Rowling is no Tolkien
Aug. 29th, 2007 04:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficThe 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?
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?
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no subject
Date: 2007-08-29 08:57 pm (UTC)See above re: Harry freeing Dobby. I'm sure there are others.
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Date: 2007-08-29 09:04 pm (UTC)It's frustating to me that with his mentor dead Harry doesn't step up and say, "this is what must be done," he says, "this is what Dumbledore wants me to do." I see that as a serious flaw.