Sarx

I said I’d wait 7 days. Seven days ago I finished reading HP7 and I didn’t like it. I liked it for 2 reasons: the outline of the story was good and there are, basically, no loose ends left.

I was disappointed because of the way in which JKR got us there.

It was painfully evident that there was almost no plan, from the very beginning, for the story arc. One can ignore this on any of the preceding works. But the fact that, even after 700 pages of the last volume, JKR had to resolve all the loose ends using a monologue (drawn out of the dead Snape’s memories) and a dialogue (between Dumbledore and Harry) left me with no doubt that she decided “oh, heck, that’s enough writing, better wrap this up…”

There were a number of deus ex machina escapes: The love Snape bore Harry’s mother would have certainly come up before as Harry’s known a whole host of his parents’ friends for 3 or 4 books now. All of Harry’s mistrust of Snape could have been resolved in book 5 if someone from the Order had just said, “Look Snape was your mother’s neighbour when they were kids and they were friends…” Further plot complications could have been avoided if we had known that the Potters were neighbours with the Dumbledores. Harry spends much of this book saying “I can’t believe Dumbledore never told me X”. So do we, the readers. Again, this is, to me, evidence that the story arc was not planned.

About 1/3 of the way in (can’t find it now), JKR spends several pages talking about something that is incomprehensible. Then one paragraph… blammo… the last several pages become understandable. That was the first time I put the book down and walked away. Even IMed someone as much: she had broken my “suspension of disbelief”. A good editor would have put that paragraph first, maybe. But there is no evidence of an editor.

From that point on, she did it over and over again. It was as if the writing was out of her control and she kept having to retrace her steps to make up explanations. The Waterfall in Gringots was another example: the kids ride under a waterfall which removes all magical illusion from the party. Goblin Griphook, travelling with them, freaks out. It’s clear that the Griphook knew about it from his reaction after the fact but why didn’t he tell? No telling. What happened to him after their deus ex machina escape? No telling.

Finally, the plot changed complete on page 404 with the introduction of the Deathly Hallows by Xenophilus (love that name!). You could almost hear the loud “dunt dunt DUHHHHH” in the sound track at that point. Horcruxes or Hallows, Harry wonders from that point on. Only finding out that Harry was the accidental 7th Horcrux makes the polot choice. The Hallows of the title become the fulcrum for a 300 page-dither. ARGH. WHy not call it “Harry and the Horcruxes” and make it only half as long?

There was also an entire subplot borrowed from Tolkien: “Wear it around your neck and it will posses you”. Tolkien is a *very* common source for fantasy writers to borrow from. His condensation of Teutonic, Scandinavian and British myths into fantasy is the best. It makes sense to borrow from him – why go back to the earlier texts when the work has been done! A number of famous and popular authors have done so. But every time I pick up a book that borrows from Lord of the Rings I say, “What? Couldn’t think of something?”

But most of my reaction has to do with the ending: Harry and Draco coldly nodding at each other over the train platform as their own children go off to Hogwart’s. If I want to see a parallel, it would be in the way that all of Western Europe grew together after WW2. But there is no end to the battle between good and evil. It starts when we’re kids in school and continues through our whole life. We don’t get to stop and become Middle Class.

And I wondered if JKR wasn’t pointing out something that, really, shouldn’t be revealed to kids.

Every generation comes along filled with hope and spunk and in the end, gets a house, a mortgage and some more kids. Nothing changes. The Baby Boomers did the Summer of Love and then became coke-snorting yuppies 15 years later. GenX got all Uppity in Seattle but calmed down once our DotCom stocks bottomed out and we had to keep working…

That’s one very cynical way to look at it. But things are always changing – for better or worse change never stops. The “Silent Generation” didn’t set out to change the world but did: the Depression ended, WW2 was fought and fascism was, for a time, halted. The Boomers brought us the sexual revolution and the end of Vietnam: no, they didn’t stop all war, but things changed a lot. Xers have brought us Teh Internet and prepared the way for those who are, now, in their 20s and are amazingly adept in this electronic culture. Things always change. The problem (from our localised point of view) is they don’t change the way we want them to.

Harry Potter killed Voldemort by letting Voldemort kill him. For this, Harry was Resurrected. Heavens, if you miss the Jesus stuff there, you’re blind. But the Risen Jesus didn’t just take a wife and get a house, did he? Did he still nod coldly at Judas Iscariot as they went to work? Nope. Things had changed. In the book even all of Harry’s scars are gone. At least Jesus still had holes in his hands and feet!

Again – the story line was good. I loved finding out the whys and wherefores. But I kind of expected those to not come in a punch line at the end. And I loved that Good wins out – not that I had any doubt about that point from the vary beginning. But it might have been better if Harry had died: leaving tonnes of readers weeping (I would have been there, too). NPR said it best: there was one point where harry is wondering what he’s doing, why he’s out there with no plan, no knowledge and dragging Ron and Hermione along with him. NPR thought that was JKR worrying about her readership. It certainly was me, too. I thought that when I read that passage.

Story tellers get bogged down all the time and need to dig their way out apologising to the listeners: right in the middle of the second movie that follows Lord of the Rings, in one of the non-canonical scenes that they made up (Frodo and Sam are never captured by Army of Gondor), Sam suddenly says, “Mr Frodo we shouldn’t even be here…” and, on opening day, sitting in the Metreon in San Francisco, I and a whole bunch of other viewers burst out laughing because they shouldn’ have been there if Jackson had followed the real story in the book. The point where JKR needed to apologised to her readers was the point I almost stopped.

A good story is not enough: it has to be told well for it to be a good book. A good book makes you want to relish the words themselves, and the skill with which one word follows the other. I wanted to just scan through this one because it was painful. For all the gushing world wide, there hasn’t been a good book in this series since #1 – which was bloodly brilliant. HP7 bears all the marks of having been rushed off to the printer so the JKR could get back to her family. I don’t fault her for this; not at all!

But it prevents this from being a good book.

update According to the August 3rd edition of The Week, some reviewers are saying they can overlook the very same things I cited and, minus those things, this book is as good as Tolkien and proves that JKR had a plan all along. Yes, I can see that if you subtract the bad things.

But if you put the bad things in – like JKR did – you don’t have Tolkien. You’d have to pretend the bad things were not the author’s creation – which they are – in order to imagine this is a good book. And, most assuredly, it’s certainly not Tolkien or Lewis.