Saturday, July 21, 2007

HP7: Beautiful

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a beautiful book. Once in the past I began commenting on a book in IRC immediately after finishing it, and I later regretted my haste. In the future I'll probably become more critical of this book, as well. But I announce right now that I believe it is beautiful work.*

Pullman, eat your heart out. The hollow hope that motivates your work can never bring satisfaction to your readers the way that works by J.K. Rowling, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien have done, and will continue to do throughout coming decades. The conventions and types upon which they rely work because they strike a chord of truth that resonates in the soul. As long as you keep playing your same shrill song, you'll just have to get louder and worse to continue to get attention...and you were already embarrassingly shrill in The Amber Spyglass.

John Granger, POMPOUS STYLE NOTWITHSTANDING, got the most important stuff right, writing way back in 2002. Good for him.

* This is to be taken in complete separation from my previous post containing predictions about HP7. As I acknowledged there, Rowling had much better ideas than I was willing to imagine she might.