Sigma’s Simulacrum of Reality

Warning: Spoilers Alert!

And so this series finally comes to its conclusion. A little bit about the Harry Potter series and me first before I start. I first started reading this series relatively late, in 2000/2001 I think. My little brother was the first one who started on it, probably due to the hype surrounding it by then. Initially, I was wondering what the big deal was about it. After all, it’s just another children’s book, right? Yes and no. Being an avid reader, I have read a lot of books in my life so far. In terms of children books, I was wondering whether HP would be as enjoyable as stuff from Enid Blyton, Paul Jennings, or Rohl Dahl, the stuff that I’ve read when I was younger.

But I quickly came to discover that the HP series is very different than those other children’s books. For starters, a very appealing ‘world of magic’ has been constructed in the HP series. Secondly, HP doesn’t wear protective gloves when talking about love, family breakdown, betrayal, evil and deaths, unlike the much more innocent books by other children’s book authors. All this, combined with terrific and memorable characters and well a constructed narrative arch makes this series a truly enthralling read.

Even though I started late, I quickly snapped up The Philosopher’s Stone, The Chamber of Secrets, The Prisoner of Azkaban, The Goblet of Fire, The Order of the Phoenix, and The Half-Blood Prince in quick succession. The more I read the series, the better it became for me. The first few books do cater to the younger audiences more, but things get noticeably darker and grimmer as the series progressed, which was just fine by me.

On a final note about the whole HP series so far, I would just like to say that my favourite book of the series would be the Order of the Phoenix (even though in retrospect, it lacked a strong plotline as evident in the movie version, but in the book, the rich characters, their backgrounds, and the cute and awkward romance aspect of it more than compensates for that), followed by the Deathly Hallows. My least favourite would have to be Half-Blood Prince, which in retrospect did serve a purpose of fleshing out Voldermort’s past as part of the whole series, but as a stand-alone book, it has the weakest plot and mystery of all of them.

Now, on to Deathly Hallows (DH). Was working when it first came out, so I had to run away from every bloody idiot who flipped to the last chapter of it and went around telling others whether Potter survived or not. Luckily, I managed to avoid any spoilers until I got the chance to read it myself. Although by then I had kinda suspected that Potter lived, since nobody had yelled out “Potter died!” yet. I was actually more interested in Snape’s loyalties than Potter’s probable death.

Being the ‘purchasing-averse’ bookworm that I am, I had devised a plan where I would keep hitting Borders to read the DH there. After about 3 sessions of this (each lasting about 3 hours), I finally finished the book yesterday with my $29.95 intact. Take that Rowling!

DH starts out like a direct continuation to the HBP. It is also the most different book of the seven, in that it doesn’t revolve around Hogswarts and it doesn’t dabble in much of Rowling’s trademark comedic teen love or humorous moments anymore. Instead, it shows how the magical world has been taken over by Voldermort and his Death Eaters. Every enemy of the Death Eaters are either on the run, captured, or in hiding. Harry, Ron and Hermione then starts on their quest to find and destroy all 6 of Voldermort’s Horcruxes. After a brief reprieve from the doom at the beginning of the book in the form of a wedding between Lupin and Tonks (two of my favourite Order characters), the trio then go on their crazy Horcrux quest. The reason why I liked OotP better than this book was due to the DH’s middle part. It dragged on too long with nothing much happening. It was mostly just Harry getting flashes from Voldermort while hiding in the middle of forests with Ron and Hermione.

After you get through that though, the fun reaally starts. I really like how Rowling’s characters are not just strictly good and evil. Many of them are sort of in the grey area. This was first evident in how she revealed Harry’s father to be not much more than a popular bully, but which unlike Draco and such, one who ultimately had a good heart. In this book, Dumbledore gets this treatment when his back story was told. Similarly, Snape gets even more airtime and his motivations for joining the Order is finally revealed. And I must say that I’m really satisfied with it since it was really believable and fits well with Snape’s character. Snape is revealed as a complex and ultimately tragic character. He helps Potter not really out of the noble aim of ridding Voldermort, but out of his personal reasons. Luckily for Potter and Dumbledore, those reasons coincide with the destruction of Voldermort.

I also liked how Rowling managed to explain and resolve almost every mystery in the whole series. She explained the connection between Harry and Voldermort wonderfully, and in a way even fulfilled the speculations that Harry had to die. The chapter ‘The Forest Again’ was truly touching in which Potter marched to his destined appointment with death with his loved ones. And the blood-letting during the Battle of Hogswarts was great. Rowling bravely exposed to children the consequences of war, which ultimately was the death of young lives. The death of characters such as Fred, Tonks and Lupin was sad. Lastly, I personally enjoyed the epilogue set 19 years forward. It gave us a nice glimpse of how Harry’s life has gone on. I quite liked the Harry+Ginny and Ron+Hermione pairings, but we were given lots of hints that who would get together with who anyways throughout the series.

I found that DH had the most allegories of real life events. Voldermort to me looked like a Hitler, and his preoccupation with purebloods akin to Hitler’s desire for a pure Aryan race. Voldermort also hates mudbloods, which was also similar to Hitler’s irrational dislike of non-Aryans such as Jews and minorities in Germany. The constant theme of mudbloods vs purebloods could also be seen as Rowling’s plea against racism. Other things I’ve picked up on were the Death Eater’s totalitarian regime being akin to Hitler, Stalin or Mao’s.

All in all, a good book, and a great series overall. I was glad to have read all of them. Unlike other children’s stories, the HP series is complex, rich and mature. It’s actually more of a teen/young adult series than a strictly children’s series, especially from book 5 onwards.

HP and the Deathly Hallows: 4 stars
HP series overall: 4 and 1/2 stars