Initial Thoughts Regarding Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

The first thing I would like to do before setting my thoughts on paper is warn you there will most likely be spoilers. If you haven't yet read Harry Potter, Book Seven, and you intend to, I urge you to do so before you read my thoughts. Besides, you should form your own opinions before being subjected to someone elses'.

That said, let me begin.

I'm only about 200 pages into the 700-plus page volume, but I'm very pleased with what I've read so far, at least on an intellectual level. It is by far the most chilling of the Harry Potter books, perhaps the most chilling work of fiction I've ever read. It isn't the magic or the spooky settings that make this book so horrific - it is the politics.

The most frightening parts of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows are frightening precisely because they are the sort of thing that can happen in the real world. They are the sorts of things that do, in fact, happen in the real world. I am enjoying the bit of irony, of course, that comes with the fact that the magical folk of the Harry Potter world are hunting people down for not being witches - a sort of Muggle-hunt, I suppose you would call it. But it is, of course, with mixed feelings. The very official sound of the Muggle-born Registration Commission is one of the most chilling aspects of Book Seven.

By demonstrating the insidious way public opinion demonized Harry Potter, someone who as an 11-year-old had been considered a sort of messiah among the magical, author J.K. Rowling has illustrated an understanding of the slippery nature of power and public opinion rarely seen in fiction that purports to be for children.

Book Seven is not a children's book, in the strictest sense of the word.

It isn't surprising, since Rowling has handled Harry's point of view well. By that, I mean that, in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Book One), she allowed the reader to experience her world through the eyes of an 11-year-old. It felt refreshing and exciting. Thankfully, with each book, that point of view matured, to allow the reader to discover, with Harry, the mechanisms behind the magic. As Harry develops an understanding, perhaps before his time, of power and public opinion, the reader does as well.

And that is why Book Seven is so incredibly chilling. The rounding up of Muggle-born wizards and witches, and the magical inquisition which Voldemort has instituted smacks of Nazism, McCarthyism and any other -ism you can think of that ends in the senseless rounding up and torture of those with the misfortune of being born the wrong race, or those who oppose such forces.

It is sad, of course, that the wonderful world Rowling created is being torn apart from the inside out, but that sadness works to invest the reader even more in the story. So far, Rowling has written with incredible courage, making what sacrifices are necessary to demonstrate the danger under which these much-loved characters labor. The Harry Potter epic has proved itself a touching, heart-rending, exciting story, and I look forward to the last four hundred pages.