Cammagno ha scritto:

Harry Potter and the shadow of Karamazov
Roz Kaveney

The last book in a series is always a summation as well as a conclusion.
It has to make sense of what has gone before and where possible repair
the damage done by miscalculation in the earlier work. If there was an
over-arching plan at the start, it will have been modified along the
way, if not in the details of the plot, then in the emotional feel and
moral content of the arc. If Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is,
for all its weaknesses, a far more satisfying work than some of its
predecessors, it is because J. K. Rowling is an intelligent writer for
whom writing the most popular children’s books in history has been an
education in responsibility and power not unlike that of her boy wizard
hero.

In plot terms, this is a nightmare of persecution and random malice that
resolves into a cathartic battle. Voldemort’s forces take over the
Ministry of Magic and Hogwarts; they persecute mixed-blood wizards in
scenes that echo the persecutions of modern history, from the Nazis and
Stalin’s purges to contemporary racism. Harry and his friends spend much
of their time on the run with nowhere to lay their heads, accumulating
the wizardly plot tokens – embedded correlatives for knowledge of
morality and of the past – that will enable their victory. Many of the
good die, sometimes in a shockingly casual manner; many secrets are
revealed, not all of which have been foreshadowed. This is a dark book
which may upset younger readers, but it will also instruct them in the
cost of what is valuable.

It has two epigraphs, one from Aeschylus and the other from the Quaker
William Penn. The first, from The Libation Bearers, is an appeal to the
cthonic gods to aid the children of Agamemnon to end the hereditary
curse on the House of Atreus with a final act of vengeance; the second
is a reminder that, for believers, the dead are not dead but influences
in our hearts. In a way that is all the more powerful for not being
specifically religious, Rowling has rethought her books as a move away
from an old law of vengeance to a new law of forgiveness offered: a
forgiveness possible because the murdered live on.

This is the most allusive of Rowling’s seven books. There are obvious
allusions to C. S. Lewis and to Tolkien, her predecessors: Harry’s walk
to what he believes will be his death among the mocking forces of evil
re-sembles Aslan’s desecration by the Witch and her minions; his
decisions to spare life parallel Frodo’s mercy to Gollum and, at one
point, Frodo’s rescue by eagles from the wreck of Mordor. Less expected
is an allusion which may be to Dostoevsky or to William James (or to
Ursula Le Guin citing them). In the ecstasy allowed to the protagonists
of epic fantasy, Harry talks to the shade of Dumbledore in an empty
Kings Cross station; a small flayed child screams beneath a bench.

That child is a portion of Voldemort’s soul, but also a reference to the
tortured child in The Brothers Karamazov. Alyosha refuses to accept it;
Harry makes a different choice. Evil chooses to be its own doom, and by
refusing grace for itself, enables it elsewhere. A key theme is
repentance: Harry’s oppressive foster family are allowed the grace of
embarrassment and quite unlikely villains plausibly repent. There are
revelations about the role of Severus Snape and some startling insights
into the career of Dumbledore, Harry’s Gandalf, who turns out to have
much to repent, not least his ruthless moulding of Harry as a suicide
weapon. This is not literally a story about casting youth and magic
aside and breaking your wand; it is, however, a book about moving beyond
parents, mentors and their expectations, about fighting your own
battles, not the wars of earlier generations.

Of course, there are faults alongside all this insightfulness; Rowling’s
prose is rarely more than adequate, sometimes, as in an epilogue set two
decades later, perfunctory and mawkish. She is too concerned to revisit
old characters and settings – a trip to Gringott’s Bank is something of
an indulgence and the Battle for Hogwarts is a ticking off of every
detail with which fans have been obsessed. In the end, however, Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows reconfigures what started as a silly tale
about a school for wizards into an emotionally powerful moral fable.