The End of an Era

It was the day every Potter fan was waiting for - 21st July, release of the seventh and last installment of the series which many in our generation have grown up with. Having read the book now, I would like to issue a warning that this blog entry might turn out to be a bit of a spoiler, so go further if you don’t mind bits and pieces of the story being thrown open to you.

Jo Rowling couldn’t have thought of a better finale than Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The entire story is so well narrated that you really can’t let go off the book once you begin. Unlike the previous books, this book as expected, is darker and moves at a expeditious pace.

I made my share of predictions in the Potter-o-logy article. Introspecting on where I went right and here I went wrong, here’s a brief summary:
1>Harry is the chosen one and he survives. I was on the spot there..
2>The Horcruxes were pretty much on target, except I missed out on Ravenclaw’s Tiara and Harry himself. As far as the latter goes, things were a lot different in the book because Harry now had the deathly hallows’ stone of resurrection with him.
3>Snape was on the good side all throughout. In fact, he turned out to be one of the best loyalists of Dumbledore himself.
4>Dumbledore was dead. I believed he would come back, but even though he physically did not show up anywhere in the book, he gave help throughout, through Snape and later in the chapter King’s Cross.
5>Grawp and the two-way mirror played important roles, thought not as big as I thought they would be.
6>The invisibility cloak was significant, because it was what got them to believe that the Hallows weren’t pieces of Xenophilius Lovegood’s imagination.

There are parts in the book where there is death and despair unlike any witnessed so far in the series. Nonetheless, all the way along, there is a sense of belief and reader’s kind now begin to understand the whole ‘power of love’ business which Dumbledore kept stressing on time and again.

All in all, a befitting end to a story that I had become obsessed with for quite a few years. As a Potter maniac,I am elated that Harry indeed turned out to be “the-boy-who-lived” at the end of the series but then somewhere down inside, I know that there’ll be no more magic to look forward too.