Don’t read on unless you’ve read the book or don’t care about spoilers.
So, it’s done. *Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows* completes the Harry Potter saga, and really leaves very little that needs to be wrapped up or further explained.
Overall I thought the book was very good, a real return to form after a couple of quite weak books in a row. Breaking away from the strict form of the previous novels by not having the main characters attending school gave the overall plot a much more novel feel, and made even the relatively ponderous second third of the book quite enjoyable.
As promised, there’s a fair bodycount. But at the end of the day the three majors (Harry, Hermione and Ron) are all standing. It’s a bit hard to pick the most major character to die, as Fred, Lupin, Mad-Eye and Dobby all had about the same amount of appearance in the books. Personally I was disappointed, as only one of the deaths is really pushed hard (that of Dobby), and the others are pretty quickly glossed over.
The biggest satisfaction was the resolution of the Snape plot, which as I (and thousands of others) expected, showed that he’d been on the side of the good guys all along. Snape is a pretty well developed character through the series, and he’s really the most heroic character in the series – he’s the only one who had a genuine choice as to which side to be on, and he was the one who paid the highest price for his actions. Harry, as always, gets off practically scot-free and bumbles through the plot.
I was quite disappointed by Harry’s role in the ending – it really does cheapen the sacrifice if you live through it. He was, at least, somewhat less stupid than usual through the plot, but he’s still far from being my favourite character.
To review my predictions from Friday:
* *One of the big three will die*: nope, completely wrong.
* *Snape is good*: yep.
* *Voldemort will die, Death Eaters continue*: Yeah, and nope, there’s not really any aftermath at the end of the book, good is completely triumphant.
* *Dumbledore back as a ghost*: Yes.
* *Time travel*: No.
* *Sirius returns for real*: Brief reapparance as a ghost, but overall no.
* *Someone other than Harry will kill Voldemort*: I think I got this one, as Harry didn’t really kill him: Neville got the last Horcrux, and Voldemort killed himself.
So 3 1/2 out of 7 – not too bad.
One final thought: this is going to be very, very hard to film. By the time you pack in all the ‘must have’ scenes, the movie is going to run for over three hours…