My thoughts on Deathly Hallows
For those of you who have been living under a rock the Harry Potter is children's fiction series (There is an old idea, beautifully expressed by Wordsworth, who said, "Heaven lies about us in our infancy." If I could quote the whole poem instead of completing this review, believe me, we'd all we happier. But I press on.) that takes place in an alternative Britain which has been reduced to a few phony movie sets.
There is an orphan named Harry, a funny sidekick, a kind old mentor, a nerdy kid and the rest of the stock characters who fight every war for us, even those in space. Everybody is there except the Jewish kid from the Bronx and the guy named Ole with a Swedish accent. As for the supporting characters - they are easier to tell apart than the Mutant Teenage Ninja Turtles, but it is a small consolation: What can you say about characters whose principal distinguishing characteristic is that they have different names?
As I read the last installment of this series - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - my attention and comprehension began to slip somewhere around page 300 and finally I wrote down: "To the degree that I do understand, I don't care." It was, however, somewhat reassuring at the end of the book to discover that I had, after all, understood everything I was intended to understand. It was just that there was less to understand than the books at first suggests.
Many books are bad. Only a few of them declare themselves the work of people of taste, judgment, reason, tact, morality and common sense. Yet was there no one connected with this project who read the manuscript, considered the story, evaluated its meaning and vomited?
In the book you learn about the back stories and characters except not really because the plot races on to catch up with itself before you can even get a good look at them. Your consolation, I guess, is that once the Deathly Hallows movie comes out on DVD there will be a pause button. Unfortunately the only button the movie will need even more than pause is delete.
Like the Rocky movies, Deathly Hallows ends with a big, explosive climax. It's so ludicrous it has to be seen to be believed: Harry not only fights like a hero, he survives a production number of fire, ice, smoke, flashing green light and laser beams, throws in an improvised solo as Jesus Christ - and ends triumphantly being held by Rubeus Hagrid in his arms, like a quarry he has tracked and killed. It's so laughably bad the whole anticlimactic sequence should have been called "Springtime for Voldemort."
To even call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. There is a crummy surprise twist in there somewhere, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when I discovered it, I wanted to turn back time so I wouldn't know it anymore.
As for the epilogue? From what planet did its author come from? What assumptions does she have about the purpose and quality of life? I ask because the epilogue is simultaneously so bizarre and so banal that it's a first: the first epilogue fabricated entirely from sitcom cliches and plastic lifestyles, without reference to any known plane of reality.
Deathly Hallows is aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience. It's the first novel I read that does not improve on the sight of the blank pages of a notebook viewed for the same length of time. The only way to save it would be to trim about 759 pages.
The novel doesn't work, but was there any way this material could ever have worked? My guess is that Harry Potter fans will be embarrassed by it and casual readers offended. However, the novel brings us all together, I imagine, in paralyzing boredom.
Deathly Hallows is a novel that deserves its title: It's lifeless, hollow, sterile and barren. It's a dead zone.