The scars on all our foreheads

This summer, the journey the Harry Potter generation began more than a decade ago drew to a close, with the release of the second part of the spectacularly successful movie version of the seventh book. High school friends and I stood in line for hours before midnight on July 14 to watch it all end. In a colossal disappointment, we left unsatisfied.

Harry Potter was transformative for loads of reasons: It was the first seriously long book I attempted reading on my own, forced a close encounter with death and evil that was entirely new and allowed an escape from the otherwise horrendous reality of middle school. And yet, the seventh book and its corresponding movie versions have done both the series and its readers a disservice. All three were overly simplistic, failed to keep pace with Rowling’s fan base, and in so doing ensured that the most inventive young adult series in decades — which drew children the world over away from Xboxes and back to libraries — ended with a whimper rather than a bang.

Critics of Harry Potter have observed that, though popular, its prose is uninteresting and unsophisticated and its plotlines are unoriginal. Some of this criticism has merit. Rowling borrowed much of her “secondary world” from Greek mythology, and there isn’t much innovation involved in writing about magic.

Yet, neither of those problems with the series is particularly damning. Children have to start somewhere, and if they’re reading at all, that’s a victory. The real disappointment in the series is that the seventh book failed to live up to its potential — to the masterpiece it could have been. It may be true that when first written, the Harry Potter novels were aimed at third and fourth graders. But by the time the last book was released in 2007, the original Potter fanbase, (1999’s third and fourth graders) were a decade older and a decade more educated. As such, Rowling had a duty to write a more inventive and sophisticated ending than “everybody dies, but the good guy survives.” There is nothing creative about killing off the entire Order of the Phoenix, little unprecedented about the limbo scene in King’s Cross Station. The takeaway from the final chapters of “Deathly Hallows” is that good triumphs over evil — a theme that could easily be found in thousands of other stories.

But why does all of that matter? Who cares if the seventh book was uninventive and relied almost entirely on tired archetypes? First, the popularity of the seventh book was a foregone conclusion. J.K. Rowling could have drawn a smiley face on a piece of paper, made 700 copies, put a binding around them, and still have sold a squillion books. It isn’t as if she needed to write a simplistic story to attract attention or to keep the series’ momentum going.

Second, the seventh book’s conclusion was unfulfilling because the series itself was so magical. “Deathly Hallows” is the completion of a series that followed in the footsteps of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and other creators of fantasy literature, but it pales in comparison to its forebears. The Battle of Hogwarts was nowhere near as gripping as the Crack of Doom scene in “The Return of the King.” Aslan’s resurrection in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” (not even the last book in “The Chronicles of Narnia”) blows the final climax of “Deathly Hallows” out of the water. And the series that gave us Quidditch and Albus Dumbledore, Snape and Luna Lovegood, Diagon Alley, Dobby and Hedwig deserved a better closing line than “all was well.”

J.K. Rowling will likely never know how much her work meant to our generation. There’s a reason that a “Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry” network exists on Facebook. Which makes it all the more disappointing that the seventh book was so unsatisfying: None of the Potter books were great literature, and truly cementing the series’ place in history would have required a thrilling finish.

Literature is full of examples of exciting but rudimentary work that faded into obscurity (as English professor Jeff Nunokawa would say, “Ever heard of Bulwer-Lytton? Didn’t think so.”) It would be a tragedy if our great-grandchildren never knew the wonder of the closing lines of “The Boy Who Lived” (chapter one of “The Sorcerer’s Stone”). Or of waiting by the mailbox on your 11th birthday, hoping against hope that it all was real.