As was probably to be expected, watching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 made me want to do nothing more than go back and read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Although I had re-read some of my favorite sections, I had consciously avoided re-reading Deathly Hallows from start to finish since I blazed through it in about 48 hours on midnight release weekend in 2007. It's just so good that I knew once I started it, I was going to have to re-read the whole damn thing. So I did.
The Harry Potter books are symmetrical in many ways. Reading the scene in which Harry, Ron and Hermione (disguised as Bellatrix Lestrange) navigate Diagon Alley on their way to break into Gringotts makes one inevitably think of that other trip to Diagon Alley, in the very first book. (And in case we forget, Rowling reminds us through Harry's own memory.) It made me want to go back and read that chapter in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, at which point I found this:
"Why would you be mad to try and rob Gringotts?" Harry asked.Did she know, then, that some 4,000 pages later our heroes would be doing exactly the thing that Hagrid said was so mad, and escaping on the back of a dragon? Surely she must have, to plant the information so subtly. Rowling frequently uses the trick of introducing an important piece of information in a comedic, whimsical or character-quirk moment. (Perhaps the best example of this is the way Expelliarmus, arguably the most important spell in the entire series, is introduced in a scene played mostly for laughs in Book 2.)
"Spells--enchantments," said Hagrid, unfolding his newspaper as he spoke. "They say there's dragons guardin' the high security vaults." (SS p. 64)
Rowling also uses symmetry to draw contrast. Compare that wide-eyed, sparkly, Chris-Columbus-friendly walk down Diagon Alley in the first book with the downright chilling scene in Book 7, when Hermione-as-Bellatrix is accosted by a maimed, wandless wizard begging for the whereabouts of his disappeared children. Way to suck the childlike wonder out of that one, Jo.
But that is part of the genius of Harry Potter, too. Rowling introduces this world that's beautiful and magical and clever and breathtaking and funny and surprising. She makes us fall in love with it. And then she very nearly destroys it. I can think of few writers with the guts to build a world so detailed and complex, and then inflict such total--sometimes irreversible--damage upon it. It's a stroke of brilliance on Rowling's part, to spend the time setting up the normal routines of this world--magical though it is--to make it familiar to us, so that when nearly everything is eclipsed by the shadow of dictatorship and war, it feels like this could be our world, and we care. It's one of the things that makes the series, for all its dragons and broomsticks and magic wands, seem incredibly real.
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