farewell to the boy wander

Harry Potter, at last, is done.

I didn’t say dead, just done; I finally finished the seventh and final installment in the sprawling wizard-world epic, though readers who don’t want the big ending spoiled for them should probably stop reading now.

Seriously.

Will the rest of you — yes, glad to see that both of you stuck around — please humor me while I pile even more self-indulgent analysis onto an already tottering heap of instant commentary?

I liked the final book but also had many moments when I thought that J.K. Rowling had gone astray, somewhat akin to what I felt when I wrapped up Half-Blood Prince. If book six might have been more accurately titled, Harry Potter and The Tom Riddle Backstory, this one seemed to mainly exist to fill us in on Albus Dumbledore’s murky history, details of which are leaked out at an excruciatingly slow pace while Harry and pals evade the Nazi-like Death Eaters. I was troubled greatly by the author’s decision to break format and abandon the familiar Hogwarts setting for the great majority of the book, instead leaving our heroes most often cold and damp in some forest or another and always on the move. For a second there I thought I’d accidentally picked back up Cormac McCarthy’s The Road:

“We have to get going.”
“Can’t we stay in this forest one more night?”
“No, Ron, you know it’s not safe here.”
“I know. But are we still the good guys?”
“We’re still the good guys. Okay?”
“Okay.”

Okay, so I’m exaggerating a bit, but didn’t all the bleak forest-jumping stuff just wear you out? One review that I’ve read suggested that Rowling intended to thrust her characters into the harsh discomfort of the adult world in this book, and that may be so, but it doesn’t make me like it.
I was also troubled by how little we saw of some of my favorite characters in this book (where the hell was Professor McGonagall until the climatic final battle?) and surprised that I was moved by the death of Dobby, who annoyed the pants off me in previous books. (As an aside, I was also surprised that we never heard more about the veil that killed Sirius in Order of the Phoenix; I thought for sure it would pop up again, or maybe I missed something?)

But those are minor quibbles next to my last point. What editor in her right mind gave a green light to the story structure in place in the final six chapters? True, “The Battle of Hogwarts” manages to be an epic climax — even if I do find Rowland’s fight-scene prose sometimes hard to follow — and better writers than me have compared it to the magnificent clash of armies at the end of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Rowling, however, goes out of her way to interrupt the action of her well-positioned climax with not one but two meandering detours into the misty Mountains of Exposition.
What happened? Couldn’t the long-overdue explanation for Snape’s duplicity have been handled earlier (and less clumsily)? And although I liked the scene at the afterlife King’s Cross Station, I tend to agree with the critics who commented that Rowling was writing herself in circles there.

But I’ll have to say she did it. Rowling pulled the whole thing off with just a few stumbles in the end and she proved with the last book that maybe she had a plan all along. This final installment seemed to go out of its way to revisit many of the major locations, spells, potions and characters from earlier books, not in a manner that felt like desperate recycling but as if to prove to us that Rowling had the whole thing figured out from the very start. I’m curious how well the series would stand up to a second reading, now knowing about Horcruxes and Hallows and who was going to croak in the end.

I’m also curious: What did everyone else think?