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Harry and I I read the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone, because there was so much hoopla and hype surrounding it. So I read it and... well. Okay. It felt good to have read it and know what it was about. Then I saw the movie, and I really liked it, and so I read the book again, and liked it better than the first time. So I bought the second book. Okay. Not bad. For some reason I didn't see the second movie. Don't know why really. But I read the third book. Now, people, was that the book where this boy Cedric died? Was this the book where they had some sort of wizardry competition, some sort of wizardry school games, and Harry won, and this guy Cedric died? You know, there is a Swedish saying from the time when we were a peasant society, so young people don't know it, but it goes like this:
That's a lot of screaming for very little wool, said the old woman as she was shearing the pig. Well, I was thinking about the copious screaming and the diminutive amount of wool after I'd read the book where Cedric died. J.K. Rowling
kills a kid just so that Harry can win some stupid wizardry games and go another round against Voldemort? That's when I gave up on Harry Potter.
My problem with Harry is that the boy doesn't fascinate me. Oh, I kind of like him, don't get me wrong, and I always rooted for him in the books I read. But he never fascinated me. I've
never had any Harry fantasies, believe me.
So anyway, I've never read book five and six and maybe not book four - depends on which book Cedric
was killed in - so there's a lot of stuff that I don't know about Harry. But when I heard that J.K. Rowling had brought her Harry epos to an end, I just had to read the last book. And now I have, and I liked it. Sure there were many deaths in it, and too many for my taste, but at least it felt as if Harry and his friends were fighting for something hugely important, and not for some stupid wizardy games.
Severus Snape: The Spock factor Only one character in the Potter universe has really and truly fascinated me, and that is Snape. There was something about him that reminded me of my one big fictional idol apart from Lois and Clark, namely Spock from the original Star Trek. In the Kirk and Spock version of Star Trek, Spock was
the absolutely only one on the spaceship Enterprise who was
not a hundred per cent human. The ship was packed with four hundred ordinary human beings plus Spock. Imagine how lonely he must have felt. And he
was lonely. Spock was never seen chumming about with the other people on the Enterprise. He was never seen hanging around with other people in some kind of bar, and he was never laughing and joking with a bunch of other people from the ship.
Spock really only had one friend, but that was the most important person on the ship: Captain Kirk. Popular, personable, radiating confidence, Captain Kirk was everybody's favorite, and Spock was the one that Kirk himself held in the highest esteem. But Captain Kirk had so many others who liked him and wanted to spend time with him, whereas Spock only had Kirk.
During the first season of the first version of Star Trek, Spock was mistrusted by several crew members of the Enterprise. Well, you know, Spock was the one and only alien, the oddity, the freak. And imagine him being Kirk's right-hand man, too, how that galled some people. They thought he was an arrogant, supercilious jerk, who fancied himself better than regular people.... During that first season of the first version of Star Trek, Spock wordlessly radiated a deep, unexpressed loneliness and pain. And I was incredibly moved by him, and I wanted him to prove himself to the others, and I wanted them to like him and accept him.
If you think about it, Snape is a bit like Spock. He fairly radiates loneliness and pain. He has no friends, or at least none that I am aware of. People are suspicious of him, and not without reason. But he is the right-hand man of everybody's favorite, beloved headmaster Albus Dumbledore.
Snape even looks a little bit like Spock. For all his professed reason and logic, Spock often seemed to be brooding a bit. Snape looks excessively brooding. Both Snape and Spock are tall, thin and dark, with rather narrow faces and very distinctive hairstyles. Both Snape and Spock have strange skills and powers, too.
Snape is, of course, a much darker character than Spock ever was. Spock could never, ever in any way be compared to a Death Eater.
What was so lovely about this last book was that it revealed that almost all his life, Snape had been driven and motivated by love - love for Lily Evans, Harry Potter's mother. Of course Snape could never have Lily. A neglected, unattractive boy, unloved even by his parents, destined to be sorted into the house of Slytherin - what could he really offer Lily, the happy, good and sweet Gryffindor girl?
But the amazing thing is that Snape, who himself was unloved all his life, faithfully loved Lily Evans all his life and took horrible risks to keep her son Harry safe. And Harry, like everybody else, reciprocated by disliking Snape. Snape had to prove his love by doing horrible things, too - by killing Dumbledore, for example.
I think the thing I liked best about this whole new book was that Snape had a lovely, silvery, graceful and oh-so-feminine
doe as his Patronus. In fact, Snape had the same Patronus as Lily. Of course the doe was perfect for Lily in every way, but you'd think it was as wrong for Snape as anything could be. Imagine - this dark, brooding, ominous man with his lanky, unkempt hair - his Patronus was this lovely image of feminine innocence and grace. And yet the doe was
perfect for him. I think of it as Snape's love for Lily taking ethereal shape in his Patronus, identical to the Patronus of Lily.
I think my second favorite thing about this book is that Harry honored Snape by naming his son after him.
Harry's taste in girls What I like least in this book may actually be Harry's taste in girls. Why isn't he the least bit interested in Hermione? Come on, people, Hermione has been Harry's faithful sidekick (along with Ron) for seven books, risking her life for him again and again, tirelessly helping him prevail against him enemy. And he isn't interested in her, not at all? He prefers a younger girl who has done so much less to save Harry and to prove her mettle, and who has shared so few fights with him? (Okay, okay, I haven't read books five and six. It's quite possible that if I had, I would think much more favorably of Ginny.)
A depressing possibility is that J.K. Rowling herself doesn't like Hermione very much. Maybe she thinks that Hermione is bookish and arrogant and has far too high-falutin thoughts about herself. Maybe Rowling thinks that girls and women don't make very good heroes, and they should really leave the hero stuff to the guys and to the housewives like Mrs Weasley. Just consider the way Mrs Weasly beat Bellatrix, when Hermione was definitely unable to do so. Maybe Rowling thinks that Ginny will prove to be her mother's daughter, a girl who will be happy to stay at home and raise her family, except during those incredibly rare and horrible emergencies when she will prove herself to be a better witch than anyone else.
So anyway, I felt sorry for Hermione in this book, so unappreciated and taken for granted by Harry. But I loved Ron's love for her. She and Ron made an adorable couple.
Harry's shining hour: Saying no to the Elder Wand It was great to see that Harry was so mature and, well,
wise in this book that he wouldn't go chasing after power and might like so many others would have done, if they had been in his shoes. Like Dumbledore himself had done. I loved how Harry declined the Elder Wand and only used it to repair his own wand.
I think you can compare Harry in this book with Aragorn in the last part of Tolkien's Ring Trilogy. In Rowling's book, Harry has to embrace death to defeat the evil that would consume England, and possibly the Earth. Int Tolkien's book, Aragaorn had to enter the realm of Death to summon dead people to fight at his side against the forces of darkness.
But in the end, Harry's and Aragorn's fates are very different. Aragorn becomes King of Middle Earth. He becomes a real royal, kingly King, the kind of King that his old friends and brothers-in-arms have to kneel before when they come visiting him. I hated it. Harry, by comparison, declines the Elder Wand that would have made him invincible, and slips off with his closest friends to sit down and have a sandwich.
So... all in all, this was a very satisfactory end to the Potter epos. And I'm sure that we all found different things in the book that we loved best and least!
Ann
