dumbledore's corpse. Oh, wait, that wasn't canonical, was it?)



First, I'm struck still by how emotionally powerful one minor bit was. When Hermione and Harry are talking about Dumbledore's mistakes with Grindlewald, Hermione tries to comfort Harry and forgive Albus by pointing out that he was "very young", and Harry, rightly and righteously, hurls back "He was our age." It's a lot of weight jammed into a single sentence--about Harry never having had a real childhood, unlike Hermione; about how much is expected of all of the major characters (the trio, Dumbledore's Army, all of Hogwarts); about how even the very young can have agency, and how they can rise to the needs or fail.

Second, Harry makes mistakes, but he doesn't have even the freedom that Albus did. When Albus made a mistake, his sister died and Europe was plunged into darkness. If Harry makes a mistake of the same magnitude, Harry dies and the whole world is sent to the camps.

Third, interesting point about Lily as Snape's Beatrice. It's worth noting that Snape's story is also very much the story of a young man's decisions--he and Lily are only twenty when Lily dies, and Snape, the teenage romantic, basically dedicates the rest of his life to her memory, even though doing so means keeping James in his memory as well. He's downright goth, Severus is--a tormented romantic wrapped in black and sulk.

And "tell, don't show" is a flaw that Rowling shares with Tolkien, who lards his novel with forty-page infodumps more than once. However, she also picked up on one of his helpful tricks: if the infodump is, itself, a story--rather than the interruption of a story--then it's quite all right.

Another comment, in response to something lavendertook said but which I forgot to leave in a comment to her post: It's pleasant and amusing that Rowling's wizards are no more free of superstition and the folklore process than muggles. The former was clear when the Divination classes began; although it is possible that magic will reveal the future, it's an unreliable and possibly completely uncontrollable process, and has accumulated around itself a thick layer of superstitions no more useful to wizards than knocking wood or picking up pennies is for muggles.

Another comment, not in response to anything lavendertook said: One of my favorite little bits in Deathly Hallows is a very oblique joke: Xenophilius Lovegood is exactly the type of person who, in our world, would wear a swastika necklace because it was a Hindu luck symbol, and mean it. But what percentage of the audience will get this joke, which is never made explicit?

And a commonplace: In the comments to rozk's extremely good review of the novel for the Times Literary Supplement, arkady presented the brilliant, quasi-fair, and VERY SPOILERY summary, "Aslan beats the Nazis and saves Middle Earth".