Rowling is no Tolkien

[ivyfic]

The ending of Harry Potter 7 just did not work for me, and it's easy to see why by comparing it to the end of Lord of the Rings.

The end of Lord of the Rings has its own problems (like being how many hundred pages long?), but it gets a lot of things right, including that it's genuinely satisfying and leaves me missing all the characters. You know that feeling: book grief.

The reason, I think, is because everything changes.

Frodo, when he returns to the Shire, can no longer be happy with the things he loved at the beginning of the books. The journey he's been on, and the close contact he's had to evil (like Harry being the horcrux) has irreversibly changed him. Even the Shire itself has changed.

It's also the beginning of the age of man—the elves are leaving. There's a sense of the ending of everything that has gone before, the death of hundreds of years of tradition and history, and that this is necessary for the hope of the new age. This makes the battle against Sauron the fight between good and evil, not just a fight. It was such a struggle that it changed the world.

Rowling, on the other hand, has snapped her world back to the way it was at the beginning of book one. Harry is perfectly content with the things he found joy in before. The evil has been surgically removed from him and he is, essentially, untouched and pure. From the epilogue and what she's said in interviews, it seems like the wizarding world is exactly the same as it was after Voldemort's first defeat, with a few superficial changes.

Now, she spent six books showing how deep the scars from the first war against Voldemort went and how these laid the groundwork for his reemergence. See how unsatisfying it is then for her to have Harry wave his wand and *poof* the entire problem is gone?

This, added to what I was saying before about Harry not going through a hero's journey, just proves that the book isn't epic. Our main character is a soldier, not a hero; Voldemort was a dark wizard, not the dark wizard; the final fight was just one battle between good and evil. The wizarding world had Grindelwald before Voldemort; there will be another dark wizard in the future. It's not even a reactionary anti-epic, like the final season of "Angel." It looks like an epic…and then isn't, like somewhere along the way the story missed an exit.

In talking about this to people, I've heard it argued that of course Harry's world didn't change, it's a children's book. I haven't read a ton of children's fantasy series, so pipe in people if you know other examples, but look at Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles (The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer, The High King). It's been a while since I read them, but in The High King, things for the main characters changed a lot. Both this and HP7 have the coming of a great war, but Taran, who spent the entire previous book on a journey of self-discovery, travels through the land trying to raise an army, therefore confronting the people and seeing how the old ways of life are being lost. Harry, in contrast, spends the book camping in the woods and occasionally doing something daring. He only has superficial contact with what we are told are massive changes in the wizarding world—he's isolated.

At the end of The High King, all magic begins to fade from Prydain, echoing the end of Lord of the Rings. Taran decides to give up what he wants most to do his duty. You may be saying here—yes, but Harry decides to die because it's his duty, but the important thing is Taran makes his sacrifice after the battle is over. Both the Prydain Chronicles and the Lord of the Rings acknowledge that the real struggle is after the war is over, rebuilding everything into a better world. (There's a reason I've always thought of the Prydain Chronicles as training wheels for Lord of the Rings.) This makes everything poignant. I cried more when Fflewddur Fflam burned his lyre than for any of the deaths in HP7. And the Prydain Chronicles are definitely children's books.

Rowling is quite possibly one of the best line writers I've ever read. Her writing is far more fun and her world far more interesting to me than either Alexander's or Tolkien's. But what good is all that if it's in service of a story arc that's limp and predictable?

Which just leads me to ask—why did she choose not to write epic fantasy?

Comments

[ecmyers.livejournal.com]

If she were writing epic fantasy, chances are I would have been less interested in the series. I was more engaged by the characters and their relationships, which came to a satisfying conclusion for me. I also think that Harry and the other students, and the people who play a role in the wizarding world, have undeniably been changed by their experiences--not all state changes need to be external. People comparing fantasy to Tolkien is why we have so many weak knock-offs of The Lord of the Rings. And just because in the grand scheme of things the world returned to a status quo, doesn't mean their struggle and subsequent victory over Voldemort was pointless.

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

"Pointless" and "unsatisfying" are very different.
Sure, they won the day. Sure, they get to live happily ever after. But where are the scars? Where are the sweeping reforms? Where do we hear that Dementors are gone forever, that goblins and wizards have reached new accords, that centaurs have more rights, that house elves are free? All we see at the end is "aw, and they're together and they're together and they're together." It's too sappy, esp. after such a dark book--it undercuts the sacrifices other characters made by essentially hitting Reset.

[ecmyers.livejournal.com]

I agree that all of that should have been in the book, or at least implied a bit more strongly, especially since she has addressed most of those issues outside of the book in interviews. But I think she made a conscious choice (not necessarily a good one) to focus the ending on the characters. I think that at the heart of these books, the theme has always been about family, and sappy ending or no, she concludes it with a glimpse into their family lives: about Harry as a father, not an Auror. It mostly works for me, though I still wanted to know more of the aftermath--but mileage obviously varies.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of my problems with the book could have been addressed by another fifty pages at the end. After how many thousands of pages leading up to the epic battle, the closing was really brief, especially considering how long she spent on the endings of the other books. It certainly would have felt more satisfying. To meta a little, I think it really shows that the epilogue was written in 1990 before the rest of the book. She would have been well served by throwing it out and writing something more organic. It felt like she finished the fight with Voldemort and was like--done!

But that wouldn't fix my problems with Harry's lack of agency or the fact that the final battle was Harry talking for pages then casting one spell. Jesus christ. It's almost as bad a let down as the Sylar-Peter non-fight at the end of Heroes season 1.

[ecmyers.livejournal.com]

Oh, is that what happens at the end of Heroes? :P

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

That was vague and non-spoilery! If you've seen the show, you can guess. The only thing I've spoiled is that it sucks.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I'm not a fan of high fantasy, but that's not what this is. I also don't think that the proliferation of bad imitations invalidates looking at Lord of the Rings for structural guidance. So many of the knock-offs are just imitating the surface (cloaks! and magic rings! and rangers and elves!) and not the underpinnings, which is what made all that work. He did a very good job of writing a classic epic story. I'm just baffled why Harry Potter didn't follow the classic storyline. You know how they say there are only two stories--well, she didn't write either of them.

To me, I've always liked Rowling's characters better, but her *poof* and everything is happy! ending made it impossible for me to be satisfied with just that. She has a ton of characters in play and it would have been difficult to give all of them their due, but I don't feel like she gave anyone a truly satisfying moment in the sun. It all felt like short shrift.

Perhaps this is a function of the brevity of the denouement, but I don't see any changes to the characters or the world, external or internal. I don't see Harry confronting his assumptions or wrestling with what he's gone through and I don't see the sea changes in the wizarding world I expected to see in their treatment of the muggle world. It felt very superficial and pat.

In the end it felt like the struggle with Voldemort was just very hard. And something simply being difficult isn't enough for me. You can tell me all you want how hard it was to accomplish something in a story but without seeing the emotional and character changes, I don't feel it.