Deathly Hallows, Chapter 27: The Final Hiding Place
The dragon continues to fly all day. It’s in remarkably good shape for an animal who’s been chained up, probably for years. Don’t a dragon’s muscles atrophy with disuse?
Ron notices they’re losing height, and Harry suggests they jump as soon as the dragon flies low enough over a lake for it to be safe for them to leap off into the water. They do so and swim for the shore. The dragon lands on another shore of the same lake.
HRH are burned all over from the enchanted treasure, and Hermione breaks out the dittany to heal them. That must be one supergiant economy sized bottle to heal all their wounds. Of course, she’s also brought clean robes for all of them, as well as bottles of pumpkin juice. What, no sandwiches, chips, fruit, and dessert? You’re slipping, girl!
Harry takes the Horcrux out of his pocket and they all look at it, wondering how to destroy it, now that they have no sword. There’s an unintentionally funny bit when Ron condemns Griphook as a “double-crossing little scab.” Hah! You’re just PO’d he screwed you over before you got to screw him over, Ron.
HRH are laughing hysterically over their narrow escape when Harry suddenly gets an exceptionally violent and vivid Voldie-vision. A Gringotts goblin is very reluctantly informing the Dull Lord about the break-in and theft of the cup. Voldy becomes so enraged he AKs the goblin, then starts killing everybody within cursing distance. Bella and Lucius show their good sense cowardice by throwing others behind them as they charge frantically out of the room.
Wow. I knew Voldy was a poor villain, but only someone as dumb as--well, actually, dumber than--Harry would slaughter his own followers. Whom does Voldy think is going to fight for him if he kills everybody? How is he going to recruit new minions once this story gets out? Magical people are dumb, but they’re not that dumb. On the plus side, this is undoubtedly one of the few times in his life Snape will be happy to have been stuck at Hogwarts dealing with dunderheaded students.
Conveniently, it seems the Voldie-visions are strictly one-way, despite Dumbledore and Hermione’s worrying. That’s unfortunate. This whole series would have been far more interesting if the connection were two-way. Imagine Voldy knowing when Harry went to the mall and going there to kill him. He could take out some filthy muggles at the same time! Come to think of it, since Harry is so weak-minded, surely Voldy could have not just spied on him, but also taken over his mind, at least some of the time. Think of Voldy controlling Harry in Hogwarts and at the Burrow, forcing him to curse out all the teachers and alienate his friends. Or Harry could kill a few people and end up in Azkaban. Sure, he might be telling the truth when he says Voldemort possessed him, but could the authorities really take the chance of allowing him to roam free? These and other lovely possibilities will never see the light of day because Rowling was too lazy and incompetent to write something that logical and imaginative.
Voldy goes on and on about his Horcruces and how great he is. He even rewrites history, casting himself as the killer of Dumbledore. Maybe he’s codependent and sees all his DEs as extensions of himself, so when Snape killed Dumbledore, it was like Voldy was doing it. (Does that mean when Voldy later kills Snape, it's like committing suicide?) Regarding the Horcruces, he wonders how “the boy” knows about them. Does Harry know what and where they are? Does he know how to destroy them? Surely someone as “important and precious” as Voldy himself would know if pieces of his soul had been destroyed. In a true divine intervention version of deus ex machina, Voldy mentally goes through his list of hiding places one by one, so Harry can check them off and know where to go for the last one.
You couldn’t have done this, oh, I don’t know, 300 pages ago, Ms. Rowling? Sure, the story wouldn’t have happened in accordance with the school year, but so what? It would have been vastly preferable to have a tight story rather than a bloated one. Or you could have done what va32h did in DH Redux and have Harry fall into a coma for three months. Sure, he sat on his can obsessing over the Booby Prizes for the same length of time, but that arouses contempt rather than sympathy in the reader.
After Harry comes out of his trance, he tells his friends what he saw and insists on going to Hogsmeade right away. Hermione protests they need a plan, as if she were some duffer Hufflepuff, air-headed Ravenclaw, or sneaky Slytherin. How did the Hat ever allow this girl to be put in Gryffindor, the House of suicidal jocks with poor impulse control?
They all hide under the cloak--I swear, that stupid thing is the ultimate deus ex machina in these books--and Apparate away. Actually, the text says, “[T]hey turned together on the spot into the crushing darkness.” I’m now imagining a new art form called Invisibility Cloak Dancing, in which people dance together under a cloak. There could be competitions, like ballroom dancing, and even a TV series called Invisibility Cloak Dancing with the Stars. However, someone would have to come up with a way to see under or through the cloaks to know what the competitors were doing. Maybe they could use the magical equivalent of 3D glasses.
This was a blessedly short chapter, only 10 pages. We’re all long past needing a break--especially me!
Next time: a diagnosis for Ariana Dumbledore