The End of Harry Potter?

by David Langford

Overview

The publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final Harry Potter novel, is probably the most eagerly anticipated event in the history of publishing. Even the smallest hints from author J. K. Rowling about what may happen to Harry and his friends have been major news stories.

In The End of Harry Potter?, David Langford—Potter fan and award-winning writer—delves into the many mysteries which remain unsolved. Is Albus Dumbledore really dead? Whose side is Severus Snape really on? What are the remaining horcruxes, where He Who Shall Not Be Named has stashed his soul? Does Harry bear a part of the Dark Lord's soul in his scar, and is this why he understands Parseltongue?

J. K. Rowling is the only person who knows the answers to these questions. But in this highly entertaining book, Langford uses his deep knowledge of the six published Harry Potter novels to explore these and other mysteries, and to present a selection of possible outcomes.

Only the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will lay these questions to rest, but in the meantime, fans of the series will find David Langford's book entertaining and thought-provoking, and a perfect way to refresh their memory of the first six books in readiness for the last.


At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429985208
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/20/2007
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	277 KB
Age Range:	10 - 18 Years

About the Author

Onetime nuclear physicist David Langford has been writing about science fiction and fantasy for several decades. He has won the science fiction world's Hugo Award 27 times.

David Langford contributed to Alien Emergencies from Tom Doherty Associates.

Read an Excerpt

The End of Harry Potter?

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By David Langford

Tom Doherty Associates

Copyright © 2006 David Langford
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-8520-8

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CHAPTER 1

The Wheels of Plot

Like most popular fantasy writers, J.K. Rowling has received a generous helping of negative criticism in response to her two high crimes against literature – writing fantasy and being popular. This traditional literary snobbery has even maddened some critics into trying to make her seem more respectable by praising her for not writing fantasy!

The Sunday Times (24 July 2005) took this dubious line with its headline 'J.K. Rowling's books seem like fantasy, but she is tackling the dark heart of the real world'. Beneath was an interview with the author herself, in which Rowling confessed to never actually finishing The Lord of the Rings or the Narnia series, and not realising she'd writ ten a fantasy until after her first was published: 'I really had not thought that that's what I was doing. And I think maybe the reason that it didn't occur to me is that I'm not a huge fan of fantasy.' Terry Prat chett couldn't resist mocking her just a little bit by adding: 'Well, of course not: that's the stuff with all those wizards and witches and magic schools and wands and other such nonsense ...'

Infodumps and McGuffins

The fantasy themes which Rowling uses in the Harry Potter series may not be terribly original (when did you last come across a brand-new fantasy theme, anyway?). But she combines them very cleverly with the British boarding-school story tradition, and is remarkably skilled at leading new readers into the fantasy universe.

It's a sad fact of life that many intelligent people find that they 'bounce off' science fiction or fantasy because the story has an unfamiliar setting – the far future, or fairyland, or the interior of a neutron star – that is just too disorienting and weird for them to take on board. Rowling has the knack of easing us painlessly into her wizarding world, with background information fed into the narrative in a way that doesn't slow down the pace. This is an underrated literary craft, but very important to her success.

She gets visibly better at this with practice. Chapter One of Philosopher's Stone features a passage of what used to be called maid-and-butler dialogue, from the old theatre tradition in which a couple of servants would open the play by determinedly telling each other things that they both already knew in order to brief the audience on the background. (In SF this kind of thing is usually called an information dump, and experienced readers wince at telltale phrases like 'As you already know, Professor ...' There's a very funny send-up of the technique at the beginning of Tom Stoppard's play The Real Inspector Hound.) So Dumbledore and McGonagall chat to each other about important current events, not really for their own benefit, but for ours.

Chapter One of Half-Blood Prince handles its information dump with much more sophistication. Readers are brought up to date on the story so far – and on developments since the end of Order of the Phoenix – by listening in as the Prime Minister is briefed by two Ministers for Magic on the latest atrocities of Voldemort's Death Eaters, and how these also affect the Muggle Parliament. Here we're eavesdropping on, and learning from, a conversation that logically needs to take place and isn't obviously staged just for us readers. Rowling's technique has grown more skilful.

(Yes, I know Rowling says she intended a scene like this for Philosopher's Stone but found it didn't fit there, nor in book three or five. The point is her improved technique: 'thirteen years in the brewing,' as noted at jkrowling.com.)

Another very traditional plot device in the first book is the use of the Philosopher's Stone itself as what Alfred Hitchcock called a McGuffin – an object of desire that provides a convenient motive for all the narrative action. Sometimes both sides are in a race for the McGuffin; sometimes one side chases it while the other guards it. The point is that it's the racing and the chasing which are important, not the supposed value of the thing itself. The classic McGuffin of cinema is the Maltese Falcon.

Now skip forward to Order of the Phoenix, where the McGuffin of the recorded prophecy is more subtly handled. Voldemort wants it, yes, but (as he finds) direct attack is no use; he has to hatch a much more cunning scheme to breach the last-ditch security of the prophecy room at the Ministry of Magic. Meanwhile, Harry isn't particularly interested in the prophecy itself, and Dumbledore is even less so because he already knows it. It's not a simple cops- and-robbers pursuit scenario any more.

The Problem of Slytherin

One cliché of fantasy that Rowling introduced in book one, and only slowly began to rethink, is the idea of bad guys who are just naturally bad because of their ancestry – or because they've been Sorted into Slytherin House. The Sorting Hat describes the character of each Hogwarts house in Philosopher's Stone: Gryffindor is brave, Ravenclaw clever, Hufflepuff doggedly hardworking, and Slytherin both cunning and unscrupulous. Heroes, thinkers, workers, and ... politicians? Diplomats?

Although Rowling has said in person that all four houses are necessary to the balance of Hogwarts – and indeed, that there are children from Death Eater families in every house – we don't hear much about any positive side to the Slytherin talents. If Rowling should indeed revise the whole series from book one as she suggested in her World Book Day chat (30 April 2004), it would be useful to introduce one or two ordinary, likeable Slytherins to make the balance more visible.

Obviously those one-size-fits-all descriptions like 'brave' and 'clever' can't sum up every Hogwarts pupil. Hermione Granger is outstandingly clever and hardworking, but finds herself in Gryffindor rather than Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff. Fred and George Weasley are distinctly cunning and unscrupulous, but nevertheless weren't put into Slytherin. Luna Lovegood may be out of place in Ravenclaw, but she is a true eccentric who would be contentedly out of place anywhere.

Rowling shrewdly includes some not-so-good folk among the virtuous Gryffindors. Peter 'Wormtail' Pettigrew was a member of the all-Gryffindor prankster team known as the Marauders, but still went to the bad. Percy Weasley's rejection of his own family in favour of advancement at the Ministry of Magic may not be exactly evil, but it is pretty contemptible.

The Slytherins, meanwhile, have less variety of character than other houses, because they've been rubber-stamped as the bad guys. Yes, Draco Malfoy is an unpleasant snob whose cronies like Crabbe and Goyle are brutal bullies. But even minor Slytherins appear to be cut off from the network of friendships that cross the lines between the other Hogwarts houses. Snape, the Head of Slytherin, of course favours his old house in a Snapeishly offensive way, so the bad character of the house is blackened further by association with Snape.

If you try to look at it objectively, though, Dumbledore's final humiliation of Slytherin in Philosopher's Stone is more shocking than Snape's outright favouritism. At the final feast, Slytherin has won the house cup and the Great Hall is decorated with their colours. Then, step by cruel step, the nice old white-haired Headmaster takes it all away from them, in public, and transfers the glory to Gryffindor. No doubt Malfoy and his ilk deserved this gratifying (for Harry and his chums) turning of the tables, but were there no innocent Slytherins who cried themselves to sleep that night?

When the Sorting Hat calls for unity between the Hogwarts houses in Order of the Phoenix, it seems too late. There's too much bad feeling between the Slytherins – or at least the ones with established names and personalities – and the rest of the school. The Triwizard Tournament, according to Hermione, is supposed to be about meeting and making friends with overseas wizards, but for once Ron Weasley knows better: it's about winning, he snaps back. He could just as well be talking about what are supposed to be the friendly house rivalries at Hogwarts.

As the series proceeds, though, Rowling develops Severus Snape into a more complex figure – an old Slytherin man who for all his petty vindictiveness is a trusted member of the Order of the Phoenix. The introduction of Horace Slughorn in Half-Blood Prince at last makes it clear that, although nobody's perfect, a Slytherin wizard can be an engaging fellow who's essentially on the right side. He even has a certain crazy innocence: when he fakes a Death Eater attack on his own house as an excuse, he totally forgets to send up the Dark Mark (which defuses, well in advance, Fred Weasley's brief suspicion in Chapter Nineteen that this Professor may be a Death Eater). Before Slughorn appeared, it looked as though the nearest thing to a good Slytherin was a dead one: Phineas Nigellus, whose portrait image runs errands for Dumbledore and tells Harry a few acerbic home truths in Order of the Phoenix.

Even Harry's arch-rival Draco Malfoy becomes interestingly conflicted in the sixth book, torn between his sworn duty to the Dark Lord and the qualms, or weakness, or trace of better nature, that cause him such emotional stress. Rowling's handling of these matters of good and evil has matured.

Those Awful Orcs

The idea of an all-wicked Slytherin House is the Hogwarts equivalent of the all-evil magical races that turn up in so many heroic fantasies. Tolkien's orcs from The Lord of the Rings are the most famous example. The only good orc is a dead orc, and this is because the orc race didn't even evolve naturally, but was manufactured and deliberately programmed to be bad by the dark lord Sauron (and, later, by his imitator Saruman).

Like Harry himself, the intelligent magical creatures in the Potter saga have the ability and opportunity to choose between good and evil. There are good werewolves like Remus Lupin and bad ones like Fenrir Greyback. Giants are distrusted because many of them sided with Voldemort – but the wizarding world's systematic anti-giant prejudice had given them what seemed like good reasons for this. House-elves as a race appear to be unbelievably devoted and nice – but then we meet Kreacher. Traditional vampires inspire terror, but at Slughorn's party in Half-Blood Prince the vampire Sanguini just needs to be watched carefully, like someone with a known weakness for the bottle.

Some of Rowling's dangerous beings behave more like amoral animals than bad people, even when they can talk. Aragog's family of giant spiders aren't evil, but they will cheerfully eat humans who stray into their territory, just as a hungry tiger might. Much the same applies to dragons. Boggarts are terrifically good at frightening people, but this appears to be an automatic magical defence rather like a skunk's smelly spray: however awful the effect may be on Harry or the woeful Mrs Weasley, there doesn't seem to be any particular malign intelligence behind it. Inferi don't really count as a race, since they are magically animated corpses, mindless zombies.

Only one magical race stands out as totally evil, with no redeeming features: the soul-sucking Dementors who guard Azkaban (until the final chapter of Order of the Phoenix) and infest Hogwarts in Prisoner of Azkaban. It's a nice touch of moral complexity that when we first meet them, these horrors are working on what is supposed to be the side of virtue – or at least, of the Ministry of Magic's brand of law and order. With allies like that, who needs enemies?

Rowling herself has explained, in another of her many interviews, that the Dementors are something of a special case. They're not really living creatures with individual minds and personalities, but symbols of the severe depression that she once suffered from: think of it as a mental equivalent of freezing fog, a hopeless chill that drains away the joy of life. Dementors are not so much a race as a disease.

(Perhaps the Lethifold, or Living Shroud, described in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them represents another variety of mental illness, the kind of morbid obsession that eats you up entirely – which is what the Lethifold quite literally does. As with Dementors, the only defence against this monster is the difficult Patronus Charm, whose casting requires the user to focus on happy memories. Could these beasties be related?)

In general, the Harry Potter universe recognises the real-world truth that it's unsafe to guess anyone's morals from their appearance. Although Mad-Eye Moody – the real one – and Lord Voldemort both look extremely alarming, one of them can be trusted. Ah, but can we trust that greasy fellow Severus Snape? More later about this hotly debated question.

CHAPTER 2

Guns on the Wall

There's a famous saying by the Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov, which goes: 'If you hang a gun on the wall in Act I, you must use it in Act III.' Sometimes it's differently translated as: 'If you introduce a gun at the beginning of the play, you must use it by the end of the play.'

J.K. Rowling hangs plenty of gun-equivalents on the walls of Hogwarts and elsewhere, but Chekhov's rule needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt when we're talking about novels. What he had in mind was the script of a play, where anything that's important enough to be mentioned in the stage directions should have its part in the action. Suppose, though, that in such-and-such a scene set in a stately home, that gun on the wall of the stage-set wasn't in the play script but is just a touch of high-class decoration added by the set designer ...?

Harry's Uncle Vernon actually does buy a gun in Chapter Three of Philosopher's Stone – but it's not there to be used, only to underline how desperate he's getting (and also, when Hagrid so easily takes it away from him, to remind us again of what a wimp Vernon really is). It's an extra touch of make-up or stage decor, rather than an important piece of plot machinery.

Part of the fun of reading detective stories is the challenge of trying to sort out these ornamental extras from the real 'guns on the wall', the clues which are part of Agatha Christie's or Dorothy Sayers' or J.K. Rowling's secret script. As her readers have discovered, Rowling is rather good at inventing smokescreens of comic diversion to help conceal important clues, even when they're right under our noses. Now you see it, now you don't.

Chocolate Frog

In Philosopher's Stone, our author wants to plant the name of Nicolas Flamel – the wizard who created the Stone itself – in such a way that we barely notice its appearance, and will later kick ourselves for not remembering it. So the brief mention of Flamel is deftly slipped into a mini-biography of Albus Dumbledore, printed on the back of the collectable picture card which Harry finds in his very first Chocolate Frog wrapper.

Meanwhile, during this scene on the Hogwarts Express, there's a flood of distraction as Harry boggles at new wonders of the wizarding world. It's the first time he's met photographs whose subjects wander in and out of the visible picture-frame, and it's also his first encounter with half a dozen other brands of magical sweeties like the very weird Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans. A subtler distraction for the reader is the nagging thought that perhaps Chocolate Frogs are a little homage to the Crunchy Frog sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus – whose Cockroach Clusters will indeed turn up much later, in the third Harry Potter adventure ...

All this inventive stuff is great fun, and it is also a conjuror's display of dazzling lights and coloured ribbons, designed to lure your eye away from the key reference to Nicolas Flamel. Rowling has a real gift for this kind of misdirection, as perfected by stage magicians who subtly guide you to look in just the wrong place.

Pyrotechnics

Onwards! A bit closer to a literal gun, since they contain real explosive, are the Filibuster Fireworks which appear early in Chamber of Secrets. At first sight these don't appear to be at all important – just something to provide entertainment for young wizards and witches, like all those weird sweets. But by writing these fireworks into the story, Rowling is secretly preparing a stage-effect for a much later chapter. When Harry needs to cause a diversion in the Potions class, tossing a Filibuster Firework into a Slytherin student's cauldron is a perfect way to create total chaos.

Why are they called Filibuster Fireworks, anyway? The most common meaning of 'filibuster' is to make long, long speeches in Parliament or Congress, not to convince anyone of anything, but to waste time and prevent unwanted laws from being passed. It's a tactic of diversion and delay – which, of course, is exactly how Harry uses his firework.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The End of Harry Potter? by David Langford. Copyright © 2006 David Langford. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction: What Is All This?,
Harry Potter and the Something of Something,
The Wheels of Plot,
Infodumps and McGuffins; The Problem of Slytherin;,
Those Awful Orcs,
Guns on the Wall,
Chocolate Frog; Pyrotechnics; Magical Misfires;,
Putting Back the Clock; Key to Transport; The Sulks;,
Lumber Room; Enchanted Gadgetry,
Logic: Seven Green Bottles,
Naming Names,
Who's Who; Wonders of Onomastics,
Smoke and Mirrors,
P-P-Poor Stuttering Quirrell; Chamber of Horrors;,
Black-Hearted Villainy; When the Wolfbane Blooms;,
Goblet of Deception; The Quickness of the Hand;,
The Ivory Gate; Conjuror's Cabinet,
Casting Spells,
The Great Spell Register?; Silence Is Power;,
Spellhacking,
Muggle Studies,
Magic and Machines; Meddling with Memories;,
Beasts and Magical Creatures,
Muddle at the Ministry of Magic,
Misuse of Magic; Abuses of Power; The Legal Angle,
Awkward Consequences,
Mischief Managed; Lifting Faces; The Curse of Scotland;,
Backward, O Time; Cloak and Dagger,
Shadows Before,
Forked Tongue; Seeing Thoughts; The Mirror of Dreams;,
Spectres in General; Black Dog; Killing Grounds; Weasel Words;,
Hands Off; Privy Purposes; Door to Death; Out of the Closet;,
In the Cards; The Black Hand; Phoenix Rising,
Pure-Bloods and Crosses,
Pure-Blood Prejudice; Wizard Genetics,
Unfinished Business,
Harry's Heritage; Wormtail's Debt; Blood Transfusion;,
Werewolf Cure?; Taking Umbridge; Yet Another Mirror;,
Lost Locket; Several Scars; Albus and Severus,
The Lives of Lord Voldemort,
Heartless Villains; Counting Down; Secret Keepers,
Slips and Falls,
Ascending and Descending; Assorted Oddities; Not So Fast!,
Echoes from Outside,
Schools; The Dead Man's Knock; Maze; Instrument of Torture;,
Patron Animals; Teleportation; Tarot; Collect the Coupons,
These Things Shall Be,
In the Stars; In the Tradition; In Her Own Words; No Comment,
The End of Harry Potter,
The Classic Fantasy Version; Professor Trelawney Predicts;,
On the Cutting-Room Floor; The Parseltongue Proclamation;,
But Seriously, Now ... ; The Ultimate Secret,
Acknowledgements and Thanks,
The Reference Library,