Mark Reads ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’: Chapter 2

In the second chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry’s life without Dumbledore is pretty sad and then, via a newspaper article, we learn Dumbledore’s horrifying, tragic past. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to read Harry Potter.

CHAPTER 2: IN MEMORIAM

Is it too soon? I guess everyone else had two years to read this chapter, but it’s been just over a week (for me, at least) since Dumbledore died, so this part of the story was really heavy on me.

Truth is, beyond an explanation for why Dumbledore trusted Snape, I didn’t expect to spend any part of Deathly Hallows on Dumbly. Can I call him Dumbly? Well, I’m going to anyway because you can’t stop me.

Since this book is all last moments, I became curious how Rowling was going to send the Dursleys out; this is Harry’s last moment with that wretched family. I don’t find that out quite yet; the chapter opens with Harry cutting his finger on a part of Sirius’s mirror. Well, or what’s left of it. Which…wow, that is such a sad thought. But it only seems to get sadder as Rowling finds an interesting way of running through physical items from books past:

  • Kneeling down beside the trunk again, he groped around in the bottom and, after retrieving an old badge that flickered feebly between SUPPORT CEDRIC DIGGORY and POTTER STINKS, a cracked and worn-out Sneakoscope, and a gold locket inside which a note signed R.A.B. had been hidden, he finally discovered the sharp edge that had done the damage. He recognized it at once. It was two-inch-long fragment of the enchanted mirror that his dead godfather, Sirius, had given him. Harry laid it aside and felt cautiously around the trunk for the rest, but nothing more remained of his godfather’s last gift powdered glass, which clung to the deepest layer of debris like glittering grit.

This just makes me miss Sirius. A lot. 🙁

Harry begins to separate his belongings and it’s implied that he is taking nothing more than a rucksack with him, as if Hogwarts either isn’t opening or he’s not attending his final and seventh year. There’s no indication where he’s going, but I know that he’s now determined to locate the remaining Horcruxes. For the record, I still have no idea what they are or where they are.

I didn’t get much time to think of the Dursleys or Horcruxes at all, because Harry starts to read an editorial in The Daily Prophet on the life of Dumbledore.

  • For his part, Albus had arrived at Hogwarts under the burden of unwanted notoriety. Scarcely a year previously, his father, Percival, had been convicted of a savage and well-publicized attack upon three young Muggles.

No. No. WHAT. WHAT???????

  • Albus never attempted to deny that his father (who was to die in Azkaban) had committed this crime; on the contrary, when I plucked up courage to ask him, he assured me that he knew his father to be guilty. Beyond that, Dumbledore refused to speak of the sad business, though many attempted to make him do so.

NO, SERIOUSLY, WHAT THE FUCK? Oh my god, this means that…HOLY SHIT. Dumbledore was so attached to Harry because he saw himself in that eleven-year-old boy, whose parents were murdered by a Muggle-hater, and who arrived at Hogwarts “under the burden of unwanted notoriety.”

My head is exploding.

We learn that Dumbly also had a younger brother, Aberforth. HE HAD A BROTHER, WHAT THE FUCK. What is happening WHAT IS THIS.

  • When Albus and I left Hogwarts we intended to take the then-traditional tour of the world together, visiting and observing foreign wizards, before pursuing our separate careers. However, tragedy intervened. On the very eve of our trip, Albus’s mother, Kendra, died, leaving Albus the head, and sole breadwinner, of the family.

Oh. Great. Dumbledore died in the most tragic way imaginable and now I find out that his life was also filled to the brim with utter tragedy.

What is going on.

  • His letters told me little of his day-to-day life, which I guessed to be frustratingly dull for such a brilliant wizard. Immersed in my own experiences, it was with horror that I heard, toward the end of my year’s travels, that yet another tragedy had struck the Dumbledores: the death of his sister, Ariana.

WHAT THE FUCK!!!!

  • Though Ariana had been in poor health for a long time, the blow, coming so soon after the loss of their mother, had a profound effect on both of her brothers. All those closest to Albus—and I count myself one of that lucky number—agree that ariana’s death, and Albus’s feeling of personal responsibility for it (though, of course, he was guiltless), left their mark upon him forevermore.

Hey, J.K. Rowling, PLEASE STOP MAKING DUMBLEDORE’S LIFE EVEN SADDER THAN IT ALREADY WAS.

  • I returned home to find a young man who had experienced a much older person’s suffering.

No, please stop it. My heart can’t handle it.

We learn more (not much more) about Dumbledore’s battle with Grindelwald, which is why the wizarding world feared him so much, and then the editorial ends like this:

  • He died as he lived: working always for the greater good and, to his last hour, as willing to stretch out a hand to a small boy with dragon pox as he was on the day that I met him.

Goddamn it, I will not cry. I WILL NOT CRY.

And I think my own brain followed the same path as Harry’s; he realized he had never really taken a moment to ask Dumbledore where he came from. In fact, we spent an entire book examining the past of Voldemort. And throughout it all, we barely learned anything about Dumbledore.

Without lapsing into SAD TIMES DEPRESSING STORY, it’s something that happens when people die. You’re left with a vacancy caused by things left incomplete. You’re left with questions you’ll never be able to be have answered.

Will not cry. WILL NOT.

But all my sadness was mopped up with complete anger at the absurd article on Dumbledore that appears in another issue of the Daily Prophet. WRITTEN BY RITA SKEETER.

I realized post-predicting-making that Rita’s deal with Hermione had already expired, so this doesn’t count toward fulfilling my ~deeply prophetic prophecies~ or anything. Instead, I’ll admit this: I did not miss her at all.

Promoting a tell-all biography on the “tumultuous” life of Dumbledore, she personifies the willingness of gossip rags and political malcontents to take advantage of the dead, to sensationalize everything, to give every moment some sort of scintillating detail to be picked over, to be trivialized or exaggerated and to be made entertainment.

Harry’s anger swells throughout the story. (I kind of want to avoid quoting every terrible line because nearly every one is atrocious.) But it reaches a fever-pitch after Harry reads that Rita actually says she is friends with Harry.

  • ”Oh, yes, we’ve developed a close bond,” says Skeeter. “Poor Potter has few real friends, and we met one of the most testing moments of his life—the Triwizard Tournament. I am probably one of the only people alive who can say that they know the real Harry Potter.”

Infuriating. Here’s the asshole who ruined Harry’s life during Goblet of Fire and turned everyone against him and can’t even leave him alone years later. UGH. Well, at least she’s not Dolores Umbridge. Even typing that inspires rage inside me, by the way. Try it out. D-O-L-O-R-E-S U-M-B-R-I-D-G-E

  • A flash of the brightest blue. Harry froze, his cut finer slipping on the jagged edge of the mirror again. He had imagined it, he must have done. He glanced over his shoulder, but the wall was a sickly peach color of Aunt Petunia’s choosing: There was nothing blue there for the mirror to reflect. He peered into the mirror fragment again, and saw nothing but his own bright green eye looking back at him.

    He had imagined it, there was no other explanation; imagined it, because he had been thinking of his dead headmaster. If anything was certain, it was that the bright blue eyes of Albus Dumbledore would never pierce him again.

Let me go drown an entire box of Kleenex in my salty tears. Also, WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED.