reviewed by John Murphy

I was a pimply teenager when Star Wars: the Phantom Menace came out in the summer of 1999. Two of my siblings and I skipped class on a Monday morning to attend the first showing. After the movie was over, as we walked out of the theater into the mid-afternoon glare, I turned to my brother and sister and said, “That was awesome.”

Who was I kidding? Only myself, of course, and I knew it; even in my salad years I could tell a good movie from a stinker, and Phantom Menace was the Swiss cheese of that summer. But I felt so let down by the experience, so confounded by how far short George Lucas had fallen in delivering on expectations, that I performed some impressive mental gymnastics to try and defend the debacle. It’s called denial.

Man, that double-bladed light saber was sweet.

Similarly huge expectations surrounded the summer release of J.K. Rowling’s penultimate Harry Potter. As I sat with trembling hands ready to devour the nearly 800-page doorstopper, I felt complete confidence in Rowling’s ability to end her epic on a high note. She’d always delivered before, with each new entry adding depth and dimension (not to mention page numbers) to the world of witchcraft and wizardry she’d created. I had no reason to expect any different from Hallows.

Yet as I tore through the text, flipping pages like my life depended on it, a curious anxiety began to creep up on me. Was it possible that a gold-medal athlete could stumble in the last lap, so near the finish line?

Most readers have wholeheartedly embraced Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. All of my friends—intelligent, literate folks—have told me that it was exactly the ending they had hoped for. Stephen King published an Entertainment Weekly essay that sang Rowling’s praises, even calling her “one of the finer stylists in her native country,” on par with Martin Amis and closing in on Ian McEwan. Critics have heaped near-universal praise—or a paternally pleased pat on the head, at least—on J.K. for her ambition, her imagination, and her wizard’s way with weaving a spell over the reader. I hardly need mention the book’s record-breaking sales, just in case we’re factoring that in as a sign of reader satisfaction. On the whole, Potterheads seem to have few complaints about the way J.K. Rowling has concluded her magnum opus.

I won’t try and argue that The Deathly Hallows is as soulless and artistically bankrupt as The Phantom Menace—few works of art can make that dubious claim outside of country-pop music and avant-garde paintings—but the disappointment cuts deeper, and will certainly last longer than the disappointment engendered by Lucas’ mangling of the Star Wars legacy. It’s the what-might-have-been factor: what should have ended with a bang ends with a whimper; or if not a whimper, then not more than a quizzical, “huh?”

Because Rowling lets us down at the end, her series will remain a beloved classic instead of the inspired masterpiece it could have been. It’s the difference between The Chronicles of Narnia, say, and The Lord of the Rings. We love one with an affection that’s more like nostalgia. We love the other with a passion that is real love.

“Beloved classic” status is nothing to sneeze at, by the way. Let’s get something straight: we’ve been lucky to live during the publishing phenomenon that is (that was) Harry Potter. More than that, Deathly Hallows is by no means a bad book; not by a long shot. It’s page-turning, competently written, and chock-full of passages that are moving, thrilling, and well-executed. What’s wrong with it, then? So glad you asked.

(Now, by the way, might be a good time to mention that a discussion of the Deathly Hallows will necessarily include major plot SPOILERS. I figure that by now everyone and their grandmother has read the book, but I just wanted to give fair warning.)

Since I’ve already put on the brakes, let me back up a second. Here at CathFic, we’ve been staunch supporters of the Harry Potter franchise, and have had no compunction about defending it against critics who regard fantasy books as beneath their contempt, or against the Christian right who’ve erroneously charged Rowling with endorsing witchcraft and an anti-Christian worldview. It can be no accident that many who make the “anti-Christian” claim have also never read the books—that’s all it would take to dismiss the argument.

The test of a book’s worth is not its genre, but its quality. With the first six books in the series, Rowling proved adept at crafting exciting stories tessellated with wit, creativity, and memorable dramatis personae: Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, aided by his red-headed buddy, Ron Weasley, and the sisterly brains-of-the-outfit, Hermione Granger, have made for delightful company over the course of the story. Rowling’s wide spectrum of colorful, almost caricatured characters shows some of the influence of Charles Dickens, amusing monikers included: Albus Dumbledore, the benignant headmaster; Hagrid, the lovable lug of a gamekeeper; the warm Weasleys; the despicable Dursleys; the malicious Malfoys; skeezy Rita Skeeter; the eclectic faculty at Hogwarts; and the roll call of ill-fated Defense Against the Dark Arts instructors: Quirrell, Gilderoy Lockhart, Remus Lupin, Mad-Eye Moody, Dolores Umbridge, (whom I, like many others, came to detest more than Voldemort), and Severus Snape, the sphinx at the heart of the series.

Along the way, JK inventions like Butterbeer and Quidditch have become cultural bywords, just as the midnight releases of each book became a celebratory event (complete with costumes, sorting hats, house colors, and up-past-their-bedtime whippernsappers) to rival any movie opening. Rowling’s consummate skill at weaving her literary spell earned her critical accolades, a massive following, a permanent spot on the all-time bestseller list, and a paycheck bigger than the Queen of England’s. She’s been credited with helping to launch a new generation of avid book-readers, and bless her for that.

Thing is, the first six books were all set-up—entertaining, thrilling, and imaginative set-up, to be sure—but Deathly Hallows was supposed to be the big payoff, the emotional clincher. Rowling never fashioned a completely new world, a lá Tolkien’s Middle Earth, so much as breathed new life into well-established fantasy tropes: wizards, goblins, potions, spells, giants, centaurs, castles, dark woods, etc. She essentially does what Lucas did to great effect in the original Star Wars: took conventions of a tired genre and made them fresh, funny, and accessible (I’ll always think of the moment in Star Wars when the Millennium Falcon creaks and groans before refusing to make the hyperspace jump – anyone who’s ever owned a temperamental car can relate to Han Solo’s frustration at that moment.)

Rowling’s structure as well as her style is also familiar. Chart the storyline of Harry Potter from book one through seven, and you’ll discover Rowling’s adherence to Joseph Campbell’s “Hero Myth,” outlined in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Harry Potter’s trajectory from the Boy Who Lived to abused orphan to wunderkind wizard to Quidditch prodigy to Triwizard Champion to the leader of Dumbledore’s Army to the Chosen One runs parallel, in its essence, to a great many heroes of literary and cinematic past: from Gilgamesh, Odysseus, and Beowulf, right on through to David Copperfield, Luke Skywalker, and Neo.

The mythic quality of her storyline—along with its very Christian valorization of love, loyalty, faith, self-sacrifice, and redemption—has helped ensure that Harry Potter would resonate across boundaries of age, taste, and nationality. Whether or not J.K. Rowling is the Second Coming of children’s literacy, her accomplishment in world-building is extraordinary and would only be underestimated by someone who’d never spent an hour daydreaming or had ever made an effort to create something of lasting value. Potter fans—and I still, with some reservations, count myself among that vast and vocal throng—can only express awe and gratitude for the skill with which she has carried out her vision over the last ten years.

With every book, that vision deepened and darkened as her lightning-scarred protagonist matured from a green-eyed, green-around-the-gills wizard-in-training to the emotionally complex, morally sound hero of the later books, living under the cloud of constant threat from his arch-nemesis, Lord Voldemort.

After The Half-Blood Prince’s cliffhanger ending—Dumbledore dead and Harry vowing to destroy the remaining Horcruxes—Rowling seemed poised to deliver a humdinger of a climax in Deathly Hallows.

What Went Wrong

Strangely, Rowling’s strengths as a writer—her spot-on sense of pacing, sense of humor, her gift for set-up and payoff, her vivid characterizations—mostly fail her in The Deathly Hallows. What are left are her weaknesses: uninspired prose, repetitious devices, gaping plot holes, fuzzy action, and a reliance on clichés. The Deathly Hallows reads like a first draft—rushed, sloppy, careless. It’s fine to sketch scenes in the broad strokes if the writer takes care to go back and add the telling details, but one gets the impression that Rowling was tired of the story, the world, and wanted to be done with it. Fair enough, it’s her funeral, but I’m frankly amazed she didn’t take more care with what will unquestionably be her literary legacy.

Similar to Half-Blood Prince, Deathly Hallows opens with a menacing first chapter featuring hero-villain Severus Snape. He’s now, quite literally, Voldemort’s right-hand man as they plan Harry Potter’s demise at a long banquet table beneath “an apparently unconscious human figure hanging upside down over the table, revolving slowly as if suspended by an invisible rope, and reflected in the mirror and in the bare, polished surface of the table below.”

Now, this is a clever conceit for establishing an air of malice and foreboding right out-of-the-gate—very creepy, very atmospheric. So what does Rowling do wrong? Considering this is the seventh and last book, the time has come for Rowling to raise the emotional stakes. Instead, as Voldemort helpfully informs us, “For those of you who do not know, we are joined her tonight by Charity Burbage who, until recently, taught at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.”

Thanks for the 411, Tom. Who the heck is Charity Burbage? I guess we’ll never know, since in her first and only appearance in the series she ends up as the main course for Voldemort’s pet snake, Nagini. This is a fundamental problem: by the seventh book, Rowling should not be introducing entirely new characters to serve solely as snake-bait. She has roughly 3,000 pages of material to work with. Imagine if Rowling had opened with Hagrid captured, or McGonagall, or—heaven forbid—one of the Weasley twins. Someone the audience had an emotional attachment to. It would be shocking, even cruel, but it would be dramatic. If you insist that Rowling could not do that to one of her beloved characters, then how do you account for her almost flippant dispatch of several beloved characters in the climactic battle of Hogwarts?

I harp on this point, which may seem like a minor one, because it is symptomatic of a larger problem infecting the Deathly Hallows: Rowling’s sudden floundering in the storytelling department. She is an undisputed master at that most basic of all storytelling skills: making the reader wonder what happens next? But as you furiously flip the pages of Deathly Hallows, that question—or at least the question, what happens at the end?—may be the only thing that keeps you going. Individual sequences don’t hold up. There are, for example, the almost unbearably boring chapters that find Harry, Ron, and Hermione hiding out in the uninhabited forests of England. As they scrounge for food, set up camp, complain about their circumstances, take turns keeping watch, and wonder what do next, the reader must wonder if Rowling was wondering the same thing.

Perhaps because Rowling was growing as impatient as her reader, she decided to help our hapless heroes out. In a ridiculously contrived scene, Harry & co. happen to overhear a conversation between fellow members of the wizarding community, including a pair of goblins, conveniently wandering about same section of uninhabited forest. England may not be Russia in terms of size, but come on…what are the odds?

In another stroke of luck, one of the goblins happens to be Griphook, former employee of Gringott’s Bank, who also happens to possess exactly the information Harry needs to hear at exactly that moment in order to continue on his mission to destroy the Horcruxes. Now, I have no objection to a certain suspension-of-belief—heck, I’m reading a book where goblins are in the employ of the British banking system—but Rowling should know better than to write such a silly scene. It’s a first-draft mistake, something the writer scribbles in with plans on fixing it later. Only Rowling never fixed it. Most readers will probably overlook the absurd coincidence if only because it means Ron, Harry, and Hermione will finally be able to leave the dull limbo of the dark woods.

Rowling adds insult to injury when this sudden stroke of good fortune inexplicably leads Ron to abandon ship, explaining, “I just hoped, you know, after we’d been running round a few weeks, we’d have achieved something.” For the sake of drama, I can see the why of Ron abandoning Harry and Hermione, but not the when. Coming on the heels of a windfall of good fortune—Griphook’s info re: sword of Gryffindor—seems like a curious moment for Ron to throw in the towel, claiming nothing’s been accomplished. I know the Horcrux was making him sour, but Rowling never clearly develops the power of the Horcruxes as a mood-altering substance. (Speaking of contrivances, I’m not even going to mention—okay, I will right now—the silliness of Ron breaking into the Chamber of Secrets by imitating Harry’s Parseltongue. “It was nothing,” Ron says.)

Ron’s sudden departure from the woods highlights another disappointing element of Deathly Hallows. Rowling seems to think she’s playing a zero-sum game; that she needs to make everyone else look bad to make Harry look more heroic by comparison. Harry has the moral upper hand over Lupin for example, both when Harry refuses to use a killing curse against Stan Shunpike early on in the book, and later when they exchange heated words over Lupin’s proper role as husband and father. Harry seems a bit huffy, but is essentially right, whereas Lupin comes off more like a petulant teenager than the sensitive, chocolate-eating professor from The Prisoner of Azkaban.

The way Ron unconvincingly abandons Harry in the forest serves the same purpose: to demonstrate Harry persevering against impossible odds while his nearest-and-dearest abandon him. Even Dumbledore, the closest thing to a saint in the Potter universe, is tarnished in a virtually extraneous (and again, deadly boring) subplot involving the headmaster’s ambiguous relationship to a powerful dark wizard, Gregorovitch, during his teenage career. Only Hermione remains steadfast, but the insulting conclusion might be that she is a girl and therefore not a threat to Harry’s hero status.

The most egregious example of how Rowling stacks the deck in Harry’s favor to the detriment of a secondary character occurs in her shamefully half-baked handling of the Snape subplot. More on that anon.

Harry, the Hero

Harry emerges as the rightful hero of the series because he is ultimately able to resist the temptation to conquer death. This is where the Christian subtext of the series is most apparent. Voldemort’s thirst for immortality is his undoing. One of Rowling’s most inventive conceits was that of the Horcrux, an object used to house a piece of the owner’s splintered soul—this idea was, in Harry’s word, “brilliant.”

Even Dumbledore was seduced by the implications of the eponymous Deathly Hallows, another means of gaining immortality. Yet, as the gravestone of Harry’s parents reads, “the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death,” a quote from St. Paul. The idea that Love conquers Death is, of course, the narrative of Christ’s Passion, and the Christ-like implications of Harry’s final choice to sacrifice his own life to save those he loves should put to rest any idea that Rowling has anti-Christian impulses.

Harry dominates The Deathly Hallows, emerging from this bildungsroman a fully-fledged hero, forged in the fire of failure, faith, and unflagging courage—a Gryffindor, through and through. That’s all well-and-good, and Harry is a likable, sympathetic protagonist. But his centrality squeezes out the other characters. Yes, most of the series is told in limited third-person from Harry’s perspective, and therefore he’s in virtually every scene. But for the death of Fred, Lupin, and Tonks to happen in passing is anticlimactic to say the least. Mad-Eye Moody’s death also happens “offstage,” as it were. They deserved better. In the interest of total disclosure, the only death in The Deathly Hallows that choked me up was the death of Dobby, the house-elf.

Now that was a great sequence, from the capture of Harry, Ron, and Hermione by Greyback right on through to Harry’s digging Dobby’s grave. It’s a bravura section of the book that features Rowling at her nimblest and most self-assured. For about sixty nail-biting pages she pulls out all the stops—Hermione tortured by Bellatrix, Ron and Harry helpless in the dungeon with Luna, the surprise (but brilliantly set-up) appearance of Dobby to save the day, and the flying-spells action scene with the Malfoys. Rowling plays her audience like the proverbial piano throughout these breathless chapters, and I found myself enthralled to her masterful control of pacing, story, and character.

If the whole book had been like the Malfoy Manor sequence—urgent, dramatic, inventive, and excruciatingly suspenseful—then maybe I’d be singing the praises of a masterpiece instead of bemoaning missed opportunities.

As it is, I could have overlooked a great many flaws if Rowling had done a better job resolving the Snape storyline, the crux of the series. It’s here that she really shoots herself in the foot.

The Question of Snape

The cliffhanger ending of Half-Blood Prince had Harry witnessing Snape murder a defenseless Dumbledore in the highest tower of Hogwarts. The shocking death of Harry’s mentor and guardian—the only wizard Voldemort feared—prompted shock and dismay from members of the Order of the Phoenix, not to mention the legions of Harry Potter fans. Was there ever a fictional character more reviled and detested than the treacherous, traitorous Severus Snape as the millions of fans around the world closed their copies of the Half-Blood Prince?

It wasn’t long before conspiracy theories started to surface. Was Dumbledore really dead? Was Snape really evil? Rowling put the first question to rest with her announcement that Dumbledore “would not pull a Gandalf” and come back to life. The second question remained.

We at CathFic had many reasons to feel otherwise. We were confident that Snape was, in fact, not only a good guy, but maybe the true unsung hero of the Potter franchise. We outlined our theories regarding Snape and book seven in a lengthy blog here.

Snape, good or evil? That was the question. Apparently, Rowling’s answer was a shoulder-shrugging, who cares? Over the course of the series, she had created in Snape one of the most potentially fascinating, complex heroes in the lexicon of English fantasy: a former Death-Eater turned Order of the Phoenix double-agent after the murder of the only person he’d ever loved: Harry Potter’s mother. His life was a lonely one: he loses Lily to James Potter, the brash Quidditch champion who cruelly taunted him when was a geeky Hogwarts student, and succumbs to his temptation towards the Dark Arts. This leads him to become a Death-Eater, one of Voldemort’s most loyal and trusted servants.

Severus Snape is far-and-away Rowling’s greatest invention and her most interesting character. Sirius insists, “Once a Death Eater, always a Death Eater,” but Snape is Rowling’s evidence that redemption is possible, a thoroughly Christian conceit. His tragic storyline could have packed quite an emotional whallop. Instead, Rowling’s downright dismissive handling of the Snape subplot in Deathly Hallows is what finally, irreparably, mars the series. It does not convince on a dramatic or thematic level.

Throughout the series, Rowling spends a great deal of time establishing Snape’s virtuosity as a wizard—his brilliance at potion-making, his aptitude for occlumency, his status as Dumbledore’s confidante, his ability to consistently fool Voldemort—and then she cuts him loose like deadweight in the last volume. What happened?

Who knows, maybe not even Rowling, but somewhere between Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows, Rowling apparently lost interest in Snape. I wonder if the pressure of writing under a microscope, with the expectant eyes of millions and millions of fans eagerly tracking every subtlety, every nuance of the plot, finally got to Rowling. In any case, she scuttled her own ship.

Here’s something that really bothered me. It might seem minor, but again it’s a case of Rowling not paying off what she’d set up. From a strictly storytelling perspective, why introduce the fact that Snape can fly? If I’m not mistaken, the ability of a wizard to fly without a broom was unprecedented until Voldemort appears “flying like smoke on the wind, without broomstick or thestral to hold him, his snake-like face gleaming out of the blackness…” to chase Harry in the second chapter.

So…being able to fly sans broom is kind of a big deal, right? Something like a demonstration of wizarding prowess beyond anything seen before? Only two wizards can do it: Voldemort and Snape.

Here’s what annoys me. It’s a mistake for Rowling to establish Snape’s great skill as a wizard if she’s not going to go anywhere with it. McGonagall’s snide aside that “he seems to have learned a few tricks from his master” is not sufficient. If Rowling had no intention of paying off her set-up, she should have nixed it. It serves no purpose other than to get the reader’s hopes up that maybe she’ll deliver a spectacular climax. I mean, Voldemort can fly, Snape can fly, and Harry’s greatest skill is as a flyer: was I mistaken to hope for an airborne climax, with Voldemort, Snape, and Harry doing battle in the sky around Hogwarts? That would’ve been as sweet as that double-bladed light saber.

Instead, Snape is left gurgling on the floor of the Shrieking Shack, killed in the most inane way by Nagini—not even Voldemort—and Harry “did not know what he felt as he saw Snape’s white face, and the fingers trying to staunch the bloody wound at his neck.”

I knew what I felt: anger and resentment that Rowling, like all the other characters in series, undervalued her greatest weapon, Severus Snape. Charles Dickens, one of Rowling’s literary touchstones, was unafraid of emotion when a scene called for it. Snape’s death certainly called for it. I don’t put it lightly when I say that Severus Snape could have been Rowling’s Sydney Carton: the misunderstood, lonely hero loyal to a love that could never be his, ready to sacrifice himself for her loved ones.

Snape’s death in Hallows reads like an afterthought, a tossed-off, “Let’s just get this over with” type of scene. Voldemort spouts moustache-twirling clichés like, “You are a clever man, after all, Severus. You have been a good and faithful servant, and I regret what must happen,” while Snape stands stupidly by, pale-faced and stock-still like a mourner at his own funeral. I could hardly have imagined a more bumbling, disappointing, undramatic denouement to what could have been the emotional climax of the series: Harry discovering the true nature of Snape.

Snape Remembers; Snape is Forgotten

Before Snape dies he entrusts his memories to Harry, who goes up to Dumbledore’s office to sneek a peek in the Pensieve.

After an almost 30-page chapter (‘The Prince’s Tale’) recounting Snape’s emotional history with Lily Potter, his abiding love for her, his willingness to risk his own life to protect her son, to act as a double-agent for the Order of the Phoenix, to kill Dumbledore on Dumbledore’s orders, and then to risk everything to help Harry accomplish his mission even as everyone reviled him as the worst kind of traitor and villain…Harry emerges from the Pensieve.

Now, I’m assuming that what Harry saw in the Pensieve came as something of a surprise to him. He’d always hated Snape as much, if not occasionally more, than Voldemort. Harry knew that Snape had betrayed his parents to Voldemort, and Snape (seeing in Harry the ghost of James Potter) had tormented him throughout his years at Hogwarts. Harry was then forced to watch, helpless, as Snape “killed” Dumbledore in cold blood.

So shouldn’t Snape’s memories—and the revelation that Snape was, in fact, courageously working as a double-agent to combat Voldemort—have given Harry pause?

The first paragraph of the next chapter (‘The Forest Again’) reads: “Finally, the truth…Harry understood at last that he was not supposed to survive.”

Granted, I can certainly understand how that information would be, to Harry, the most pertinent of the Pensieve experience. I think I’d also be disconcerted to discover that my friend and mentor had all along intended me to die as part of a grand scheme to do-away with Voldemort. But in the whole of the chapter, as Harry winds his way through the passages of Hogwarts towards what he assumes will be certain death, Snape merits only one, fleeting mention after six pages of Harry’s interior monologue: “He and Voldemort and Snape, the abandoned boys, had all found home here…”

Harry has just discovered that Snape secretly loved his mother, worked for Dumbledore to redeem his Death-Eater past, and then sacrificed himself to help Harry. For Harry to barely even think of Snape for the rest of the book makes no sense to me, dramatically or thematically. What a missed opportunity.

I also expected Rowling to do something with the Legilimency thread she’d established in Order of the Phoenix. The Pensieve business grinds the story to halt, taking us on a leisurely detour down memory lane while many of Harry’s friends are dead or dying and Voldemort sits in wait in the Forbidden Forest. I could have imagined a much more dramatic encounter between Harry and Snape that paid off the otherwise superfluous Legilimency lessons from Order. Perhaps at some crucial point Harry makes the decision to pursue Snape instead of Voldemort. Perhaps he decides to attempt the Avada Kedavra curse on Snape (and really mean it this time), when he suddenly gains access to Snape’s true thoughts using Legilimency. That might have been a more effective way to convey the information Harry gleans from the Pensieve.

The last opportunity missed arrives in the last chapter before the epilogue, ‘The Flaw in the Plan,’ when Harry visits the headmaster’s office to commune with Dumbledore’s portrait.

The Boy Who Lived has defeated Voldemort, saved Hogwarts, and proven himself once and for all, the Chosen One. The portraits of Hogwarts’ previous headmasters and headmistresses give Potter a standing ovation, “But Harry had eyes only for the man who stood in the largest portrait directly behind the headmaster’s chair. Tears were sliding down from behind the half-moon spectacles into the long silver beard, and the pride and the gratitude emanating from him filled Harry with the same balm as phoenix song.” The portrait, naturally, is of Albus Dumbledore.

Reading this scene, my only question was: where is Snape’s portrait?

He remains the forgotten hero—forgotten even by his own creator.

The Curtain Closes

I hope this lengthy diatribe makes one thing clear: I was and remain passionate about the Harry Potter series, and my disappointment was proportional to my expectations. More than anything, I had hoped Rowling would do justice to the amazing narrative she had set in motion.

Even if she fell short of my expectations, I will always treasure the experience of reading the Harry Potter books, and will always admire Rowling’s monumental achievement.

I will remember the books with a sense of affectionate nostalgia, if not with the deep and abiding love reserved for genuine masterpieces.