Tuesday, July 24, 2007

A few more thoughts ...

No, this isn't going to become all Harry Potter all the time. But The Deathly Hallows is a big book and there's a lot to digest. One thing that's sure to come up (because it always does) is whether or not the series is Christian, or at least is suitable for Christians. I found a good perspective in Bob Smietana's review for Christianity Today. Christ 'whispers' into the story, sometime pretty loudly it seems to me. But maybe not to you. Because that's one thing to remember about stories -- you can't leave the reader out of the equation. I got the scripture references on the tombs in Godric's Hollow and I've loved how, all along, the stories hint that death is not the end. There is a worse fate than physical death and Voldemort is a perfect illustration of that. (Just remembered -- in The Lord of the Rings the ancient Numenorians feared death, too, and it was their downfall.) But just remember that these are stories, after all, and you do a disservice to the story when you try to force it to do something it was never intended for.

Fantasy, maybe more than any other kind of story, is metaphor. But the metaphors work best when you don't strain too hard to look for them. They work best when you let the story sink in and simply be what it is.

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