Harry Potter and Primo Levi

Just finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

My initial impressions are mixed -- on the one hand, it's a real page turner, and it reaches deeply into the past six books to tie things together, so that the whole book feels through-composed. On the other hand, I found the epilogue to be utterly unnecessary, a tiddly-bump happy ending that some editor somewhere probably insisted upon because "that's what the readers expect", even though Ms. Rowling had done an estimable job in the last chapter planting little seeds of closure that would have grown quite nicely in the readers' imaginations on their own. Indeed, I found the change in tone to be jarring, so much so that it almost felt like the epilogue must have been written by someone other than Ms. Rowling.

But what surprised me most was the overwhelming sense that what I was reading was a fictionalized exploration of Europe's struggle against Hitler. Certainly, there are obvious parallels to Nazism -- one of the central themes of the book is racial purity, and the ways in which the Death Eaters terrorize the so-called "Mudbloods" are eerily reminiscent of the campaigns against the Jews in the 1930s -- there's anti-mixed blood propoganda, Voldemort supporters misuse pseudo-science to score political points, there are public humiliations, mixed-blood wizards and witches are stripped of their wands (rendering them unable do magic), their businesses are closed down, there are show trials where they must (in vain) prove their purity and on and on. The Death Eaters form a sort of Brown Shirt brigade, or perhaps a wizarding version of the SS Guard. Voldemort's supports also seek legitimacy by propping up a puppet government at the Ministry of Magic. Of course, like Vichy France, it's riddled with resisters both organized and not, with the Order of the Phoenix standing in the role of the French resistance. There's even an underground radio station to rally the resisters.

One of the parallels felt more subtle, and so I can't decide if it was intentional or coincidental. I don't want to spoil the plot, but it will suffice to note that for a significant part of the book, Harry, Ron and Hermione hide out from Voldemort and the Death Eaters by camping out in woods and forests around the English countryside. They are on the move constantly, lest they be discovered, and most of the time, they sit around waiting for something to happen (exactly what, they're not sure, and this is part of the dramatic tension), stealing what they need to survive and generally living off their wits.

Of course, this being the wizard world, they travel in style, complete with a tent that is bigger inside than it is outside and things like invisibility cloaks, but even so, I was struck by the parallel in tone to Primo Levi's If Not Now, When?, which recounts the story of Jewish partisans in Eastern Europe during World War II. In that book, the partisans hide out in the woods, steal what they need to survive and generally live off their wits. In both books, the time in the woods, doing nothing, weighs on them, and in the end their lives take on a weird sort of routine despite a world turned upside down. They take turns gathering food, and standing watch for the enemy, and they bicker, love, laugh, cry with the frustration of it all. Their existence is punctuated by moments of sheer terror, as they find themselves in situations that they must bluff or fight their out of or run away from, or die. But mostly they wait around for something to happen, and it is the waiting that weighs on them most heavily.

As Levi so achingly recounts, and Rowling echoes artfully, the partisans get by by reminding themselvs of their vision of an idealized future, a world without the evil that they are forced to confront moment by moment. Their resolve flags sometimes, and is revived by sporadic news from the outside world that reminds them that they're not alone. Each band has a mission -- to reach Italy and freedom, and to destroy Horcruxes, respectively -- and during the long days and even longer nights, they lose and then rediscover their faith in the mission, before finding its underlying meaning. And in the end, the ultimate victory of the cause for which they have been fighting is bittersweet, laden by the burden of the struggle, tinged with the guilt of the survivor.

Amazingly, in each book, the partisans retain their essential humanity even as the world around them seems to shed its own. At key moments, they show empathy for enemy soldiers who have shown some measure of remorse at what they've done or become, and forgive their attackers. But they do not romanticize the enemy, either, and are not afraid to fight or to kill if necessary.

I haven't reread If Not Now, When? recently enough to identify other parallels, but thought this one was worth mentioning. Not bad for a kids' book, huh?