July 19, 2007
From the desk of Jane Galt:Harry Potter and the Half-Wits
* SPOILERS (sort of) *
I find Harry Potter snobbery exceedingly tiresome. I'm sure it would be very nice if everyone read proust instead, but it would also be nice if they confined themselves to a high fiber diet, took up jogging, and never had a drink . . . and I'll fight any nanny who tries to make me do it.
And yet . . . the last two books have done a lot to kill my buzz. That hasn't stopped me from (like everyone else in the known universe) pre-ordering my copy of the Harry Potter book. I figure I have about a twelve hour window in which I can avoid knowing how it all turns out; during that time, I mean to plow through all eight squintillion pages of wizardry and adolescent angst. But I am not as excited about it as many of the people around me, or indeed as excited as I thought I would be, after I finished the first few books. The problem is not that the books aren't Anna Karenina; it's that they're not nearly as good as they could be, or ought to be.
Recently, kicking through some internet archives, I found that Kieran Healy had put his finger on the source of my lingering disappointment with Hogwarts and company. “Harry”, he wrote, after finishing the Order of the Phoenix, “has been licking the lead paint at Privet Drive.”
Harry acts like an idiot, and not the normal sort of teenage idiot who thinks they are the immortal centre of the universe. Harry’s idiocy is sui generis. Who but Harry Potter, having been given a wrapped gift by his beloved godfather with the words “use it if you need me”, would leave it unopened at the bottom of his suitcase and instead break into the evil head teacher’s office when he wanted a quiet chat? What sort of a nit can’t figure out that when a wild giant keeps saying the word “Haggy”, he wants his half-brother Hagrid? Or guess, for tiresome centuries of pages, that “Tom Marvolo Riddle” might be an anagram for “Lord Voldemort”, when the seven-year old sitting next to me in the bookstore picked up on the resemblance a few scant minutes after opening The Half-Blood Prince?
I mean, not that that's some great feat. "Marvolo" is a name so ridiculous that it could only have been invented to absorb extra letters. The real magical mystery of the Half Blood Prince is how little Tom Marvolo managed to escape being beaten to death on the schoolyard long enough to make it to Hogwarts.
However, one shouldn’t be too hard on Harry, since his mental fog seems to be infectious. Adults in children’s books are often stupid and capricious. But at least their pointless behaviours are usually animated by some comprehensible motive, such as malice. The adults in Harry Potter seem to perform acts of outrageous idiocy on a purely recreational basis.
For example, I cannot be the only person who found myself unconvinced, to the point of queasy embarrassment, by this passage at the end of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix:
“But did you not wonder why it was not I who explained this to you? Why I did not teach you occlumency? Why I had not so much as looked at you for months?”Harry looked up. He could see now that Dumbledore looked sad and tired.
“Yeah,” Harry mumbled. “Yeah, I wondered.”
“You see,” Dumbledore continued, “I believed it could not be long before Voldemort attempted to force his way into your mind, to manipulate and misdirect your thoughts, and I was not eager to give him more incentives to do so. I was sure that if he realized that our relationship was - or had ever been - closer than that of headmaster and pupil, he would seize his chance to use you as a means to spy on me.”
This could have redeemed only if Dumbledore had continued:
“You realize, Harry, that this makes no sense. For one thing, I have been coddling you for years, despite having known all this, until I—suddenly and for no apparent reason—decided to drop you this year like a hot rock. Too, you might ask why, if I was so worried, I had allowed you to learn many so things that it would be incredibly useful for Voldemort not to know, such as the fact that a cadre of wizards is plotting against him. Why, in fact, the one secret I kept from you is that Voldemort can read your mind, when presumably this is, by definition, the one thing that Voldemort certainly already knows.
But had I displayed the sense God gave a mussel in this situation, you would probably have acted more like a normal teenager, and less like a severely brain damaged refugee from The Dirty Dozen. And then there would have been no book. So I am sorry that you were upset, and Sirius had to die, but publishers get very shirty when you slip your dates.”
I confess, I am afraid to find out how Harry Potter ends. It seems all too likely that Harry, and th rest of his band of merry madmen, expire--not through the evil agency of Lord Voldemort, but through forgetting to do something basic, such as breathe.
Yeah, you're right. I've got no time for the snobs, but the last three books have not been nearly as enjoyable as the first three. Order of the Phoenix pretty much killed my enthusiasm. I'm pretty sure I read the sixth one, but I have no strong memory of it.
I'm sure it would be very nice if everyone read proust instead,....
No it wouldn't.
(It's just a goddamn cookie, Marcel. Get over it.)
I've felt, more and more, like I'm wading upstream trying to read these books and I'll be glad when they're done. I place no small part of the problem on the doorstep of the movies. As far as I'm concerned, it was after Rowling was on set that the quality of the books began to drastically decline.
Potter's world was once a world of incidentals that may or may not prove relevant, became a focused tunnel where every introduced element would impact the unfolding of the plot and every magical effect was described nicely for the CGI folks.
That being said, I'm glad they've got kids reading. I only hope they go on to read things a bit more "put together."
I have a slightly different take: I think it was the very fact of Rowling's enormous success that spoiled the later books. I think the earlier books were actually *edited*, whereas after all the hullabaloo no one had the clout to tell Rowling that portions needed to be cut, or certain aspects of the plot did not make sense.
Cf. Tom Clancy, where his later books drone on and on about endless technical details, 90% of which add nothing to the plot.
Yet on the other hand, Megan, with regard to Dumbledore's behavior, it may be argued that the reason he "dropped Harry like a hot rock" was the Voldemort was actually back, in possession of his full powers, and actively recruiting followers. Dumbledore plays his cards close to his chest (far too much so -- methinks his evident humility is a mask for underlying arrogance, actually), and conceives himself to be the lynchpin of any resistance to Voldemort (at least, until Harry's up to the job). So he wants to keep Harry away from him while he gets on with the organization.
I do think you've hit the nail on the head, though, in that Harry is really not all that bright, nor is he all that great a wizard. (If the Patronus is such a big deal, how come all his buddies figured out how to do one so easily in Book 5?) Heck, Hermione's way smarter, way better at wizarding, and is just as loyal and brave as Harry, if not more so. I am hoping that Rowling has been saving some extraordinary personal growth for him for Book 7, so that he will wind up as a more credible hero.
Thank you for my morning laugh and a guffaw! I'll admit that when I read the first book it took me about 10 times longer than it took to read Red October. It was only because I kept forgetting to pick it up, and then, when I did, my eyes kept sliding off the pages as they desperately tried to get me to see something, ANYTHING interesting to look at.
When I finished, I realized there was a plot, it did kind of make sense, but was very young in its unfinished, semi-gloss sort of way. It hung together the way the thinnest of ligaments could hold together a skeleton. I did see the movie versions of the books, but interest was a wee bit hard to gin up. I did read about four chapters of the fifth book, but it was as reported, a jumble of words with absolutely no rhyme or reason, not even a melody.
So, maybe it was success that did 'er in, as Mr. K thinks, a sad but familiar tale. It annoys me when it seems the author lost respect for the reader, showing a little bit of arrogance in knowing she's gonna make a gazillion bucks on anything she put out, irregardless of quality - well after a session or so of that, even a cathouse consumer learns to move along to a more fulfilling purveyor.
A lady friend is interested in seeing the newest movie, and I'm sure I'll cough up the dineros, and who knows, maybe I'll enjoy it, but I think its going to be like eating an Outback steak, then fininding out, two hours later, that it was really disguised Chinese food.
Again, thanks for the laugh, Missy.
Well, as long as we're all picking nits (a job I would normally outsource to a team of monkeys), I'd like to see a show of hands for anyone who has ever dropped a hot rock. Really, has anyone ever picked up a hot rock? If so, can you explain why? Did it really surprise you that a rock you tossed into your campfire was that hot? Or were the ornamental rocks you were arranging as part of your zen meditation heated secretly by a prankster?
That said, what I like about the fifth book was that Harry acts like a stupid, self-centered teen. While his stupidity is probably greater than average, I liked the fact that he wasn't idealized and perfect like, say, Jack Ryan (or to a lesser extent, Horatio Hornblower). Also, I was relieved that it lacked a truly awful and contrived plot device of the Triwizard Tournament with four wizards. Merely failing to include that bumps it up a couple of notches in my estimation.
I don't know if it is the author losing respect for the reader, exactly, but rather that when an author becomes enormously successful and makes boatloads of money (1) the author's opinion of her own prose goes up accordingly, so she no longer self-edits as much (if at all), and (2) people around the author no longer dare to critique one so successful.
I guess I'm a snob then. I honestly never imagined -- until I started reading this thread -- that adults would even *think* of reading Harry Potter. My kids dragged me to several of the movies, but after the second or third one I just refused to go see any more: "Sorry guys, but when you've seen one, you've seen 'em all."
FWIW, I just recently got around to finishing Dr. Zhivago, which I had started reading as a teenager in 1960, and then had put aside. And I also recently read Lolita cover-to-cover for the first time.
If this be snobbery, make the most of it.
If I start something, I finish it. This is true with very little exception. I can't imagine not finishing the last of the Harry Potter books. I think I'm much more forgiving of the inconsistancies and stupid plot devices than the average adult. I am also fairly dense about figuring out things like "Tom Marvolo Riddle" but then again, I've always been awful at anagrams.
The thing that I have come to dislike about the books in the past couple volumes is the lack of communication. "Gee Harry, if we just told you the truth from the beginning everything would have been good and you would have been able to protect yourself. But instead we thought it was best if you didn't know anything so you wouldn't get yourself in touble, which has clearly worked *so* well in the past."
I'm happy that the 7th book will not take on the same format as the first six. I'm glad that Harry actually seems to know what's going on and I really want to see people die, so that should be fun. I'm looking forward to the last one, if only because it will be over, then I can reread with new eyes from the beginning.
i loved the earlier books, but things started to fall apart once the evil became really evil, rather than kid's book evil. i started order but just couldn't get into it, so i put it down. i think the same thing happened to stephen king, once he was beyond the power of any editor. i don't find it surprising that rowling was great at writing a children's book, not so great at trying to write an adulteque book.
Really, has anyone ever picked up a hot rock? If so, can you explain why?
You need to get out in the sun more.
Order of the Phoenix was about 18 months overdue and it almost killed the enthusiasm that I had developed for the series. It was slow, boring and contained enough "Potter is a moron" sections that had me wishing for Harry's self-vivisection potion to start working.
I knew a professional writer once who described how she worked her way through writer's block. First she typed a word. Then another. And another. Eventually, the words would come out smoothly and she could proceed. OOTP looks like Rowling wrote the entire book using this method, only without ever reaching the smoothly flowing part.
And yes, I will buy and read it very soon.
Am I the only one who thought Goblet of Fire was the best book in the series...?
Jane: Or guess, for tiresome centuries of pages, that “Tom Marvolo Riddle” might be an anagram for “Lord Voldemort”, when the seven-year old sitting next to me in the bookstore picked up on the resemblance a few scant minutes after opening The Half-Blood Prince?
I thought that was explained back in _Chamber of Secrets_?
I mean, not that that's some great feat. "Marvolo" is a name so ridiculous that it could only have been invented to absorb extra letters.
That's using information that's not available to the characters *within* a story. :-)
(I've sometimes made use of the fact that, in a murder mystery, the murderer can't be some unnamed character.)
Well, when it comes to nits -- "Lord Voldemort" has 13 letters, none of them an "i." "Tom Marvelo Riddle" has 16 letters. Yes, I can figure out what you meant, but it's not what you said. In the casting of spells, precision is essential.
From Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets:
"He pulled Harry's wand from his pocket and began to trace it through the air, writing three shimmering words: TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE. Then he waved the wand once, and the letters of his name rearranged themselves: I AM LORD VOLDEMORT. "You see?" he whispered. "It was a name I was already using at Hogwarts, to my most intimate friends only, of course. You think I was going to use my filthy Muggle father's name forever? I, in whose veins runs the blood of Salazar Slytherin himself, through my mother's side?"
Whether she got too rich or too important to correct, Rowling stopped being entertaining. Each new book became 'second verse--same as the first' with the only difference being that the evil grew bigger and bigger. Letting half trained teenagers fight the greatest danger to wizards ever is akin to letting Shirley Temple fight the Nazis.
Jane, really, you should take into account the hostility of British school children vs. instructors. Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' comes to mind. The story is set in British type schools -- the teachers with few exceptions are idiots an ogres, there are favorites among students and teachers.
And most of the story elements are borrowed from other children's and other stories.
I wouldn't read a lot more relevance into Harry Potter than in two of William Steig's books that I enjoy, 'CDB' and the sequel 'CDC'. "C D B. D B E S A B-Z B" or "See The Bee. The Bee, he is a busy bee!" With line drawings and all!
I really like the young reader fiction of Tamora Pierce. Robin McKinley's 'The Hero and the Crown' and 'The Blue Sword' are great, and her 'Beauty' is a new telling of the beauty and the beast story. Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books, including 'Arrows Of The Queen', 'Arrows Flight', and 'Arrows Fall', are very, very good, as is her 'The Godmother'.
I would say that Harry Potter seems better written than a book I enjoyed in 4th grade (about 1961?), 'Danny Dunn And The Dinosaur Egg'.
You need to get out in the sun more.
In the interests of Science, I went out at lunch and picked up rocks exposed to the noon sun. I also touched various other sunlit objects. None of the rocks or concrete could have been called unpleasantly hot; the asphalt was closer to being unpleasant. A dark-green trash can was the hottest object; it's not the sort of thing that you'd want shoved in your pants just as you try to land an airliner in a crosswind, but I kept my hand there for several seconds with no ill effects.
I still think the confluence of a 1) a rock hot enough to hurt, 2) someone who wants to pick up that rock and 3) unawareness of the hotness of the rock is an extraordinary collection of circumstances that makes me wonder where the idiom comes from.
All of which is beside the real point, which I have lost track of.
I've always assumed it comes from cooking with rocks, where it's often not clear which ones are hot.
But if you're cooking with rocks, isn't reaching in to grab one kind of the equivalent of slapping your hand onto a stove's burner and hoping it isn't the one that's turned on? That's my point: not that rocks can't get hot, but for them to get hot enough to involuntarily drop, they have to be found in pretty unusual and fairly obvious circumstances that make picking them up a dumb idea. And really, I suspect there aren't that many people who feel a compulsion to pick up rocks of any temperature.
But then, I've never cooked with rocks, nor do I suffer from rock-related OCD, so what do I know?
Anyway, as you can tell by the bizarre irrelevant overanalysis, I have actual work that I'm trying to avoid. By an act of will, I will now return to it.
You need to get out on volcanoes more.
I blame the endless need for the Next-Big-Thing... I think most authors have a quality decline, and not JUST in a long series like this...
on the other hand with getting less smart... puberty seems to have that effect. I don't know that JKW is trying to write that in her books, but I have seen genius level real people do seriously stupid things while they are in the thrall of adolescence... or in love, or in hate, or...
hey, it happens doesn't it?
the key is how much do things make sense to themselves? How much can you not know, while you are in that universe... but then YMMV.
"...t's not the sort of thing that you'd want shoved in your pants just as you try to land an airliner in a crosswind..."
ha!
"...it's not the sort of thing that you'd want shoved in your pants just as you try to land an airliner in a crosswind..."
He took a duck to the face at 250 knots.
Rocks can be hot, and you just don't know it. They don't have to come from the crock pot (paleolithic variety) or from the campfire. While strolling along Torrey Pines Beach when there was still a wisp of fog, and the air was about 75 degrees F, I picked up a beautifully blanched shell. It was not hot...
As I walked towards the sidewalk, I saw an interesting rock that was a wee bit dark...it burnt the cr*p out of my fingers, was that sucker hot! There was very little decision making going on, just the almost-autonomic response of whipping the hand out from under the blistering breccia and stuck two fingers in my mouth. Because of the startle reflex, I stepped part way out of my flip flop onto the dark brown sand...and as I bounced up and down, from one hot foot to the other I totally forgot about the fingers as I tried to find a way to insert foot into...well, you get the pic, I'm shur.
That's my point: not that rocks can't get hot, but for them to get hot enough to involuntarily drop, they have to be found in pretty unusual and fairly obvious circumstances that make picking them up a dumb idea.
Might be the climate you live in. I can remember 95F+ days where even an exposed sidewalk got so hot by 1 or 2pm that it was painful to walk on it barefoot.
Also, rocks used in cooking and fire rings can hold heat for deceptively long periods of time, so if you were trying to disassemble a ring for transport in the premodern age, you might have good reason to suddenly drop a hot rock.
Rocks and other dense, non-flammable objects were commonly heated near a fire and used as bedwarmers and such in the days before modern insulation and climate control technologies. If you were to misjudge just how hot one of them had gotten, guess what...
I can remember 95F+ days where even an exposed sidewalk got so hot by 1 or 2pm that it was painful to walk on it barefoot
Yesterday was a 95F+ sunny day when I conducted my experiment. I think the sidewalks and asphalt probably would have been uncomfortable to walk on barefoot, but when I laid my hands on them, they were certainly not nearly hot enough to cause the drop reaction like falkoyn describes.
Of course, they were probably in better thermal contact with cool ground underneath than a rock sitting on sand would be.
I was stupider than Harry. You were and are exceptionally bright. My problem with book five is it seemed too real. I thought book six was better but still too real. I cry like a girl when I think of the poor orphan Harry Potter.
For what it's worth: there's probably a lot more going on beneath the surface that folks appreciate about the Harry Potter books. A gentleman named John Granger (www.hogwartsprofessor.com) has me well nigh convinced that Rowling is writing her book on a strongly alchemical skeleton and that the stuff Jane is so irritated with is a function of the limited third-person omniscient voice Rowling is using. It's how Rowling gets people to identify with Harry and to accept his viewpoint as being more knowledgeable than it is which makes the surprises (like the revelation in Goblet) more powerful. Food for thought.
(Oh, and Granger thinks that Harry is a Christian hero. Looking forward to the book tomorrow to see if he's validated, which I hope he is.)
I don't want to sound like a relentless JKR cheerleader here, but most of your criticisms appear to stem from careless reading. I can understand that, since the Potter cycle is one that calls out for skimming quickly until you get to the denouement, but really, the stuff you're carping on is more than adequately covered if you actually take the time to, you know, read all the words.
I'll take just one example: Voldemort can't read Harry's mind anymore than Harry can read Voldemort's. What they have is some kind of psychic connection where one can be present, in the psychic possession sort of way, in the other's head -- without the possessee necessarily being aware of it. Harry toured Voldemort's world several times before Voldemort ever cottoned on to it, and even when he figured it out, it took him a while to find a way to exploit the link.
I will also say you give Dumbledore far too little credit in his concern for Harry. If you were orphaned as a baby, forced to live with horrible relatives, and in fear of your life from the time you were about 11, would you really want to know that you were destined to kill at least one person if you wanted to survive? Again, Dumbledore's reveal to Harry needs to be considered in its entirety, because he takes pain to say that there's nothing inherently true or real about the prophecy, nothing that means it has to happen -- except for the fact that Voldemort believes it, and therefore he will force it to come to fruition. In point of fact, Harry still has the option to walk away, but he won't because that's not the kind of person he is, and since Voldemort transferred power to him with the failed killing curse, he knows he had damn well better use those powers or things will be much the worse for everyone.
It will be a little while before I can get book 7 and settle down with it; I can wait. There's still a lot to think about and discuss in Books 1-6 -- from politics to economics to race relations. The increasing complexity and density of the material as Harry ages is another aspect of this series that I find difficult to dismiss as inconsequential. I can understand people not being interested in this sort of thing at all, that's fine. But I don't understand people who purport to be interested going on at length about how stupid it all is when they haven't the time or interest to read and think about what it is they are criticizing.
My predictions:
(1) His true love will be killed by a spike shoved up her spinal column.
(2) Thewizard's powers will be revelaed as coming from an evil hyper-advanced alien race that is trying to bring chaos.
(3) He will use a spell of an equation qwith no terms and get total control over his powers.
Wait... I'm thinking of a different wizard...
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