Deathly Hallows

[sistermagpie]

I feel weird writing this post, because I don't really feel like posting, yet it seems like I should, and then I think--what, do you imagine the public is waiting on pins and needles for your words? Get over yourself!:-D

Anyway, I didn't much like it. Perhaps my feelings will change, but stop here if you don’t want to read any negative stuff. I don't have any rants prepared or anything or want to harsh anybody's buzz. (But misery also loves company!) I was talking to someone who's asked me what I needed from the book, what I wanted to happen or what would have made me satisfied, and the truth is, I don't have an answer. I don't have a list of prescriptive criticism, or think things were done badly, or should have been done a different way.

Well, except one little thing, which couldn't be helped. When that white doe showed up I never doubted for a second it was Snape's Lily!Patronus (cause she's a lady!James!). We'd seen Arthur's and Kingsley's Patronuses talk, and oh, how I wanted that beautiful sparkly stag to come up to Harry and tell him to get this Quest going already in Snape's sarcastic voice.

I've never loved these books the way some do--which should not be taken as a criticism of people who do. I just mean that I know there are people who re-read the books over and over as comfort, and that's not something I ever did. I didn't ever want to re-read to spend time with these people or in this world. There are other books I do feel that way about, books that other people find meh. Basically, I felt like JKR was writing a story of good and evil, and life and death, that resonated with her and satisfied her, and felt like a triumph for her--just not me. So I was a bit left out of the story, objectively even seeing characters doing good, brave things, and just not sharing much in the emotions. More than once I felt like I was seeing more story outline/structure than story so that it seemed very contrived (a couple of times Harry himself seemed to admit it) and made it feel like nothing was building to anything.

What it mostly made me do is go over all the ways I was reading it wrong, making my issues more central than the author really considered them. I don't think I was ever so off as, say, a Harmonian banking on the Hippogriff o'love or anything like that, and some things that happened I did predict (Snape/Lily, obviously, and DDM!Snape). But in general I think I was reading Rowling a bit too much like a Tolkien fan, and maybe too much as a Jungian (not that I'm any expert on Jung, but I was reading from my own idea of his stuff). And I think when JKR said that she was Christian and if she talked about her faith we'd know the ending, I immediately began interrogating from the *wrong* Christian perspective and got that wrong too.

Contrary to what some may have thought at times-or not-I don't hate the good guys. Still don't hate them, just still would not want to spend time with them or re-read the books to spend time with them. The characters I liked the most I think less of now or am just kind of confused by, which is unfortunate. I find Harry affectionately naming his child Albus Severus downright creepy--but that wasn't the first time in the book where that kind of thing happened.

Not sure what I predict fanfic-wise. I wonder if people might not start writing some interesting stuff. I did at one point think how I wanted to take a favorite character and put him in a different story.

Oh, also I've been dreading the epilogue for years, because I've always hated epilogues. Even when I was too young to know the name for them I hated them. Some books I guess can make a case for them being appropriate. HP is really not one of them that I can see. There was no reason I could see for needing to see these people married with children. The one good thing I read about it was after it was leaked, before I read it, and I read a comment where someone said the epilogue read like any cliché H/G fic...or any cliché post-war H/D fic.;-)

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

with me constantly struggling from somewhere under the rubble.

LOL! I love that image. That's what I feel like.

I agree, not in a children's book, since kids who read books don't want their heros to grow up and have kids. It's always really depressing when that happens.

That's how I always felt as a kid--it made me really angry.

[alula-auburn.livejournal.com]

That's how I always felt as a kid--it made me really angry.

At the risk of invoking the always dangerous JKR/Jane Austen demons (Taboo! or something), the epilogue reminded me of something I read once comparing Austen to Charlotte Bronte (I think it might be John Sutherland, in his little puzzles of victorian literature book). Anyway, what he says is that Bronte leaves "holes" in her fiction; i.e. she not only leaves gaps where she doesn't articulate details about what happens to characters, she almost draws attention to the fact that her characters live when they're not under the narrative lens: the ending of Vilette comes to mind, and there's a bit in Shirley, which I think the comment was about. Austen, by contrast, seals her fiction off very tightly--even in the end of, say, Pride and Prejudice, when everyone's is married off, it's fast and clean, and it's as if a door shuts. "They lived happily ever after, and that's all I'm going to tell you." I think one of the reasons I've always stayed clear of Austen fanfic (besides the writing itself--I can't really read fic for things when I love the text, not parts of the story, so to speak) is that I instinctively want that seal--I don't want to see Lizzy and Darcy being married with kids, even as an adult.

The point to all this literature-wanking is that I got to the epilogue, which I also thought was always going to be bad, and it was like it had the worst of both techniques. It calls attention to what we don't know (er, what does anyone do, for example, other than have kids?), but it's also very claustrophobic and constricting, IMO, because it closes off your options for filling in the blanks yourself.

And of course, it's written in the lamest, IWasATweenageFanficcer kind of way--I could totally believe she wrote this a lot earlier, because other than her (and her editors') baffling inability to understand semicolons versus colons, I thought the writing was technically better in reasonable sections of this. (Although maybe it just helped me not to have to read Quidditch scenes.) But the epilogue, Lord. If it had to be there, I think almost ANY other narrative strategy would have been better--appendices, correspondence, newspaper clippings, American Graffiti-style bullet points, excerpts from Luna Lovegood's memoirs--ANYTHING but kids running around King's Cross shrieking about snogging and the trio talking about parking. I'd have even swallowed a wedding scene if it meant we actually got to see some other people, like Kingsley or Dean or Luna, and some grown-ups actually talked. NOT ABOUT PARKING.

[tamerterra.livejournal.com]

On the parking - the fact that Harry and Ron, both wizards who aren't grounded in the muggle world, have driving licences, was one of the only things that did interest me in the epilogue. It raised the question of what, precisely, the relationship between the magical and muggle worlds post-Voldemort is. Maybe.