The Bakersfield Voice

By: Jon Auverset

The seventh and final installment in the now-legendary Harry Potter series has provoked worldwide excitement, shattered sales records, and redefined our expectations for popular literature.  In the wake of that kind of success, is there really any point in asking whether or not the book is any good?

The truth is that J.K. Rowling could have published a 700-page essay about her favorite cheese, and if she had called it Harry Potter and the Delicious Gouda, it still would have sold ten million copies. With a following like hers, success — even phenomenal success — can happen quite independently of quality.

So is The Deathly Hallows any good? Thankfully, yes. Rowling avows that it’s her favorite of all the Harry Potter books, and it’s easy to see why. For one thing, her original readers have aged even more than her characters in the ten years since Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and that allows her to approach some of her darkest themes yet. Murder, torture and domination are disturbing enough when used by villains for villainous ends. Now Rowling asks us to face the fact that sometimes good people can be forced to use them for virtuous ends. Of the three Unforgivable Curses, Harry himself uses all but one.

Does your favorite character die? Maybe. I count 15 named characters, major and minor, and at least 50 unnamed witches and wizards who don’t survive the final struggle.

But for all this darkness and death, Rowling has produced a fundamentally optimistic, romantic, even idealistic book. Good finally triumphs over evil (you didn't really think Voldemort was going to win, did you?), and almost everybody gets what they really deserve. It’s a characteristic of the Harry Potter books that virtue eventually receives its just reward, while wickedness eventually comes to naught.

This is pretty common stuff for fantasy literature, but what separates Harry Potter and the Eventual Triumph of Virtue from the innumerable imitators lies somewhere in that “eventually.” Rowling’s real literary excellence is her ability to depict a universe that's just as morally difficult and confusing as our own, and in “The Deathly Hallows,” even more so than in its predecessors, doing the right thing is hard.  The vast majority of ethical dilemmas in fantasy are between a difficult-but-moral action and an tempting-but-immoral action. Rowling prefers to put her characters in situations where every choice, including inaction, seems potentially immoral, unpleasant and dangerous.

Maybe that's why her characters feel so supremely heroic, in the end. The more difficult it is for them to be good, the more remarkable it is when they succeed. Harry and his friends have spent six books winning the game only to find that they've lost the match.  All the setbacks they've dealt to Voldemort and his followers haven't prevented the Death Eaters' power and influence from increasing, or saved their friends and loved ones from being relentlessly murdered. Yet for all this, they've never given up, never stopped making the hard choices, never opted for the easy way out.

When they finally win — and they do finally win, in this book — their victory feels genuinely cathartic. Rowling writes a great climax too, with Harry and Voldemort circling each other like wolves and hurling taunts back and forth even as the final secrets of the Elder Wand are revealed.  And there’s a lovely epilogue, set 19 years afterward, that tells you who marries whom, who’s happy and who’s not, how everyone ended up, and generally everything you could want for a satisfying conclusion.

Of course, in a way, it doesn't matter. Nobody who has read the first six books is going to fail to read this one, and nobody who hasn’t read them is going to start here. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is as much the culmination of a cultural phenomenon as it is a book in its own right. If you’ve enjoyed it all so far, you won't be disappointed now.