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| Friday, September 11, 2009 06:16 AM |
| (Last updated on Friday, September 11, 2009 08:33 AM) | | Re-Potterizing: Progress Report 2 |
 by Fëanor |
Some further thoughts on Harry Potter, now that I've finished reading Goblet of Fire again (warning: tons of spoilers for any of you slackers who haven't read the books yet):
Things I love:
- The Creevey brothers, especially the scene wherein Dennis arrives at Hogwarts and is terribly excited to tell his brother that he fell in the lake, and even more excited when he learns he was probably pushed back out again by the resident giant squid.
- And as long as we're talking about great characters who are brothers, how about a hand for Fred and George Weasley? They might be my favorite characters in the entire series: so cool and so funny.
- The ridiculously awful presents the Dursleys get for Harry. In the fourth book they reach a new low by sending him a single tissue for Christmas.
- It's neat that in Goblet of Fire the world J.K. Rowling has created really opens up and reveals itself to be much larger than we at first realized, as we come to meet wizards from other countries and learn of other wizarding schools. At the same time, the characters we know are growing, their minds expanding. Romance and desire are beginning to enter their lives.
- There's a great scene in Goblet of Fire during the Yule Ball when, to illustrate how little he knows about the mysteries of his own school, Dumbledore tells a story about waking up in the middle of the night, needing to go to the bathroom, and coming upon a room full of chamber pots that he'd never seen before, and that he was not able to find again afterwards. He postulates that perhaps it only appears if one is in great need of it. Reading it through the first time, this just seems like another funny, eccentric Dumbledore story, but after you've read the later books, you realize Dumbledore is actually telling Harry about the Room of Requirement here. It's a cool moment.
- Another interesting moment of foreshadowing comes when Harry tells Dumbledore that Voldemort used Harry's own blood to bring himself back to life. Harry notices a brief look of triumph on Dumbledore's face before the Headmaster covers it up. Has he already realized what this means, and how it will lead ultimately to Voldemort's undoing?
- Goblet of Fire would definitely be my favorite book yet if it weren't for the fact that the plot doesn't make much sense to me. (More on that later.) It's a very funny and exciting book, but also deeply moving and effective. The focus this time is on loss, persecution, self-deception, and dealing with the tougher things in life. The ending is particularly powerful. And man is it satisfying when everybody hexes the crap out of Crabbe, Goyle, and Malfoy. (UPDATE: It's also satisfying seeing Rita Skeeter get caught red-handed by Hermione and get some of the comeuppance she so richly deserves.)
- I love these books, just in general. I was sitting on the train reading Goblet of Fire one day and realized I had a huge smile on my face. So much fun!
Although I still think Rowling's plots are impressive and complex pieces of clockwork, some of them have some logical flaws that really bug me.
- One of the lesser issues I have is with Prisoner of Azkaban: If Sirius recognized Peter in rat form instantly from just seeing a photo of him in the newspaper, why didn't Lupin recognize him, as well? It seems to me he certainly would have seen him, either in that newspaper article, or when Ron brought him to class. Of course, it's vaguely possible (though unlikely) that Lupin simply doesn't read the newspaper, or didn't look at that particular picture. And it's also possible that Ron never brought Scabbers to class, or never had him out where Lupin could see him; after all, for a good portion of the school year, Scabbers was missing, and for the rest of it, Scabbers was freaking out and trying to escape from Crookshanks and Padfoot. It's also vaguely possible (though again unlikely) that back in the old days, Lupin only ever saw Peter in rat form while Lupin himself was a werewolf, and thus he didn't remember very well what Peter looked like as a rat.
- One of my biggest problems in terms of plot logic is with the central conceit of Goblet of Fire. I just don't understand why it's necessary for Barty Crouch Jr. to go through the considerable trouble and danger of pretending to be Mad-Eye, smuggling Harry's name into the Goblet of Fire, and fixing the Tri-Wizard Tournament so Harry would win it, when all Crouch really had to do was turn any random object into a Portkey and trick Harry into touching it. Or even just ambush Harry in Hogsmeade, stun him, and apparate them both to the graveyard. Either plan would certainly have made things quicker and easier for everyone involved. I suppose the argument is that Crouch couldn't have done either of these things while Dumbledore was nearby, but could Dumbledore really have sensed Crouch doing Portkey magic, suspected something was wrong, and come running in time to stop Crouch from tricking Harry into touching said Portkey? I'm not convinced he could have, since he certainly didn't notice all the other trickery Crouch was using during the school year.
- When Harry tells Sirius Black about overhearing Karkaroff talking to Snape, and pointing to something on his arm, Black tells Harry he has no idea what this could mean. But it seems highly unlikely to me that Sirius Black, an original member of the Order of the Phoenix and an old school dark wizard fighter from way back, wouldn't recognize a reference to the Dark Mark tattoos. We learned earlier in the book that the Dark Mark in general is well known in the wizarding community; wouldn't it also have been well known that all Voldemort's followers had a big ugly one on their arms? I mean, surely after apprehending enough dark wizards, Aurors would have started noticing that they all had the same tattoo, and they would have broadcast this information so it was easier to spot supporters of Voldemort. Or do the Death Eaters have some way of hiding the tattoo when amongst their enemies? I mean, besides the obvious way of wearing long-sleeve shirts. (UPDATE: poppy pointed out to me that the visibility of the Dark Mark tattoos seems to vary at the whim of Lord Voldemort [they get darker and darker as the book goes on, then by the end they've lightened considerably, though you can still see them], so it's very possible he could have made them vanish when he needed them to vanish. But it still seems very odd that Sirius Black wouldn't have heard about them.)
- In most cases, the changes made in the process of adapting the books to films were bad, but I quite like the change they made in terms of how Harry learns how to breathe underwater for the second of the Tri-Wizard Challenges. It never made sense to me that it would be so hard to find some bit of magic that would allow one to breathe underwater. In the book, Harry, Ron, and Hermione do an enormous amount of research in every book they can find in the school's library, and yet are unable to find anything useful. That's unbelievable to me, especially since the other challengers find other ways of dealing with the problem which must have been mentioned in some book somewhere. Learning how to breathe underwater seems to me to be a far more practical skill than the other things they're being taught during the school year (such as how to turn a hedgehog into a pincushion), and surely various basic books of magic would mention how to do it.
Of course, we learn later on that the one book in the entire school, apparently, that mentions Gillyweed is the one that Crouch gave to Neville earlier. He assumed Harry would ask Neville for help and Neville would tell him about the weed. This makes sense, and this is indeed what happens in the movie. (In the book Crouch has to stage a loud conversation about Gillyweed in front of Dobby, so Dobby will take the information to Harry.) Also, in the movie, while they do make it clear that Harry and his friends have been doing research on the problem, they don't make the unbelievable claim that they've looked through practically every book in the school and still come up empty.
A final miscellaneous item: for a long while, I was deeply disturbed by the subplot about the House Elves and Hermione's S.P.E.W. activist group. The way I was looking at it, Rowling's inclusion in her magical universe of a race of creatures that is enslaved, but enjoys being enslaved, could only be a nasty metaphor for some real-world situation. What was Rowling trying to say?? But as a friend of poppy's recently pointed out to me, there are people in life who are really like that, and maybe Rowling was just pointing out this fact. It also works as foreshadowing of, and as a parallel to, the type of self-deception that we will see later in this book and the next one, when Fudge and other wizards refuse to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Voldemort has returned. |
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