The Longest Journey

„Deathly Hallows Part 2 is a battle movie—dismal and death-ridden, a sort of Götterdämmerung for eight-year-olds. Stuart Craig’s production design has turned gray and black, and is often quite handsome in an impressively gloomy way. Hogwarts Castle is put under siege by Voldemort and his hordes of Death Eaters, and, by the end, it looks like a bombed-out cathedral in the Second World War. The playful wit of Rowling’s opening pages—Harry getting the appropriate wand for wizardry school in a London shop the way a boy going to Eton would get a morning coat—now seems very far away.

From the beginning, Rowling’s own brand of magic has been her quiet mastery, the supple, straightforward prose in which extraordinary things just happen, without preparation or emphasis. Young readers of the books slipped into Rowling’s world as easily as they did into a new pair of sneakers or a romp in the ocean. Her hero, marked as special from the beginning, was one part Jesus, one part Siegfried, and, most pleasingly, one part sweet, sturdy Harry, a wizard with yeoman spirit. As he matured into adolescence, he discovered—as did Rowling’s readers—that the world of wizardry and witchcraft was riven by plots, conspiracies, and betrayals. It wasn’t all that different from the adult political world. Rowling pushed her young readers into a recognition of mortality and loss.”