Back of the Envelope

Spoiler alert! There are spoilers to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in this post, including to some of what appears in the epilogue, but they really aren't too bad.

Over at the Corner, John Podhoretz believes that J.K. Rowling will be writing a new Harry Potter book sometime in the future. Although that may be a bit misleading--his contention is that she'll write another book in the same world, even if it's not actually about Harry. John Hood suggests it may be a prequel. I'm not so sure about that. A large part of Harry Potter has been the revelations from the past, the truth about the years when James, Lily, Sirius, and Snape were in school, and about when Hagrid and Tom Riddle were in school, and even about Dumbledore's misspent youth. The bottom line is that, even if there are still a lot of blanks, we have a lot of information about the pasts of all the significant characters. There's just not much need for a prequel. If there is one, I'd rather have Lily's or Snape's perspective, rather than, say, James's or Sirius's. And the period between their Hogwarts years and Voldemort's first encounter with Harry would be more interesting than their school years.

Anyway, I think there's a better chance for a sequel than a prequel. The epilogue of Deathly Hallows already introduces us to the likely cast of characters we'd see in it. Of course, there's no clear antagonist there, but that doesn't mean one can't be found. And did anyone else notice that Deathly Hallows takes place in 1997? That nineteen years later in the epilogue lines up with nine years from now, which makes it ten years from the time Rowling would have finished writing Hallows. Ten years is about the time you'd expect it to take before an author returned to their old world... just a thought.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the seventh and final Harry Potter book, and as such, it is bound to disappoint people. What series, having built up such a following, can possibly live up to everyone's expectations in the final book? There were numerous things I was disappointed in myself. Despite that, I enjoyed the book overall, and if you've read all the others, it's simply impossible not to read the final one. I will not attempt to make this a spoiler-free review. There will be minor ones from this point on. I'll hide the big ones at the end, but there will be small ones throughout.

First, lest anyone has any doubts, this really is the final Harry Potter book. It finishes up everything: it ties up the loose ends, answers all the mysteries that have been dangling since Book 1 (Snape's motivations and Dumbledore's reasons for trusting him being the big one), and closes out with a satisfying finality. Rowling could write more books in this world, certainly, but Harry Potter's story is complete.

It's not too much of a spoiler to reveal that this book takes place away from Hogwarts, as Harry said that he would not be returning to Hogwarts for his final year as a student at the end of the last book. Instead, he spends it wandering around the countryside, looking for Horcruxes. Without the school as the backdrop, a lot of things don't work as well as they could. Harry and his friends spend the whole year wandering, and that means that weeks go by when there's nothing happening. At school, weeks where not much happens are at least filled with classes, but out in the middle of nowhere, nothing means nothing, and I find it hard to imagine that they couldn't come up with something to do.

Another negative is the tendency Rowling has to infodump. This has always been an issue in the Harry Potter books: that final chapter where Dumbledore explains everything, after a whole book of tantalizing hints that you can be sure mean exactly the opposite of they appear to mean. This time around, with the final book and a lot left to explain, there are a lot more infodumps, and a lot less misleading tantalizing hints. Now I like getting information, but I couldn't help feeling that maybe this could have been spread out better.

Boring stretches and infodumps took up way too much of this book, but there were exciting moments too. And those mostly worked out pretty well. Each time a Horcrux was retrieved or destroyed, the account was engaging and entertaining. Unfortunately, the final showdown didn't match the caliber of these exciting interludes.

Now, on to the big spoilers:


As I said, overall I liked it, but it could have been better.