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| Monday, 16 July 2007 |
| Rereading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix |
I'd had the idea I'd have some huge Harry-fest before Deathly Hallows came out, but actually I've read the first four books so many times - and had Stephen Fry read them to me - that I could practically recite them in my sleep, and did manage to read Harry Potter à l'ecole des sorciers (book one in French) largely without a dictionary. So I thought I'd start with this one.
I didn't like OotP much when it came out. It felt huge and inadequately edited, with too many adolescent tantrums. The quote from Dumbledore ("now I am going to tell you everything") was the one on the back of the book, the one being widely quoted when it first came out, and that was what was driving my desire to read the book. The supra-volume story arc was what I was interested in, in Voldemort and Harry and Questions of Good and Evil. And because I had to wade through so much other stuff, I got pissed off.
Now I know what happens, it's actually a much better book. For one thing, I like the moral ambiguity: I've always liked Snape because it's not certain which side he's on, and even if he is ultimately against Voldemort, he's still not a very nice person, and let's face it, that's much more interesting that the nicey nice characters in the book (Weasley family... yawn). And here, Rowling takes great pains to emphasise that there is more to evil than Voldemort: she uses that exact word about Umbridge, "she's evil!", about a dozen times. Fudge too, well - fudges. All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,* especially when they really don't want to believe that the evil is actually happening. I've long wanted Harry's world to become more complex: it seemed completely ridiculous in the earlier books that "the most evil wizard ever" could be defeated by a couple of first year students and expelliamus.
I remembered the book as full of Angry!Harry, which didn't strike me so forcibly this time. Instead, it seemed like rather a good portrait of what being fifteen is like: confusing, arbitrary, and caught up by other people's rules and priorities.
The scene in the Department of Mysteries, however, still leaves me utterly unmoved. I can't imagine how Rowling can have reduced herself to tears "killing" Sirius like that, because he seems less to die than to trip over and fall through a curtain (and naturally now, there are a million theories all over the internet saying that he isn't actually dead...). I'm rather dreading the at-least-three deaths we've been promised in DH, because I don't think she does death scenes very well. Voldemort's "kill the spare" in GoF was chilling and repulsive as a line, but like Cedric himself, it was just a throwaway, totally superceded by Harry Being Heroic.
What she did do well was Bellatrix Lestrange. Beautiful. I feel fanfics coming on... Is Bella/Voldie just too weird?
By dint of having moved country since my last reading of it, I've managed to lose my copy of Half-Blood Prince. Fortunately the replacement has just arrived from Amazon, so I'm taking the afternoon off to read it.
* A friend of mine, another eBay seller, has the sig line "all that is required for eBay to triumph is for good men to sell nothing", which has me in fits every time.Labels: Harry Potter |
| posted @ 11:58 |
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