On our plane trip from St. John’s to Seattle, the kids and I made a game of counting how many people we saw — on the plane, in airports, on the street — reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. We counted eight — which, when you think of the number and variety of books and readers in the world, is pretty amazing. Driving through Seattle today I noticed that a car ahead of us had a message hand-lettered in white paint on the back window: I TRUST SNAPE. There’s no question that the Harry Potter books have made a bigger impact on popular culture than another novels of our generation.
As the conclusion to a seven-book series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is almost completely satisfying. No, it’s not a perfect book — there are flaws, and in wrapping up the storyline J,K. Rowling was bound to disappoint some readers who might have hoped for different outcomes for favourite characters. But that wrap-up answers so many questions that have been raised throughout the series and brings the characters and their stories to such a satisfying conclusion that most of us who’ve followed Harry’s adventures from the beginning are left feeling that all-important sense of closure.
Writers like me, who start books without the slightest idea how we’re going to finish them, are also left in awe at the accomplishment of a writer who can weave such a tight-knit plot that seemingly random comments made in Book Two become crucial to the conclusion of Book Seven.
The strength of these books has never been in Rowling’s literary ability — they are not very literary books; her style is probably most comparable to C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books and there are many writers of children’s fantasy who are more skillful wordsmiths and worldbuilders than either of them. But what Rowling does well is create characters that readers care about — complex characters whose motivations we can argue about for ten years — and lead them through a storyline so filled with twists and turns that one hundred pages from the end of the six-hundred-page final volume, we’re still unsure whom we can trust and how the conflict might finally be resolved.
Spoilers from this point on … if you haven’t read if yet but you plan to, don’t click!
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