As a reader, my interest in the plot has been reduced to two main questions: (1) Does Snape turn out to be good? and (2) Does Harry live or die? I officially don’t care about the links that get us there. Then he’s thrown in a dungeon that also happens to contain most of his long-lost friends. Harry has just been saved from certain doom, 007-style, by his captors’ greedy bickering. Rowling has cranked the “coincidence” dial up to eleven and is now flagrantly abusing her “imminent-death-thwarted-at-the-last-possible-moment” privileges. Reading this novel apparently creates the same symptoms as major depression and agoraphobia. I smell terrible and am eating peanut butter directly out of the jar and fighting off another nap. They keep saying “effing” and “hell.” Some entertaining idiomatic wizard cursing: “Merlin’s pants!” and “what in the name of Merlin’s most baggy Y Fronts” and “why in the name of Merlin’s saggy left-” (I’m thinking “wizard-teat”). Hermione tells Ron to kindly insert his wand into his anus. Things are getting Blair Witch–ish: endless bickering on a never-ending camping trip. The plot has been washed away on a hormonal tsunami of teen angst. Harry and the gang are so deep in Mission Impossible–style reconnaissance (the plan is to break into the Ministry of Magic) that I take a nap. Watching Harry buy school supplies is 100 times more original and thrilling than watching him battle Voldemort over the fate of the universe. Rowling is a genius at imaginative world-building, but she’s mediocre at these oversize plots and climactic epic-battle royales. Casualties of the battle include Harry’s tooth, George Weasley’s ear, Mad-Eye Moody, Hedwig the owl (who seems oddly undermourned), and whatever hope I have left that I’m going to enjoy my weekend. They concoct a Saddam-style decoy plan to hide him, then fly straight into an ambush. All of Harry’s friends appear in the backyard like a magical A-Team. That’s all from Chapter 1! And I’m not even counting the name “Pius Thicknesse.” I go to bed at 3 a.m., on page 35. “And you, Draco?” asked Voldemort, stroking the snake’s snout with his wand-free hand. “Enough,” said Voldemort, stroking the angry snake. Te>He drew out his own wand and compared the lengths. The book opens with a generic evil-warlord crony meeting that’s reminding me a lot of He-Man, right down to the fish-in-a-barrel sexual innuendo: After glancing through the table of contents, I’m working very hard to resist skipping ahead to Chapter 20 (“Xenophilius Lovegood”). The scary highbrow epigraphs (one from Aeschylus), as well as my gut, are telling me that Harry is going to die. I find this cheesy but also mildly touching - which is perfectly appropriate, since that’s been the emotional keynote of the entire series. The novel is dedicated, like Time magazine’s Person of the Year Issue, to All of Humanity (“You, if you have stuck with Harry until the very end”). Warning: There are more spoilers here than there are goblins at Gringott’s, or house-elves in the Hogwarts basement, or adverbs in a J.K.
#How many pages are in harry potter and the deathly hallows full#
In loving memory of my lost weekend (and in lieu of a full review, which will appear in the next print issue), I’ve produced the following hour-by-hour catalogue of my weekend of wizardry.
It took me two full days of hard reading. At midnight, I stood at the very back of the gigantic horde at my local bookstore (so far in the back that the employees all applauded when I bought my copy) and left at 2 a.m., brandishing the book triumphantly over my head - not an easy lift, since it’s exactly as long as Gravity’s Rainbow and The Brothers Karamazov.
Once it became clear that no amount of credentials, real or fabricated, was going to get me an advance copy of Harry Potter and the Noun That Makes No Sense Until Chapter 21 - and after Michiko Kakutani went all Slytherin on us - I decided to take the opposite tack and surrender fully to the magic.
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