The end of Potter
I finally finished 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows'. I was going to add 'thank god!' to the end of that sentence but to be fair the last 200 pages are actually quite good. They're every bit the exciting, tense, action-packed epic that the whole book needed to be. Sadly the first 400 pages are dull, plodding and with the occaisional exception, don't really do anything. I honestly feel that those first 400 pages could have easily been boiled down into about 100 pages, making the book much more balanced and energetic. And think of the trees you could save. The whole show-stopping drudge with the wedding at the Hollow and the chapters at Grimauld place could go out the window for a start. You can fairly easily jump from the opening chapter to the Ministry infiltration, to the staggeringly easy incursion into Gringots and just carry on from there.
And is it me, but I think you could atually remove the Deathly Hallows from the book and it wouldn't actually make any difference. I appreciate that the Elder wand ('Deathstick' - Jeezus!) plays a very important role in the grande finale but beyond that the whole Deathly Hallows thing just serves to protract and over-complicate a straight forward quest story.
Then there are the deaths. Hedwig was a shock but worked nicely to set the tone for the book (a tone that then, never really came). Then there was Mad-Eye Moody. Okay, a haggered old Auror killed in a high-speed broom chase with big bad Voldemort himself. Sad, but again, sets the tone nicely. Then there's a few deaths of people we've never heard of and don't care about, before we get to the Battle of Hogwarts and Fred Weasley, Colin Creevy, (and too conveniently) Lupin and Tonks cop it in meaningless 'off-screen' deaths. It just feels spiteful on Rowlings part and feels almost as if she's saying, 'Well, it's a big, climactic battle so some of the main characters need to die. Who can I spare?' Shame really.
I pretty much guessed Snape was a double agent all along and it's nice that Neville got to be as much of a hero as the main three in the end. He's sort of the Wedge of the piece. I think we all knew Hermione and Ron would end up together pretty much from book one - they are the Han and Liea of the piece, afterall. I would have preferred Harry to end up with Luna or nobody, really. Ginny is too symmetrical with Ron and Hermione.
Finally there's that schmaltzy, sickly epilogue. I would have preferred a movie-style paragraph for each character detailing what happens to them afterwards but instead we get a prolongued scene with excruciating dialogue featuring a whole sea of next-gen Potter and Weasly children on Platform 9.5 - that doesn't tell us anything except to prove that Voldemort doesn't ever return - which we learn in the last sentence. Sigh!
On the whole, a fairly mundane, overblown and unbalanced final chapter in the Harry Potter story. It feels like a first draught, desperately, desperately in need of editing (much the same as books 4,5 and 6). I'm not going to accuse Rowling and her books of being vastly, vastly over-rated because we all know she is and they are. I've known she is, pretty much since book one, but I've still bought them and read them and besides, whenever I get on my high horse about Rowling I'm always reminded of this Penny Arcade strip from a few months back :)
'Here Lies Arthur' by my favourite author, Phillip Reeve next - HUZZAH!
Wayne