Harry Potter and the Curse of the Burnt Out Author?

The newest and last-est Harry Potter novel is on its way.  The owls will be delivering it to bookstores in July.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Excuse me?

It's called what?

JK Rowling's not exactly extended herself in titling her books.  They've all been fairly workmanlike.  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.  Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.  Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.  Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.   Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  You could replace Harry Potter with The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, The Bobbsey Twins, Tarzan, or John Carter and not have made those titles any better or worse as what they are---simple announcements that you're about to read a boys' adventure novel.

Yes, girls read and love boys' adventure stories.  And yes, Nancy Drew is a boys' adventure story.  The souls of these books are boyish in the way the Elizabethans used to say that souls of people, men and women, were female.  It's gendered, it's sexist, it's true.  For now.  Until somebody comes up with a better term for it.  And I'm open to better terms, always.  A boys' adventure story is a story in which the hero enters upon an adventure that frees him---or her---from all domestic entanglements, rules, and expectations, and that includes love and sex.

Jane, Maid Marian, Callie Shaw and Iola Morton, Ned what's his name, the college eunuch Nancy Drew's supposedly dating---Nancy's pal George has more machismo and sex appeal---these characters aren't love interests, they're just literary signposts.  They direct readers of the opposite sex into the story in a way that allows them to identify with the hero or heroine.

I don't know if it says something about the subject of pirates or the genius of Robert Louis Stevenson that girls love Treasure Island even though there is no "girl" to latch onto at the start.

Rowling knew what she was doing when she started with Harry Potter.  She wanted to write a boys' adventure novel and she decided to go the whole way by using every single trope, conceit, and cliche of the genre boldly, cheerfully, unironically.  Under the old-fashioned rules she had decided to give herself to work with, there was no point in not making Harry a boy.  But she also knew she needed a Hermione.

Not just to give girls a character to guide them into identifying with Harry, I think.  She needed Hermione for herself.  But she was smart not to set Hermione up as Harry's love interest.  This kept to the rules---the hero must be free of domestic entanglements---and it allowed Hermione to develop in her own right as a character and a heroine.

At any rate, these rules explain why Rowling has caused herself trouble with her attempts to hook Harry up with first Cho and then Ginny.

Heroes must be constantly moving forward.  You have to stop and smell the roses when you're in love.  Heroes, and heroines, settle down at the ends of their careers.

Here's another rule to follow if you want to write a boys' adventure novel---and they're not really rules, they're more guidelines---if you absolutely must have love and romance give the jobs to secondary characters.

That's why it's Ron and Hermione.

Ron is also there as a literary signpost for readers who suspect they aren't as heroic as Harry.

Harry is a hero by birth.  Ron is heroic because he has to be and he manages it by mustering all the little talents and brains that he does possess.  Harry is graced.  Ron has to work for it.

And speaking of rules being more guidelines.  Pirates of the Caribbean plays with the rules all the time, but you'll notice Jack Sparrow---sorry.  Captain.  Captain Jack Sparrow---doesn't have a love interest except for his ship, the Black Pearl.  Will, the second lead, gets the girl.  The hero gets...away.

But back to the title of the new Harry Potter.

What in the name of all that is not Muggle is a Deathly Hallow?

All the other titles make sense on their own.  Without even having read the books, you "know" what a sorcerer's stone is (or a Philosopher's Stone if you read the book in Great Britain), you know what a Chamber of Secrets is and can make a pretty good guess as to what might be in it.  Prisoners of Azkaban and goblets of fire are fairly self-defining.  An order of the Phoenix is quite obviously a secret order, and facts about secret orders are not the least bit secret to even the youngest readers.  Even half-blood Princes, although mysterious sounding, aren't mysteries.

But a deathly hallow?

Even an intimate knowledge of the series so far won't clue you in.

Not only is the title opaque, it sounds lame.  It doesn't trip off the tongue. It sounds as if it was thought up by somebody other than Rowling herself.   It sounds like somebody who didn't really know what they were doing trying to sound like Rowling.  In fact, it sounds as if it was invented by a fourth or fifth grade fan who came up with for his or her own boys' adventure story about wizards and witches.

A ten year old would know exactly what she meant by a deathly hallow and expect that you would know exactly what she meant too.

Makes me wonder if Rowling held a Name the Final Book Contest that I didn't hear about and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was the winner.

And it makes me worried that it's a sign that Rowling has lost interest in her own story.

If the news reports are true, she came up with the title at the last minute.   This strikes me as highly unlikely, considering she's been working her way towards the last book for over a decade now.  It may be that she consciously tried not to plan too much too far ahead in order to keep the adventure of writing the series fresh for herself.  But it seems to me that at about midway through Goblet of Fire the artistically responsible thing for her to do was the opposite, to start focusing on her ending and directing her story accordingly.

And, oddly, and the first sign of trouble, I thought, was that it was in Goblet of Fire that Rowling began letting her story get away from her.

She gave herself the opening to expand the story, to move it beyond Harry's limited and limiting point of view, and then got lost in the ridiculous and irrelevant Tri-Wizard Tournament, leaving Volemort and the Death Eaters waiting in the wings for hundreds of pages while Harry did nothing that he hadn't already done and proved nothing that he hadn't already proved about himself in the three previous books.

Order of the Phoenix was a mess.  The supposed darkening of the story that was meant to match the maturing of Harry and his friends' views of how the world works didn't seem like a developing of a tragic spirit but the product of too much sulking about how adults are so unfair---which is to say, Harry and Hermione and Ron were acting too much like "real" teenagers, characters in books by Judy Blume or SE Hinton, and not like the heroes and love interests in a boys' adventure novel.

The book was bloated and rambling, with wasted page after wasted page of petty bickering and trivial arguments over politics.  Rowling let background detail and subtext take over, the kind of mistake that you'd expect a writer to make at the very beginning of her story, not two-thirds of the way into it.

To me, it seemed as if Rowling had lost focus and she'd lost focus because she'd lost interest.

She didn't seem to care anymore what happened to Harry in the end, so she stuck with what was happening to him in the immediate present, which turned out to be nothing but a lot of adolescent angst.

A worse sign was the way she threw away the death of one of her secondary heroes.

The big battle sequence is as confusing and cluttered and as seemingly pointless---in that neither side appears to have a strategy---as the battle between the Ewoks and the stormtroopers on Endor in Return of the Jedi, and the way Rowling handled the death of his hero was as if George Lucas had decided to kill off Han Solo but did it in a cutaway shot between the scene of Luke on the Death Star and Lando in the Millennium Falcon.

She got things back on track with the Half-Blood Prince, but that's what that book seemed to be about---regaining control and setting the stage for the final installment.  There's a perfunctory quality to it, which isn't just disappointing, it's strange, considering which main character she kills off in it.

Rowling may have been saving it all up for the end, but the impression I've had for the last three books is that she's been losing more and more of her steam.  And now I suspect that the final book is going to be a big letdown.

This is what happened with Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Snicket kept promising that the series would not end happily, but it turns out that by that he meant it would end disappointingly.  There would be no sense of completion, no big denouement, no satisfactory conclusion to anything.  Even the villain's death would be presented as an afterthought.

And you can feel this lassitudinous ending coming beginning with the ninth book, The Carnivorous Carnival, in which Snicket doesn't simply seem to lose interest in his main characters, he begins to seem actively hostile to them, as if he's begun to root against the Baudelaires himself and he wants us to start disliking them too.

Sunny holds her own, despite her author, but Klaus and Violet become maudlin, self-pitying, passive, self-loathing, and almost willfully stupid.  In short, they begin to exhibit signs of a serious case of depression.

I hope that was just a case of the author growing sick of his characters and not that he was projecting.

Taking on a long series is brave, or foolhardy, thing for a writer to do.  There's no way to know that you are up to the job.  You can't predict that you will feel the same about the characters and the story by the time you are done.  You can't know that you have enough material to carry you through all the projected number of books, unless you plan them all out well in advance, and that might turn out to be as much of a hindrance as a help, if it robs you of your own sense of surprise.

And you can't predict whether or not like Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes you will just get sick of the whole thing and want to be done with it well before your readers, your publisher, and your creditors want you to be done.

I think the writers with long series who work in trilogies and/or stand-alones are smart.  Terry Pratchett's Discworld series can go on until he dies because he didn't trap himself in any of his ongoing mini-series.  He mixes up the continuing tales with his stand-alones, and he makes each book within the several mini-series a complete story in itself.

Whatever's ultimately in store of Sam Vines, Captain Carrot, Angua, the Patrician, and the rest is only of vague interest, and it can be put off indefinitely.

But Harry Potter has been doomed to have his final showdown with Voldemort since Rowling wrote, "Chapter One:  The Boy Who Lived."

I won't be upset if she finishes by writing "Chapter the Last: The Boy Who Died."  Heroes, even the heroes of boys' adventure novels, don't always survive.

But I will be disappointed if Deathly Hallows is a typo and she meant to write Deathly Hollow, which turns out to be a description of what's at the center of the book and the feeling we all get when we turn the last page.

Comments

[Claire]

Lance, I think I've been waiting for your post on the title of the last HP book since it was released a couple of weeks back. I agree with you with the lousy title. That being said, I did just pre-order my copy through Amazon. I can't wait.

[BOSSY]

One more reason everything was simpler back in Bossy's day. Are You There God It's Me Margaret contained all the answers in the universe.

[Ken Muldrew]

"Sorcerer's stone" makes no sense to me; surely that came from a marketer who thought American's were too dull to understand alchemists' ephemera. Upon hearing the latest title I assumed that the publisher nixed Rowling's own title and substituted another "sorcerer's stone". For some reason you think that "sorcerer's stone" is self explanatory though. Can you please explain it?

BTW, I always thought that Rowling's forte was tension and release rather than the story. Sort of like a great blues player who may be stuck in the same 12 bar pattern but nevertheless pulls stark emotions from the listener despite the constraints.

[Mr. Shakes]

Afternoon, Lance.

Yah - the title is just God awful. She must be damned stubborn, since I'm certain that almost everyone she knows has pointed this out to her. No way a regular non-billionaire type author could have gotten away with "Deathly Hallows." May as well have called it "Harry Potter and The Dyonisian Marshmallows," for all the sense it makes.

That said, I enjoyed installments 4, 5 & 6, and so I'm not perpared to be quite as pessimistic as you are, yet. But, yeah - this title is worrisome.

[julia]

Lily and James Potter died in Godric's Hollow - perhaps there's a graveyard there?

[julia]

and it was Philosopher's Stone in England and Canada.

[SV]

Eh, doesn't bother me. Sounds vaguely like Halloween, and the word "Deathly" is even better than "Deadly."

One thing I would like to know, though - one of the best adventure series I read as a kid, if not THE best, was the Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander. Not only were domestic attachments imporant to the story, they were a vital theme. The one character who was always trying to get away from them was seen as vaguely buffoonish. The "love interest" was all that and more - a major character whom Taran, the hero, loved so much that his hopes for their marriage was what set off the action in the fourth book. And the series climax wasn't success in the final battle, but rather the aftermath, where Taran's love of all the attachments he's developed over the years, romantic and otherwise, turn him from a hero to a HERO.

If you haven't read it, by all means, go! Now! (And avoid the Disney abomination at all cost).

If you have read it, then isn't it, according to your definition, not a "boy's adventure"? My question is, other than the domestic attachments, why?

If it's the lack of domestic attachments that defines whether it's a boy's adventure or not, isn't that kind of a tautology? I'm calling shenanigans.

[Kevin Wolf]

Not a fan of nor reader of HP so I had no real reaction to the title - but if what you say is true and the phrase Deathly Hallows has no known place in the HP universe, I guess I'd be worried too.

But you almost seem to have suggested a reason for the title: That any 10-year-old would just know what it means. (Or think they know.) It's merely suggestive - and aimed at young readers, not the adults who seem to have taken over the fan base.

In other words: Leave the poor woman alone!

[joanr16]

I must be an oddball-- Order of the Phoenix was my favorite in the series. On a childish level, I loved the creepiness of Delores Umbridge, and on an adult level, I relished the depiction of academic repression. I rooted for the subversion of Dumbledore's Army, but yeah, the Harry-and-Cho subplot was a giant yawn. Harry and Ginny, likewise; I was always more interested in Ron and Hermione acknowledging the unthinkable, anyway. Thanks, Lance, for helping to clarify why.

[Lance]

Ken Muldreew: "Sorcerer's stone" makes no sense to me...For some reason you think that "sorcerer's stone" is self explanatory though. Can you please explain it?

Ken, I only meant that the other titles conjure up concrete thoughts. For instance, the average American fifth grader would know what a sorcerer is and could imagine that if the socercer has a stone it is very likely a magic stone and therefore a thing of mysterious interest---it's not what the book turns out to be about, exactly, but the Harry Potter world of magic and wizards and things with special powers is suggested by the title.

By the way, while there really is such a thing as a Philosopher's stone, average American fifth graders, if they can call up an image of a philosopher aren't going to picture anyone particularly magical, just some old fuddy duddy professor type, and if he has a stone then it's probably like the one grandpa had to pass.

Kevin, you may be right about Deathly Hallows and ten year olds, but the target audience is no longer ten year olds, it's high school students, and the one I know who is a devoted Potterite,Violet Mannion, is just as mystified as I am by what a deathly hallow might be.

SV, the only one of Alexander's series I read was The Black Cauldron, and I wouldn't call it a boys' adventure novel; even though it's about a boy who has an adventure, I think of it as a different kind of book. I need to think some more about your question though. I'm not sure how the escape from domesticity is merely tautological. But a boys' adventure novel takes the hero away from all demands that he or she grow up too, which means an escape from society as a whole, as well as from hearth and home. That's why Treasure Island is a boys' adventure novel and The Three Musketeers is not. Another factor is that in a boys' adventure novel nothing much more is at stake than the hero's own surival and apotheosis as a hero. But like I said, I'll think on it.

joanr and Mr Shakes, I liked Order of the Phoenix too. I just think it's not as well-crafted as the first four books and that's why it worried me. At the point where I expected Rowling to be tightening her grip, she seemed to have let it relax to the point of letting things go.

[OutOfContext]

How about Harry Potter and the Sticky Horse for a title?

[Mike Schilling]

Harry's a Pothead and the Philosopher's Stoned

[joel hanes]

There's a bunch of us waiting, still hoping, but fearing that George R.R. Martin has now lost his passion for the Westeros cycle that he began in _A_Game_of_Thrones_ (which I cannot recommend too highly).

The fourth volume, _A_Feast_For_Crows_, was an extended tease: like watching the gaffers erect the scenery for the next act, in place of watching the next act itself.
But I still have hope.

Another wonderful boys' book series is
Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan books. Look for them
wherever genre sci-fi is sold by those who care.
And, of course, at B&N and Amazon.

[joel hanes]

Oh, BTW: a _hallows_ is a numinous but elegiac place:
like the tomb of one's ancestors, or royal
tombs of mythological kings, or a dale in
which great events now legendary once transpired
and in remembrance of which all doff their hats
or observe a solemn reverence.

I don't find it confusing a bit.

[kara McNair]

I'm afraid that I give credence to those who substitute 'hallow' for 'hollow' as in Godric's

Personally, I've never been so fussed about the actual writing as compared to the story, which, despite a few egregious cockups (hm, so Lily & James were "Head Boy & Girl in their year" as per Hagrid in the first book but "his dad hadn't been a prefect either" in the 5th book) I find the story of each to be very .... consistent.

I've got my own predictions about the final book, and I must admit that I don't care about the actual literacy aspect of it as much as I do the . puzzler/logician aspect

Who will die? Who's to be married to whom? Who faked death & who will betray his 'master'? I know why Dumbledore trusted Snape (accurately), do you?

(tis easy - Slughorn gave it away. "I don't know anyone who knew her who wouldn't have liked/loved her"...)

[ichomobothogogus]

it's a pretty awful title, but not much worse than some of the others. i suppose from a purely utilitarian point of view "the chamber of secrets" might be better, but its a shit-awful title from any other perspective. if its a choice between "dull but descriptive" and "half-arsed attempt to be evocative and mysterious" im almost tempted to plump for the latter. it's a shame her names are usually so blah. i'd have thought the name'd be the easiest part. if you've written a 900 page book it can't be too much extra effort to spend ten minutes coming up with a decent title. maybe it is just fatigue and a lack of interest. i remember in the Barry Trotter parody it said something like "there were worries that Rollins had become disenchanted with the books and was losing interest, a suspicion confirmed when the sixth book 'Barry Trotter and The Scary Magical Whatever' was released." It's not that far off.
I think the main problem with order of the phoenix was her original decision to make each book last a whole school year. it might have worked earlier on, but it's really dragging the story down now. the end of book 4 was very dramatic, it seemed as if everything had suddenly moved up a gear, becoming more urgent, as well as a lot darker, but then nothing happens. Both Harry and Voldemort spend a year twatting about doing nothing, and the atmosphere's ruined. same with book six. how interesting can it be to have harry tailing malfoy for six months while making really good potions?

i did find it strange that you use Pratchett as a counterexample to authors who get bogged down in 26 book epics and lose interest halfway. Pratchett seems like a case study of getting stuck in ever-decreasing circles. Having several series with recurring characters (witches book followed by death book followed by rincewind book followed by guards books followed by witches book...)isn't really much better than a single 26 book cycle, especially as he's constantly reusing plots and his characters never seem to grow or progress much(they get married and get older and all that, but they never seem to change as people). By now nine times out of ten you can work out in advance what someone'll do or say. Even the stand alone books are getting dragged into this, all of the characters now seem to speak an interchangeable low-vocab language called "Pratchettese" and spout cliches so much they're almost impossible to tell apart, (not to mention the constant cameos from the guards, the wizards, the beggars uncle tom cobbleigh and all) I dunno why all his characters and sets seem so cardboard these days, but it's mibbe because he had such a recognizable style when he started, that(like harold pinter)the more he repeats it the more he reads like a bad parody of himself. still as long as his next book isn't called "Rincewind and the Breathy Mallows" i can't complain that much

[ichomobothogogus]

sorry, i should have proofread that. that's some pretty awful writing there

[almostinfamous]

we all know what's gonna happen....

[Ken Houghton]

Think "Hallow'd be thy name..." Or All Hallow's Eve. Deathly Spirits, or Deathly Souls. (Think Gogol, as it were.)

I think it's the perfect title, given that the objective in this book is for the other six parts of Tom Riddle's Soul. (Not to mention the no-longer-dead Regulus [REB] has to appear.)

I do note that, unlike the other six covers--and it may be that the artwork isn't done, but I doubt it--this one is just a black cover with the title, author, and "Year 7"; it needs a different type of title, since it's not an adventure book, even in the tradition of (to continue SV's reverence for Lloyd Alexander, above) The High King. (You're wrong about Goblet, by the way; it serves the same function as Taran Wanderer in that connections were made that will be needed in the Final Battle, so the others [e.g., Krum, Fleur] had to actually see Harry in action—especially if the wedding that will open this book goes as I expect. Which is not to say that Books Four and Five weren't bloated.)

[Geoduck]

My predictions/responses/hopes..

Snape's motivation was NOT tru luv for Lily Evans, or at least not entirely. (If Rowling has become lazy enough to go that route, I'll be pissed..)

It's very possible that Dumbledore is still alive.

RAB was indeed Regulus Black, but he really is dead, and won't appear in the story. (There's no need for him to appear; if you read OotP carefully, there's already another locket floating around that can serve as the Horcrux, and in HBP we learn who probably has it now...)

The Deathly Hallows are whatever lie on the other side of that Mysterious Evil Curtain in the Ministry of Magic. Harry's gonna go through that thing, one way or another, and get help from Sirius, which is why Sirius was killed in the first place.