Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - A

Book Review

While this site is primary preoccupied with movies, music, and TV, any site that claims to focus on pop culture would be remiss if it did not discuss the concluding book of the pop phenomenon of the past fifteen years: Harry Potter.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling is a thunderous success in every sense of the word. In this, Hallows is that rarest of all pop culture events: one in which the hype comes primarily from the general public and in which the event surpasses the build-up.

SPOILER ALERT That said, what I’d really like to address in this article is the phenomenal, almost incomprehensible popularity of these books and how Deathly Hallows provides the necessary ending to the tale told within them (I’m assuming that the wild success of the films are fueled primarily by the novels). Several theories addressing the popularity of the Potter series have been proffered, all of which, I’m sure, are integral to its success. These include the fully-formed magical world, complete with history, from which the stories spring (the comparison’s to Tolkien’s Middle Earth are fully justified). Others include Rowling’s writing, immediate and lyrical. Still others hold up the characters. Each, from Voldemort to Tonks to Hermione to Harry himself, behave as humans, with recognizable drives, reactions, foibles, and strengths.

Still, while Harry’s popularity would not be possible without these, they alone are not enough to explain the ravenous hunger for this tale. That’s because, ultimately, Harry Potter isn’t about magical worlds or messianic destiny or even good versus evil. At its most basic, all Harry really wants is a home. A home that was denied him by the death of his parents at the hands (or wand, as it were) of Voldemort. The hunger for his mother and father and his inability to truly come to grips with their absence is on every page of every book. Of course, his view of what life would be like with his parents is idealized and made perfect. We (or those of us who grew up in families) know that there is no ideal home. We know home is a place of great happiness but also great pain. We know the heartache of having our expectations of how a mother and father should behave shattered by how they sometimes do. We know that parents are just humans, really. And so, as we travel with Harry on his journey to discover his parents, we are forced to confront our own broken pieces and disillusions. And, in the end of Deathly Hallows when Harry’s parents tell him, through the use of the Resurrection Stone, that they love him and are proud of him, we weep, too. Because we know how much we still long to hear that. And we understand, especially those who believe in an afterlife, how dying can be going home and why that’s a decision Harry is willing to make.

But if the story is ultimately about going home, why does that resonate with our current situation? A couple reasons, I suspect, that are tethered to each other. One is that between the hard sciences, a fundamentalist reading of scripture, and sociology, most of our meta-narratives have been destroyed. Christianity in particular, along with Islam and Judaism (the historical religions), have had their sacred books second-guessed until they died the deaths of a thousand cuts. We need meta-narratives, and, although Harry isn’t quite that big, it is a very big story that helps us understand ourselves.

Similarly, but on an even larger scale, post-modernism has so rattled then destroyed the foundations of our world and belief systems, we in Western Culture are longing to go home. But we know we can’t. Absolute Truth in its metaphysical sense seems impossible to determine. Our naivete has crumbled and there is no going back to a time and place of certainty and safety. The moorings of God, the Church, logic, and reason which once provided solidity to our world have been cut loose. We resonate with Harry and his frustration in only seeing part of the story. Even his priest (Dumbledore) knows only in part and seems full of more mysteries than truth. It’s for this reason that the oft-decried Epilogue is integral to this final book. Harry finally has a home, but he doesn’t know much more then than he did before. Instead, his home is purely relational. It is one that he’s built, bound to his wife, two kids, and good friends. It echoes quite strongly the ending of About a Boy in which Hugh Grant’s character finds himself in the same situation. And it provides, if we allow it to, a suggested way forward for us in these topsy-turvy times. It is in this that Deathly Hollows gives Rowling her greatest triumph and truly contributes to the human experience. A.