All the wait, all the frenzied, anxious wonderings- it’s all
over now. The last word has been written & the quill has been put
down, & if our favourite muggle-’witch of words’ picks it up again,
it won’t be to depict another year in the extraordinary life of one
bespectacled Harry James Potter. & so, how does it feel? Relief, that
Harry Potter lives, or perhaps disappointment for those wise cynics who
would have preferred an unhappy ending? Yeah, I’ve come across some
disgusting spoilsports who reckon Harry should have died, & the
reason one of them has given on Yahoo Answers is, and I’m
quoting-".should have died because for some reason, Harry gets on my
nerves." Well, I think if the hero of a book gets on anybody’s nerve,
then he/she should put it down, read other things and spare us from
their strange ideas of’poetic injustice’. For my part, I feel a bit
strange. I was older than eleven when I first discovered Harry in his
cupboard under the stairs, but I shared his surprise and his feeling
enchantment as he made his way through Diagon Alley and Hogwarts. I
read the first four books within a space of a few weeks, so I can’t say
I grew up with Harry, but I accompanied him as he grew up. So, I
suppose it feels a little strange to think it’s really the end of the
journey, that there would be no more waiting for the next book.
& so
what about the last book? Well, to me it was intense, action-packed.
From the moment we see Harry Potter in his bedroom at Privet Drive till
Voldemort finally falls in the Great Hall of Hogwarts, there is hardly
any time to breathe. It’s like jumping from one event to the other. The
opening chapter with Voldemort at Malfoy Manor sets the mood & he
& his deatheaters are after Harry sooner than we could be ready for
it-
chasing him in the skies across three counties, nearly missing him at
Bill & Fleur’s wedding & then right afterwards at a deserted
muggle
cafe on Tottenham Court Road, the Ministry of Magic and Grimauld Place,
at his native village- Godric’s Hollow, then in the house of Xenophilus
Lovegood- the father of his friend who pays for his outspoken support
to Harry, & then, finally getting caught & imprisoned at Malfoy
Manor, escaping again but only to land up in Gringotts- the wizard bank
& almost getting caught, escaping, finally to turn up where
Voldemort
expects him to go- Hogwarts & walking willingly to his own death.
And
throughout the constant changing of locations, the aimless moving that
at a point of time disillusions Ron & Hermione & even Harry, we
are
given clues that ultimately falls neatly into place. This is the most
amazing thing about Rowling’s writing, how all the pieces fall neatly
into place in the end, how the plot is tied up, in each book
individually, & taking the series as a whole. And it makes us look
at
the whole issue of making the right choices by throwing new light on
the character of one whom every Harry Potter fan, like Harry himself,
had come to see as infallible. He had been carried away by his talents
and abilities in his youth, he had been, by his own admission, selfish
&bitter before reality hit him hard in the form of death for his
sister and although never evil, or whatever Rita Skeeter and Ron’s Aunt
Muriel would want us to believe, Rowling shows us that the greatest
wizard on earth could be human, and susceptible to human follies.
& then, what about Snape? Fanfiction writers have been saying for ages
that he had loved Lily, some went to the extent of saying that Lily
loved him back &(bless us) Harry was actually Snape’s son! Jokes
apart, ’Prince’s Tale’ was undoubtedly one of the most moving chapters
of the book. But does that make James Potter a hateful character? One
of my friends, my best-friend in fact, declared that she hated James.
But if we hate James for what he was like to Snape in school, we’ve
to hate Sirius as well, & Sirius Black, I’m sure, is one character
all HP-fans(ok, most of them, making exceptions for those who wanted
Harry to die) love.James was arrogant, but Snape on the other hand
was immersed
in the dark arts, & having a muggle-born best-friend didn’t stop him
from joining the service of a wizard who talked about pure-blood
supremacy. No, I am not trying to find fault with Snape here, but what
I’m trying to say is that neither James Potter nor Severus Snape were
perfect individuals. & yes, they detested each other so they hexed
each other whenever they got the chance & Harry was unfortunate
enough to land up inside a memory that showed Snape at the recieving
end. I don’t agree with Snape that James had saved his life’only’ to
save his own friends from being expelled, nor when he says(at the end
of book6) that James would’veve never attacked him unless it was
four-to-one, it could not have been more than two-to-one- because Lupin
was the good boy in the group, & Pettigrew was content to watch his
bigger friends do the honours. & I’m convinced that James Potter,
whatever he might have been as a school-boy, was a brave man & a
great wizard. He was, after all, Harry’s father. So the purpose of this
long lecture? Snape is a tragic character & I feel bad about the way
he died, & the fact that he died before Harry realized what he truly
was, but that doesn’t make James Potter a bad person.
Going back to the book, I think Rowling made it
a point to prove beyond doubt that there’s a war going on, & so there
deaths, and important deaths. Not at the end, like books 4, 5 & 6,
but from the very beginning. if we leave Charity Barbage out as someone
we never came across in the other books, it begins with Hedwig, Moody,
Ted Tonks Dobby, Fred Weasley, Remus Lupin, Tonks, & Colin Creevay.
Hedwig- who was annoyed with Harry for not letting her out of her cage
fulfills the promise Harry had made to him(".and then you can fly
again.") in a way Harry never had dreamt of, Moody- who knew & had
expected Voldemort to go after him, Dobby- who had promised never to
try & save Harry’s life again at the end of book2, Colin Creevay,
always so taken up with Harry, Remus and Tonks- the parents of an
infant, dying in what Rowling calls an echo of what Harry’s fate when
James & Lily died, & finally, Fred Weasley who had planned what his
friends would wear at his wedding only a few months back. Rowling’s
been ruthlessly brutal with these twins who wanted to
sell laughter in a strife-torn, war-ravaged world. "Can’t you tell us
apart even when we are Harrys?" must have been the last time they would
get the chance to play on their identical appearances, because soon
after this, George Weasley, feeling’saint-like’, would be telling Mrs.
Weasley- "You can finally tell us apart, Mum." And then the time would
come when there would be no question of mistaken identities, because
one of them would die. We get a picture of happy life 19 years later,
we hear of Teddy Lupin, obviously happy, Percy- not much changed,
Neville in his element with herbology, Victoire- the daughter of Bill
and Fleur & we assume they are happy too, but we don’t hear of
Charlie, & we don’t hear of George Weasley either. Is he still
selling laughter? I would like to believe that "Weasleys’ Wizarding
Wheezes" is still making roaring business, & he did open the