***

So the Harry Potter series is over, and I was pretty much right. (Read my entry What Will Happen in the Final Harry Potter?)

I predicted that Harry, Ron, and Hermione would all live to the end of the series, though J.K. would keep us in suspense until the last minute. Bing! I predicted that Snape would reveal that he had killed Dumbledore and turned Death Eater on Dumbledore’s orders. Bing! I predicted that Harry would triumph over Voldemort at the expense of lots of secondary characters. Bing! I predicted that Harry would find some way to contact Sirius Black again from beyond the grave. Well, no bing! there, but I’d suggest that I deserve a partial bing! since Harry does manage to contact another dead mentor (Dumbledore) from beyond the grave.

Of course, you can chalk this up less to my amazing powers of prognostication than to the fact that J.K. Rowling made a lot of this fairly obvious. I think many of us knew that Dumbledore was going to die from the second or third book in. I mean, didn’t Obi-Wan Kenobi die on Luke Skywalker? Didn’t Gandalf die on Frodo? That’s simply the way these stories go: Our Hero receives instruction from a Wise Mentor, who later dies and leaves the hero to confront the Big Bad Villain alone.

I’ve heard a lot of people complain that the Harry Potter novels are “too derivative.” To which I say, Yes! J.K. Rowling is derivative! And that’s the entire point. One of the things that makes these books so terrific is the fact that the author is very consciously following traditional patterns. She’s taken something old and familiar, dusted it off, and made it seem fresh and new again. It’s harder to do than you think.

So how does Deathly Hallows rank? How good was the book? I’d say Deathly Hallows is the third best in the series, behind Order of the Phoenix and Prisoner of Azkaban.

I admit I was very worried about this book. L. Frank Baum got lazy a few books in to his Oz series and wrote a real stinker called The Road to Oz, which basically consists of Dorothy meeting up with all her pals and going to the Emerald City for a big party. (Baum even pulls in characters from his other books in a crass effort to draw attention to them and boost lagging sales.) Then in the sixth book, The Emerald City of Oz, Baum tried to wrap the whole thing up by making Oz invisible. C.S. Lewis had similar issues drawing Narnia to a close in The Last Battle. I dreaded the prospect of Deathly Hallows becoming a Road to Oz-type wrap-up with endless cameos by secondary characters.

So imagine my surprise that Rowling didn’t fall into this trap at all. There’s very little of that last-time-around nostalgia kick going on in Deathly Hallows. No last ride on the Hogwarts Express, no last trip to Hagrid’s shack, no last game of Quidditch. Hell, they don’t even make it to Hogwarts until the last hundred pages or so. About three-quarters of the book is focused exclusively on Harry, Ron, and Hermione, and there are quite a number of new characters here to sink your teeth into. Characters like Dobby, Neville, and Hagrid (the last of whom seemed in danger of staging a Fonzie-like takeover of the series two or three books in) only show up for short bits here and there.

That’s not to say that the book is perfect. Rowling does still indulge a number of her less-than-admirable habits in this book too. She makes too much of the plot revolve around obscure details and marginalia from several books back that we can’t be expected to keep track of. Remember how frustrating it was when Sherlock Holmes would bend to the ground at the scene of a crime, take notice of something that our narrator Watson couldn’t see, and then produce this insignificant thing at the conclusion as the final damning piece of evidence against the villain? Rowling’s got that affliction too.

Why didn’t Harry die when Voldemort cast the Avada Kedavra curse on him at the end? Why did the spell rebound on the Evil Dude? There were a couple of long convoluted explanations about switched wands that I couldn’t really follow, nor did I think it really mattered that much. Ditto with the overly complicated back story for Albus Dumbledore. What mattered was that Voldy’s selfishness, arrogance, and shortsightedness did him in in the end, and Alby’s faith, patience, and trust in Harry won the day.

(And has anybody else noticed Rowling’s little joke here, that “Avada Kedavra” sounds a heck of a lot like “abracadabra”? Well, maybe it’s not so much of a joke, as Wikipedia explains.)

The other questionable tactic Rowling uses is her excessive killing off of characters. About a dozen characters bite it in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but it almost seems like the author chose them at random by writing their names on note cards and tossing them up in the air. I mean, really, Tonks? Crabbe? Anybody wonder what logic there was in some of these choices? (And anybody else find it peculiar that Mad-Eye Moody’s body was never found?)

So now that we’ve seen the whole Harry Potter saga from start to (presumed) finish, what can we say about it? Will the Harry Potter novels endure?

I say yes, but not necessarily because of the clever plotting and suspense. The primary virtue of these books is that they provide such an incredibly convincing portrait of a boy’s coming of age. So many other authors who write about children either gloss over the turmoiled adolescence or yank their characters from childhood to adulthood in one fell swoop. Harry starts the series as a cute kid who discovers a magical world, and undergoes a very gradual transformation through the seven books to a responsible adult. It’s an impressive achievement, made all the more impressive by the fact that Rowling is a woman. (Although once future generations finally shake off this irritating Puritanical streak that runs through our culture, people will start to wonder why Harry is the only teenaged boy in history to grow up without a sex drive.)

So if you’re one of those people feeling incredibly sad that Harry’s adventures are over, don’t worry — I’m sure J.K. Rowling will return to Hogwarts at some point. Even though we know what happens to Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny nineteen years down the line, there’s still plenty left to show. I’m betting that the lure of the four hundred zillion dollars the publishers throw at her will prove irresistible.

I’m betting on a collection of Potter-related short stories sometime in the middle of the next decade, and/or one or two novelties like Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastical Beasts and Where to Find Them done for charitable purposes.

***

A side note: Perhaps I missed this in earlier books — but did anyone else notice that the death date on James and Lily Potter’s graves was 1981? Which would make the present day of Deathly Hallows 1997-98, not 2007-08. Rowling eschews the use of topical references and specific dates through most of the series, and this is the first time I noticed when the series was supposed to take place. It’s an insignificant thing, really, but I’m curious if there’s any reasoning behind it. Remember how in Superman Returns, if you looked at the dates closely, the Man of Steel turned out to have gone off on his little five-year hiatus right before 9/11?

Man in Black: Really! In that case, I challenge you to a battle of wits.

Vizzini: I accept!

Man in Black: All right. Will Harry Potter die or will Voldemort die? The battle of wits has begun! It ends when J.K. Rowling decides, and we all read, and find out who is right — and who is dead.

Vizzini: But it’s so simple! All we need to do is divine from what we know of J.K. Rowling: is she the sort of woman who would kill off her protagonist, or her villain? Now, a clever author would kill off her protagonist, because she would know that only a great fool would assume that the beloved protagonist of a popular series of novels is safe. We are not great fools, so we can clearly not bet on Harry Potter to die. But J.K. Rowling must have known we were not great fools; she would have counted on it! So we can clearly not bet on Voldemort to die.

Man in Black: You’ve made your decision then?

Vizzini: Not remotely! Because while J.K. Rowling pretends to be a novelist with a dark and sinister side, she’s really a sentimental crowd pleaser at heart. And she knows that killing off her protagonist would be very distressing to much of her young audience. So clearly, though she’s going to string us along, she won’t do something so dark as to have Harry Potter die in the end. She’ll go for the cheery, crowd-pleasing ending of having Voldemort die and Harry Potter triumph.

Man in Black: But she’s already killed off beloved characters before, like Sirius Black and Dumbledore.

Vizzini: And I think there’s a good chance she’s going to bring Sirius back before the end of Deathly Hallows too. Either that or she’s going to hint somehow that he’s still alive, or Harry can still communicate with him through the grave, or something like that.

Man in Black: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.

Vizzini: Wait ’til I get going! Where was I?

Man in Black: Dumbledore.

Vizzini: Yes! Dumbledore! As for Dumbledore — you realize that he expected to die, and even planned for it? In fact, if you carefully re-read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, you realize that all the time Dumbledore is begging Snape to keep his vow and do what he promised, he’s actually begging Snape to kill him when the time comes. Snape has been acting so mopey throughout the series because he doesn’t want to go through with it and pretend to join Voldemort’s side, even though he promised Dumbledore he would.

Man in Black: So who will die then? Rowling’s already claimed several characters will die.

Vizzini: Not Ron or Hermione, that’s for sure. They’re going to get together by the end of the book, Rowling’s been hinting at that for ages. I doubt Ginny Weasley will die either, because Rowling’s set Ginny up to be Harry’s love interest — though I wouldn’t rule out Ginny being another tragic loss Harry has to endure before the end. I’m guessing that Snape will die in the act of saving Harry and thus become your classic tragically misunderstood martyr character. I would have bet on Neville too if I hadn’t heard that they cut out the parts about Neville and the prophecy from the Order of the Phoenix movie. Now I’m convinced that all along he was just a red herring. Draco Malfoy might bite it too, although Malfoy strikes me as a likely candidate for either sudden repentance at a last, crucial moment, or as the bad guy who’s going to stick around and endure the punishment at the end of the book.

Man in Black: What makes you so sure that Harry won’t be the one to die?

Vizzini: Because the whole series is set up as a coming of age story for Harry. With a few exceptions, just about every chapter in all six books has been set from Harry’s point of view. The series begins when he’s eleven — just entering his teenage years — and ends when he’s eighteen — a symbolic age for the passage to adulthood. Rowling’s not writing a martyrdom story here or a parable about Jesus; she’s writing the classic passage-to-adulthood story. And we all know how this story goes: the protagonist begins young and naive, he faces great challenges, and eventually he vanquishes his enemy, but not without great sacrifice along the way. He emerges from the story older and wiser, triumphant but having learned that life requires hard work and sacrifice. Harry can’t very well learn that lesson if he’s dead, can he?

Man in Black: But Rowling has hinted several times that Harry might not be safe.

Vizzini: Marketing hokum! J.K. Rowling is terrific at it. Plus she loves red herrings. Remember that scene in Order of the Phoenix where she made us believe, for just a moment, that Mr. Weasley had died? Why put that in the book? Because she got a nice little thrill from telling everyone that a major character was going to die in that book, and it’s just so much fun to play around with readers’ expectations.

Man in Black: You’re really so sure that Harry’s not going to die then.

Vizzini: Well, I’m sure that having Harry live is what she should do. But keep in mind that making predictions about the outcome of the series is nothing more than a guessing game. Like any good novelist, Rowling’s stuck omens and portents in the books that could lead to any number of possible outcomes. There’s evidence to support just about any conclusion you might draw. It’s all a question of what kind of person Rowling is, and what kind of endcap she feels like putting on her series. I suspect she’ll leave Harry alive, but she’ll kill one or two tertiary characters simply because she has to to keep up the suspense. But she’ll also leave enough openings and a few juicy unresolved mysteries just in case she decides to write sequels.

Man in Black: What else is going to happen in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows?

Vizzini: I don’t have high hopes for the book, because I suspect that every character from the past six books is going to pop in for a farewell cameo. It could prove to be very messy. That’s what happens when you get such phenomenal success so early — it affects what you write. J.K. Rowling’s probably gotten a thousand letters from children all over the world begging to hear what happens to every minor, insignificant character in the series, and I’m afraid she’s going to try to oblige them all.

Man in Black: So will Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sell less than 20 million copies?

Vizzini: That would be totally, and in all other ways, inconceivable.