Fascination Place » Harry Potter

Harry Potter VI

Michael Rawdon — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 04:15:05 +0000

Last Sunday we went to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the new film in the series. My expectations for the films at this point are moderate at best: The book series bottomed out with the awful Order of the Phoenix and never really recovered. The original of this one was padded and poorly plotted, although it had some good character bits in the middle.

The story basically survives intact in the film, although with many of its warts still showing: Many sequences are slow, especially the beginning (in which Dumbledore and Harry persuade Horace Slughorn to return to Hogwarts) and the end (the retrieval of the Horcrux is tense, yet tedious). But the stuff in the middle is still quite entertaining: Harry, Ron and Hermione falling for various other students, Harry awkwardly captaining the Quidditch team (I rather wish the series had more consciously explored the theme of Harry being thrust into a leader’s role while being anything but a natural leader), and Harry learning potions with the help of the textbook of the Half-Blood Prince. The flashbacks to Voldemort’s past are interesting and not as overdone as they are in the book.

The film has been getting strong reviews, and overall I enjoyed it despite its flaws, but it’s not nearly as good as the best in the film series, The Prisoner of Azkaban, although with stronger source material it might have been its equal.

It’s interesting to see all the actors growing up. Daniel Radcliffe looks less buff than he did in Phoenix where his appearance seemed a little odd. Rupert Grint seemed to grow into his body awkwardly, especially in Goblet of Fire, but he seems to be past that; he’s the actor who’s changed the most in appearance as he’s grown up. Emma Watson has changed the least, looking much the same at 18 as she did at 11. Tom Felton’s features have become much more defined as he’s grown up, and he doesn’t have the smooth, dark-elfin look he had when he first played Draco Malfoy.

I can’t believe I’m going to sit through two films to see all of the final book, Deathly Hallows, which was another padded book; that means a lot of the padding is surely going to make it into the films (which already run long at over 2-1/2 hours apiece). But no doubt I’ll do it.

Just Ignore the Author Behind the Curtain

Michael Rawdon — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 21:39:36 +0000

J.K. Rowling says that Professor Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series is gay.

I hate it when an author makes statements like this about their story after the fact, and I’ve learned through experience to simply ignore them, unless I happen to be specifically interested in the author’s writing process (which, in the case of Harry Potter, I’m not). My feeling is that if a fact didn’t matter enough to actually make it into the book, then it ain’t so. That doesn’t mean that it ain’t not so, either. But once the story is finished and distributed, the author doesn’t get to fiat it into existence.

(In Rowling’s case, I also wonder why she bothers to bring it up now. Cynically, I suspect it’s just to keep her name in the news, now that Harry Potter Mania is fading.)

John Scalzi weighs in on the subject:

Do these facts mean that Dumbledore’s sexuality is unimportant to who the character is? Absolutely not. The moment Rowling said (or discovered, however you want to put it) that Dumbledore was gay, it made a difference in how she perceived him and how she wrote him. The only way Rowling’s statement of Dumbledore’s sexuality would be irrelevant or should be ignored by the reader (should they hear of the fact at all) is if there were proof that Rowling was tacking on the sexuality of Dumbledore after the fact of the writing, i.e., that Rowling had no conception of Dumbledore’s sexuality through all the books, and then is throwing the “dude, he’s gay” statement out there now just for kicks.

I’m in agreement with John on many things, but I think he’s got this one exactly wrong. I think his error is in confusing the story with the author; while the two are clearly linked, they’re not the same thing. Once the author has finished the story, it becomes a thing unto itself, experienced completely independently of further input from the author. In effect, once the story is finished, the author becomes just another reader of the story, her opinion no more important than that of any other reader for the purposes of interpreting and experiencing the story. Anything she left out of the story is not part of the story, even if it factored into how she wrote it. If it was left out, and it can’t be reasonably deduced from the text, then it’s not part of the story, and in this case, not part of the character.

Essentially (and I know I’m not the first one to say this), once the story is finished, it’s no longer the author’s story, it’s the reader’s story. I mean this in the experiential sense, not the legal sense, of course: The reader doesn’t own the story, but they do own their experience of reading the story, and their interpretation of the story, and I think it’s entirely fair to base that entirely on the story, and completely disregard elements which are not in the text.

I think part of the point of fiction is that it’s an experiential and interpretive thing. Having the author come down from on high and state “this is so” when it’s not even in the story undermines that part of the experience, and cuts out the possibility of interpretation.

John also says:

Going back to Rothstein, the best you can say for his argument is that it notes that Dumbledore doesn’t have to be gay for many of the influential events of his life to have had an effect on him. To which the correct response is to say, yes, well. And this would be different from the lives of actual gay people exactly how? We go through any number of events in our lives without our sexuality front and center — it would make sense an author would model a character similarly. But it doesn’t mean that at the end of the day that sexuality doesn’t matter to who the character is.

The crux of the issue is this: If you can’t perceive that the character is gay, then does it matter to you whether the character is gay? John thinks so, I don’t. It’s a matter of perception, because reading fiction is entirely a matter of perception. But once a story is finished, that something else went on behind the scenes, that the writer intended something which didn’t come through in the story, means that those elements actually don’t matter. Because if they did matter, then they’d be present in the story.

Which means that I’ll believe John Perry is allergic to blueberries when it shows up in one of Scalzi’s novels, and not before.

I don’t really care whether or not Dumbledore was gay, but having read the books, I see no strong reason to believe one way or the other. Unlike Ceej, who has some smart things to say about the whole brouhaha, I don’t think the Grindelwald stuff is compelling evidence.

Your mileage may vary, but the important thing is that it’s your mileage, not J.K. Rowling’s.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Michael Rawdon — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 22:35:59 +0000

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
- by J. K. Rowling
- HC, © 2007, 607 pp, Bloomsbury (U.K.), ISBN 0-765-31544-0

Harry Potter
and the
Deathly Hallows

The Harry Potter series wraps up at long last: After publishing the first three books in 3 years, it took another 8 years for J.K. Rowling to write the last four. Of course, each of the four is twice as long as any of the three, so there you go.

If you’ve surfed in here and haven’t yet read the book, be advised that there are spoilers after the Read More link below, although I’ve tried to keep the first half of the review free of them.

Deathly Hallows starts, as the other books do, at the end of the summer between school years, but this time the book promptly heads off into new territory: As Harry is enemy number one where the resurrected Lord Voldemort is concerned, and since his mystical protection will evaporate as soon as he turns 17 (which is the age of maturity for wizards), the Order of the Phoenix plans to hide Harry for his protection. Not everything goes as planned, but Harry finally ends up in a safe house.

While preparing for the marriage of Ron’s brother Bill to Fleur Delacoeur, our trio of heroes (Harry, Ron and Hermione) start planning how they can go about finding the remaining Horcruxes containing fragments of Voldemort’s soul, since if they can destroy them all, then they can bring about the dark wizard’s downfall. Unfortunately, the downfall of some powerful forces on the side of good in the wizarding world leave the three on the run from the ascendant dark lord’s forces, with precious little idea of how to proceed other than trying to stay one step ahead of their pursuers.

Their adventures on the road involve personal conflicts, a variety of traps, and learning some surprising facts about Harry’s family and Dumbledore’s history. They also learn of the existence of the Deathly Hallows, some powerful magical artifacts which could turn the tide against Voldemort, but which – like the Horcruxes – are well-hidden, if they even exist at all.

I freely admit that the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, sapped my enthusiasm for the Harry Potter series. It became clear to me that J.K. Rowling was no longer being edited, and she really needed a strong editor, because she too easily fell in love with her own typing. Phoenix badly needed to be cut at least in half, and Half-Blood Prince, though better, was also too long and had long stretches of boring in it. So I didn’t approach Deathly Hallows in a very forgiving frame of mind, since it was another giant tome.

That said, Hallows has some things to recommend it. It’s a very different book from its predecessors, having very little of the “kid’s stuff” feel of those books: It’s all deadly serious, and Harry and friends are mostly left to their own devices, as Rowling puts them in the role of the “last, best hope” for the good guys. The story has finality written all over it: The stakes have never been higher, and the story revolves around Harry’s and Dumbledore’s backgrounds (much as Prince revolved around Voldemort’s), bringing a strong feeling of coming full circle.

But, dammit, the book is still too darned long. It takes nearly a quarter of the book to finally get Harry and company on the road looking for Horcruxes; the pages before are a very, very gradual build-up of elements of the story, and once again I wished Rowling would just get on with it. Heck, the whole first chapter is completely superfluous and should have been cut. I’m still of the mind that Rowling simply fell in love with the sound of her typing, and had enough clout to keep her words from being edited, even though she really, really badly needed some serious editing.

The book takes some strange turns once Harry is on the road, and some of them don’t ring true. And then it still takes quite a while before the shape of the story becomes known. Eventually, the conflict becomes not just the one between the forces of good and evil, but the temptation of the Deathly Hallows for Harry: To follow the course Dumbledore set for him to destroy the horcruxes, or to go for the seemingly-certain victory by seeking the Hallows. This is actually a surprisingly sophisticated conflict for what is otherwise not a very subtle series, and I wish more time had been spent on it, rather than the noodling around which occupies the first half of the book. (The insight into Dumbledore is not uninteresting, but it’s not essential either. A lot of it is spun out of whole cloth just to increase the suspense in this volume, with little connection to earlier volumes.)

Deathly Hallows feels so divorced from the rest of the series that it makes several of the early books feel even less relevant: Goblet of Fire can be boiled down to Voldemort returning from the dead, Order is little more than giving Harry a reason to hate Voldemort because of what he does to Sirius Black, and Prince is partly Voldemort’s backstory and partly the set-up for this book. It feels like you could read the first three books, and then just skim the next three to get to the “good stuff” that’s in here.

And as usual I think the cover of the U.K. edition (pictured above) is much better than that of the U.S. edition. Mary GrandPré’s art is not at all to my taste, so I’m glad to have the British editions instead.

The bottom line in my opinion is that this book is more suspenseful than the two before it, and feels more necessary to the overall story, but Rowling still needed to be seriously edited to cut down the volume of extraneous material and make the story more streamlined and enjoyable. She could still surprise and delight, but not like she could in the first three, shorter books. My final feeling is that I’m glad the series is over because I don’t think I could have pushed through much more of her verbiage, and that’s not a good epitaph for any series. The core magic of Harry Potter was the feeling that Harry was a normal boy who found that he was really extraordinary, but that magic is far in the past. Deathly Hallows is just a straightforward adventure story.

Beyond this point are spoilers for the book, so don’t continue if you don’t want to be spoiled!

The character interplay among Harry, Ron and Hermione is really annoying at times. I completely did not believe that Ron would fight with Harry and then storm off the way he did. Geez, how many times do they have to learn the same lesson again? Okay, I understand that they’re teenagers, but things that real teenagers do don’t necessarily work in fiction, especially heroic fiction. It seemed like every book involved the trio learning to trust each other and believe in their friendship, and always after having some break with one another. It got pretty repetitive.

The book is pretty bloody, with many supporting characters passing away, especially in the big battle at the end. This is always a difficult choice in a book, since a lot of the characters aren’t given much of a send-off due to both everything going on, and the volume of death. It’s very hard to navigate the tension between verisimiltude and dramatic payoff, and I don’t think Rowling’s writing skills were up to the task. While Dobby gets a sentimental send-off, Hedwig’s end feels like it’s given the short shrift, and Lupin – one of the best characters in the series – is just one of the body count at the Battle of Hogwarts.

Lupin is really treated abominably in the story, with his moment of panic when he tries to abandon his wife, Tonks, when she becomes pregnant is just pathetic. It doesn’t even serve the role of letting Harry be an authority figure, since there are plenty of other ways to accomplish that. It’s a scene that badly needed to be cut. Lupin was always something of a tragic figure, and he deserved a better end than this.

(Luna Lovegood’s father Xenophilius – aside from having perhaps the most forced-sounding name in the series – comes off similarly pathetic in a likewise-unnecessary scene, although since he’s a new character as of this book, it’s hard to shed a tear for him.)

Despite mishandling Ron and Lupin, Rowling does provide some nice character moments elsewhere: The departure of the Dursleys ends with a nice exchange between Harry and Dudley. Harry has his final confrontation with Draco Malfoy, and it was nice to see Malfoy shown to be not quite a complete idiot, realizing that he and his family have gotten in way over their head and earning a modicum of redemption. (It’s also hands-down the best action sequence of the book.)

Surely the best suspenseful moment is when the trio are captured by the Malfoys and Hermione is tortured. There were rumors that some major characters – maybe Harry himself – might die in the book, and this was the moment when Rowling made me think she might really go through with it. This scene might be her finest moment as a writer so far. Of course, it would have been difficult to make the story really pay off had any of the three actually died, since the series had taken such pains to make them equals as well as friends. But it’s the threat that it could have happened that made this a brilliant scene.

The book’s epilogue is weirdly unsatisfying. There’s very little there which we hadn’t basically figured out already, so generic is the writing here. It feels very peculiar that Harry fought his way through six years of school and didn’t have the closure of a graduation ceremony. The implications is obviously that after what he’s been through he didn’t need it, but it still leaves the series feeling incomplete: It was always at its best when portraying the wizarding experience, not when dealing with the threat of the dark lord. (Indeed, the early books are at their cheesiest when the Voldemort rears his head.) The epilogue would have worked better had it focused on the specifics of where Harry’s life had gone after the events of the series, rather than the overused “circle begins anew” approach we’re given with our heroes’ children. The Wikipedia entry fills in some other information, but it’s not the facts but their presentation which is the flaw here.)

I wonder how Harry Potter will be remembered in the future? My guess is that 20 years from now it will be recalled as a best-selling series, but not a particularly good or groundbreaking one. Children’s fantasy series such as Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time, C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, and John Christopher’s Tripods trilogy (all from the 1960s) are still memorable decades later, for new generations of readers, but I don’t think Harry Potter will be among their company.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Michael Rawdon — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 05:17:43 +0000

This afternoon we went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I was not enthusiastic about seeing this entry in the film series because I hated the book. Fortunately, the film is quite a bit better than the book. Unfortunately, the story still isn’t very good, and the movie is, like the book, the weakest of the series.

Director David Yates thrws down the gauntlet at the beginning of the film that he’s a director, dammit with a fade-in to Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) marking time in London and being tormented by Dudley Dursley (Harry Melling) and his cronies: The playground Harry’s in is bleak, Harry’s sitting on a swing, and there are various dramatic camera angles and pans during the opening sequence, when Harry and Dudley are attacked by Dementors. On the one hand it all seems a little too ostentatious, but on the other hand given how easy it would be to do a rote adaptation of Order, I appreciated anything Yates did to liven things up.

And actually Order is the most visually appealing entry in the series after Prisoner of Azkaban: Hogwarts and its environs look beautifully rural, in a dangerous-looking, untamed way. The Order’s safe house is crammed with decor and stuff. The Ministry of Magic is large and imposing and by turns claustrophoic and paranoiac. The thing is really very pretty to look at, and the camerawork fits in pretty nicely.

The film jettisons a lot of the chaff of the book – as it has to, in order to finish in under 12 hours – and at its core are two truths: That the story works best when focusing on Harry’s relationships with his friends and allies, and that the plot feels basically entirely superfluous to the overall arc of the series.

The plot of the story, basically, is this: In Goblet of Fire Harry saw Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes without a nose) come back from the dead. While Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) and his allies believe him, Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy) and the Ministry of Magic do not, and they believe the Harry’s pronouncement is both a public nusiance, and that it’s part of a power play Dumbledore is making towards the Ministry. Consequently Fudge installed Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) at Hogwarts to push Dumbledore out and squash Harry’s spirit.

In other words, the larger plot boils down to Harry trying to convince those in charge that what really happened, happened!

This leads to some character bits that are both good and bad: Harry spends the early part of the film brooding and feeling alone, which is pretty annoying and just rings false for the character. On the other hand, he ends up in the middle of the resistance against both Umbridge and Voldemort, putting him in a position of authority and trust, where he’s an admirable figure. Radcliffe is much better at playing the hero than the petulant young man, so the latter scenes are a lot more fun. (Radcliffe, by the way, is filling out and looks quite buff – rather different from the stringbean that Harry is.)

The film also points out that the Potterverse is getting weighed down with an awful lot of characters, many of whom no longer get much screen time: Ron (Rupert Grint) has hardly anything to do in the film, Snape (Alan Rickman) has only a small role, Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) appears for just two scenes, Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) is also only in a few. Evanna Lynch is quite good as Luna Lovegood, but the character feels irrelevant. Staunton is appropriately nauseating and loathesome as Umbridge, but she never really gets her comeuppance on-screen, so all the build-up doesn’t have an appropriate catharsis. Even the film’s best moment – the Weasley twins’ kissing off to Umbridge, to a fantastic bit of music by composer Nicholas Hooper – feels like it was tacked on awkwardly.

All things considered: Order does its best to make order out of Order, it’s pretty to look at and has its moments, but it’s still pretty much a mess, mainly because of the source material. It should delight plenty of Harry fans, but I think Azkaban is going to end up being the apex of the movie series.

My Reviews of Earlier Harry Potter Films: