by J.K. Rowling

My plot for the seventh book was this:

To undo the magic linking him to Voldemort, Harry Potter must die. He has to pass through the curtain in the Department of Mysteries and descend into the land of the dead, a Greek underworld type place, with a river Styx and the shades of characters long-gone – but no grand Lord Hades reigning over it all, just eerie primal magic of some natural kind – the basic mysterious forces of the universe. However, there are some kind of personified figures of fate – Norns or something – and Harry, in trickster fashion, first has to summon them and make some kind of wager or deal to ensure his being able to return from the land of the dead, something nobody has ever before managed to do. In a heart-rending scene, he meets his parents, and Sirius, and whoever else, and impulsively tries to bargain for their souls as well. Ultimately they can’t join him – for some reason it would work out that they could be saved but only by canceling out Harry’s original purpose in entering the land of the dead, and thus forfeiting the fight against Voldemort – the lesson being: losing things that we love is simply the price of fighting the good fight, no matter how much magic we have.

A darker alternate was that Harry’s only way of walking through the land of the dead and returning would be to create his own Horcrux, killing some bad guy but in the process souring his soul forever. In the end he’d be able to mostly mend himself on magical terms, but would still become a darkened, compromised adult, like everyone who must take the burden of fighting evil. His final rite of passage into adulthood would thus be descending into the grey between good and evil, in order to protect the world; and he would finally be able to commiserate with Dumbledore, who would be revealed to have made similar compromises that somehow explained the Snape situation.

I guess I was looking for a noir ending, or something with a poignant mythological resonance. It seemed like she had been heading in that direction. But the series actually ended back where it began, with the simplest colors and the most Saturday-morning-cartoon-worn tropes. She seemed to know the book needed a feeling of compromise, but she gained it only by killing off a few sympathetic characters, and even that was never quite given the chance to sink in. The tale of Harry Potter ends, like so many disappointing video games, with a boss battle not qualitatively different than any other battle, and somewhat less interesting than much that has gone before. Then the credits roll.

My comments last time about J’s converting the epic into the technical continue to apply, with the added sadness that now the technicalities no longer really make any kind of intuitive sense. They also may not even make technical sense, though the rules have gotten so fuzzy-edged that it’s hard to know how to navigate her labyrinths of technicalities. And I’m not inclined to try. I would rather have thrown out all kinds of babies in the bathwater and been given something bold and compelling in the end. But that would have been dissatisfying to many, I’m sure. She obviously felt obliged to give a shout-out to every misbegotten bath-baby from the entire series, but a string of shout-outs just leaves us feeling like we haven’t really been there, we haven’t really found out what happens to anyone. Was that really the last time I’ll hear from Hermione? I’m not convinced; maybe I never really knew her. I think the frantically good-natured effort to give everyone what they came for is going to sap away some of the life from the preceding books, retroactively. But I don’t plan to be rereading any of these anymore.

I absolutely enjoyed the entire process of reading this series – it was truly a delight. But make no mistake, this needs to be classed as a guilty pleasure, not a proud one. Participating in a mass phenomenon is a thrill; seeing people of all types reading de-covered copies of this giant book about wizards on the subway never got old. But it fades fast, as it did after every installment, and now that it’s over I’m not sure I’ll ever have any reason to stir up the embers again.

I think the notion of J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter phenomenon will linger on in my mind – and if I may prophesy, in the culture at large – for much longer than the content of books themselves. In this last volume I was more aware than ever of this non-writerly, pleasant but ordinary woman, gamely taking on the task of entertaining everyone in the whole world. Like someone’s mom somehow organizing an international 100 million person game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. How did we get here? How did this end up happening? Of course I have to approve.

J.K. Rowling (2005) by Stuart Pearson Wright