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And I've stolen secrets from the sorcerer's own sage
Well. Now I've read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Hm.
[edited 2005-07-18 22:06]
(Cut because my reply to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
the_red_shoes ran away to the Isle of Skye with me.)
Keep in mind that I read all six hundred and seventy-two pages of this book* in the space of about two hours, sitting in the cookbook aisle of the local Barnes & Noble. I did not buy the copy, because I have no money; so I cannot cite either page numbers or direct quotation, and I will almost certainly need to re-read if I am to discuss the book in great detail. Meanwhile, I will keep as much away from spoiler-content as possible, because I reserve the possibility that somewhere in the world are people who might like to read Half-Blood Prince with as little prior knowledge as possible, but anyone who wishes is free to introduce specific material into the discussion. All right? May this be at least a partial answer to your question.
There is a feeling I have had since the fourth book that only intensified with the fifth, and it may have hit critical mass with this installment. What frustrates me most about Harry Potter is that in the hands of a better writer—not competent, but brilliant—it could be monumental literature. This is not a joke. J.K. Rowling is fantastic with names.** Her ability to blend extant folklore and personal invention may not be unparalleled, but it is impressive; she has been known to deploy grotesquerie alongside realism with the stylishness of Mervyn Peake (albeit none of his rich and ridiculous flair for language) and I love how her spells, like any number of real-world incantations before them, are nearly all screwy Latin and cockamamie Greek. There’s very little in the basic structure of her wizarding world that has not been done before, and often done better, but the details are consistently individual. But. Creation of an worthwhile universe and cast of characters does not necessarily guarantee a worthy follow-through. As the potential for the series builds, so does the potential for it all to come crashing down in flinders and stupidity, and I am beginning to wonder if J.K. Rowling is hitting the current limits of her own talent.
In broad strokes, she has arranged in various configurations a host of diverse and distinct characters—including Harry, in fact—whose affiliations are involved and ambiguous, whose motives are not always clear, some of whose histories are high drama and some unremarkable and some flaming shrapnel disasters, and turned them all loose on one another. The weight of the past has been steadily accumulating in Harry's life ever since he came on the Hogwarts scene in Philosopher's Stone, until finally it has caught up with him and flung him out on his own devices. There is no one who remains uninvolved: Harry has, as it were, inherited the last forty years of wizarding history as his own. Yet for all the wealth of characters that J.K. Rowling has to work with, she does not seem interested in exploring any of them—with a very few exceptions—in much more depth than their immediate plot significance.*** This strikes me as an outrageous waste. Every now and then, a scene surfaced that achieved real emotional pull, and therefore I was doubly annoyed every time I saw another possibility for intricate character work casually elided in favor of romantic minutiae or melodrama.
Which brings me to the issue of pacing. From about the fourth chapter on, I couldn't shake the persistent sense that even more so than Goblet of Fire or Order of the Phoenix, both of which could have done with some hefty editorial interference, Half-Blood Prince was two stories that had been spliced into the same book. One mostly concerned itself with teen romance and the sort of daily tragicomedy-of-errors that life turns into when the hormones really start to kick in, and the usual set-pieces of life at Hogwarts: classes, spells, Quidditch, et cetera. The other had a knot of murky and intriguing relationships,**** a puzzle-quest that was hardly the (mostly) bloodless conundrum of earlier books, an offstage character who provoked almost as much interest as his onstage counterpart, and an actual emotional stake. And as far as I cared, the teen romance could have been almost entirely excised and I wouldn't even have come to see it off at the station.° In its place, a fair number of pages might have been freed up for the further examination of plot points that I found woefully underused.
The conceit of the Half-Blood Prince fascinated me, for example, but the execution left me wanting. What does that storyline actually accomplish, other than to give Harry brilliant marks in Potions? He may save Ron's life and pick up a few new spells, but the broader ramifications of the information contained in the eponymous Prince's book—not to mention its author—somehow sink without a trace. Likewise, the notion that wizardly civil war has spilled over into the mundane world made me perk up my ears, but the matter never re-emerges once the opening chapter has delivered its exposition. The further backstory of Tom Marvolo Riddle makes for entertaining reading, but seemed oddly detached from the rest of the story except insofar as it provided clues to the nature of Voldemort's Horcruces;°* and we all know how Dumbledore loves the sound of his own voice, but everyone seems to have caught the bug here. The book really wouldn’t have suffered from a thirty percent reduction in after-the-fact explanatory dialogue. In short, the novel is massively unwieldy. The dark and daylight worlds of the narrative never cohere, plot threads awkwardly intersperse one another, and the story all but stalls for two-thirds of the book. For nearly seven hundred pages' worth of words, surprisingly little seems to have happened; and most of what really interested me took place in the first two and the last three or four chapters. And chiefly had to do with Snape. And may, depending on how the seventh book comes out, make me deeply unhappy.
All right, this all sounds like a death sentence, doesn't it? And if I say that I am still planning to read the seventh book, you'll ask me why I haven't had my head examined. Well, ask away. I want to see if J.K. Rowling can pull the conclusion off. If nothing else, I did enjoy that for once in the universe of Harry Potter, the book does not end with the riddle solved and Harry off on summer vacation and the world, however temporarily, saved; instead, the puzzle pieces aren't what you thought they were, the world has been kicked hard in the tush, and everyone is standing around blinking and saying, ". . . whaha?" So I want to see where the story goes from here. I am worried. I do not trust J.K. Rowling implicitly—and in some ways, I'm left amazed that she's created as much weirdness and complexity as she has—and I fear that she will not be able to close the story in anywhere near as resonant a fashion as this whole towering house of cards and wands deserves. But she's got one book left. I'm curious. And masochism springs eternal.
Oh, and go read the book. I need people to discuss it with now . . .
*To appropriate a line I read in someone's livejournal: HOLY FLAMING COW, does J.K. Rowling need an editor! (Okay. Caps-lock off. It’s safe to come out now.)
**I freely concede that I am biased in favor of classically-derived names, because I feel there aren't enough of them in current use, but she rarely stretches them to the extent that they become unintentionally ridiculous. Given how magic is frequently portrayed as a system that science has superseded—outcompeted by transistors and combustion engines; the relic of an older world—while Rowling's wizards are simply up-to-date on a different technological path, the sense of antiquity inherent in many of her characters’ first names effectively conveys both archaism and familiarity. Sirius Black serves as a handy example: one doesn't have to speak Latin to recognize the first name as old-fashioned and slightly mythical, while the last name might have been picked out of any phonebook in the English-speaking world. There's her modern wizardry right there: a fusion of times and traditions.
***The obvious bone of contention here is Snape, to whom she devoted a beautifully intriguing scene near the opening of the novel and a plot thread that I would have liked to see pursued in far more thoughtful detail than Rowling evidently felt necessary, and then I feel rather as though she hung him out to dry. I am not speaking in terms of good, evil, morality, any of that (although I am sharply afraid that she has dispensed, one way or another, with the ambiguity that initially caught my interest: we will have to see how Book Seven falls out). My objection is not even because Severus Snape is the character in whom I have the most intellectual and emotional investment. The point is that he is not irrelevant to the plot of Half-Blood Prince—all right, he's integral to several angles of the story—and I would have liked to see him given the weight in the text that his role demanded. But even if I leave Snape aside for a moment, the complaint remains. Draco? Narcissa? Tonks? Payoff suffers when a character essentially steps out of the woodwork to perfom their appointed plot-shove and then disappears back in again. And the woodwork in this novel was practically a revolving door at times.
****This footnote contains spoilers, although hopefully couched in terms obscure enough to keep me from being bludgeoned to death with unread copies of Half-Blood Prince. Between the Unbreakable Vow, Draco's assignment, what Snape tells Narcissa and Bellatrix about himself and what Dumbledore tells Harry about Snape, the Draco-Dumbledore-Snape triangle of obligations, duplicity, and lives at stake would have made a novel in itself. (I was vaguely reminded of The Scarlet Pimpernel, especially the 1934 film version with Leslie Howard, Merle Oberon, and Raymond Massey, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Oh, and while we're on the subject, I bet Raymond Massey would have played a marvelous Snape.) Except for the indisputable fact that J.K. Rowling clearly wasn't interested, I'm still not sure why it wasn't. I suppose watching characters pair off is just not my cup of herbal tea . . .
°My personal preference, of course; but all the scenes that really took my fancy were in the darker thread, and a number of them felt so hastily sketched for time that I might actually have been more annoyed with their unrealized potential than if J.K. Rowling had left them out entirely. The adolescent breathlessness of who's Ginny dating now? will Harry ever find a soulmate? is Lavender going to stop calling Ron "Won-Won" before one of his friends feels honor-bound to kill her? not only clashed with the increasingly darker atmosphere of the other storylines, but hardly made up for the loss of possibilities. See footnote #3, for the same problem approached from the angle of individual characters.
°*I will confess, Voldemort seems to be challenging Koschei the Deathless for Weirdest Places To Keep One's Heart—or soul; whatever—at the moment. I think I like that. I remain unconvinced that Rowling had the concept of the Horcruces planned ever since Chamber of Secrets, whatever Dumbledore may claim, but I'm fond of the idea that committing murder fragments one's soul.
Hm.
[edited 2005-07-18 22:06]
(Cut because my reply to
the_red_shoes ran away to the Isle of Skye with me.)Keep in mind that I read all six hundred and seventy-two pages of this book* in the space of about two hours, sitting in the cookbook aisle of the local Barnes & Noble. I did not buy the copy, because I have no money; so I cannot cite either page numbers or direct quotation, and I will almost certainly need to re-read if I am to discuss the book in great detail. Meanwhile, I will keep as much away from spoiler-content as possible, because I reserve the possibility that somewhere in the world are people who might like to read Half-Blood Prince with as little prior knowledge as possible, but anyone who wishes is free to introduce specific material into the discussion. All right? May this be at least a partial answer to your question.
There is a feeling I have had since the fourth book that only intensified with the fifth, and it may have hit critical mass with this installment. What frustrates me most about Harry Potter is that in the hands of a better writer—not competent, but brilliant—it could be monumental literature. This is not a joke. J.K. Rowling is fantastic with names.** Her ability to blend extant folklore and personal invention may not be unparalleled, but it is impressive; she has been known to deploy grotesquerie alongside realism with the stylishness of Mervyn Peake (albeit none of his rich and ridiculous flair for language) and I love how her spells, like any number of real-world incantations before them, are nearly all screwy Latin and cockamamie Greek. There’s very little in the basic structure of her wizarding world that has not been done before, and often done better, but the details are consistently individual. But. Creation of an worthwhile universe and cast of characters does not necessarily guarantee a worthy follow-through. As the potential for the series builds, so does the potential for it all to come crashing down in flinders and stupidity, and I am beginning to wonder if J.K. Rowling is hitting the current limits of her own talent.
In broad strokes, she has arranged in various configurations a host of diverse and distinct characters—including Harry, in fact—whose affiliations are involved and ambiguous, whose motives are not always clear, some of whose histories are high drama and some unremarkable and some flaming shrapnel disasters, and turned them all loose on one another. The weight of the past has been steadily accumulating in Harry's life ever since he came on the Hogwarts scene in Philosopher's Stone, until finally it has caught up with him and flung him out on his own devices. There is no one who remains uninvolved: Harry has, as it were, inherited the last forty years of wizarding history as his own. Yet for all the wealth of characters that J.K. Rowling has to work with, she does not seem interested in exploring any of them—with a very few exceptions—in much more depth than their immediate plot significance.*** This strikes me as an outrageous waste. Every now and then, a scene surfaced that achieved real emotional pull, and therefore I was doubly annoyed every time I saw another possibility for intricate character work casually elided in favor of romantic minutiae or melodrama.
Which brings me to the issue of pacing. From about the fourth chapter on, I couldn't shake the persistent sense that even more so than Goblet of Fire or Order of the Phoenix, both of which could have done with some hefty editorial interference, Half-Blood Prince was two stories that had been spliced into the same book. One mostly concerned itself with teen romance and the sort of daily tragicomedy-of-errors that life turns into when the hormones really start to kick in, and the usual set-pieces of life at Hogwarts: classes, spells, Quidditch, et cetera. The other had a knot of murky and intriguing relationships,**** a puzzle-quest that was hardly the (mostly) bloodless conundrum of earlier books, an offstage character who provoked almost as much interest as his onstage counterpart, and an actual emotional stake. And as far as I cared, the teen romance could have been almost entirely excised and I wouldn't even have come to see it off at the station.° In its place, a fair number of pages might have been freed up for the further examination of plot points that I found woefully underused.
The conceit of the Half-Blood Prince fascinated me, for example, but the execution left me wanting. What does that storyline actually accomplish, other than to give Harry brilliant marks in Potions? He may save Ron's life and pick up a few new spells, but the broader ramifications of the information contained in the eponymous Prince's book—not to mention its author—somehow sink without a trace. Likewise, the notion that wizardly civil war has spilled over into the mundane world made me perk up my ears, but the matter never re-emerges once the opening chapter has delivered its exposition. The further backstory of Tom Marvolo Riddle makes for entertaining reading, but seemed oddly detached from the rest of the story except insofar as it provided clues to the nature of Voldemort's Horcruces;°* and we all know how Dumbledore loves the sound of his own voice, but everyone seems to have caught the bug here. The book really wouldn’t have suffered from a thirty percent reduction in after-the-fact explanatory dialogue. In short, the novel is massively unwieldy. The dark and daylight worlds of the narrative never cohere, plot threads awkwardly intersperse one another, and the story all but stalls for two-thirds of the book. For nearly seven hundred pages' worth of words, surprisingly little seems to have happened; and most of what really interested me took place in the first two and the last three or four chapters. And chiefly had to do with Snape. And may, depending on how the seventh book comes out, make me deeply unhappy.
All right, this all sounds like a death sentence, doesn't it? And if I say that I am still planning to read the seventh book, you'll ask me why I haven't had my head examined. Well, ask away. I want to see if J.K. Rowling can pull the conclusion off. If nothing else, I did enjoy that for once in the universe of Harry Potter, the book does not end with the riddle solved and Harry off on summer vacation and the world, however temporarily, saved; instead, the puzzle pieces aren't what you thought they were, the world has been kicked hard in the tush, and everyone is standing around blinking and saying, ". . . whaha?" So I want to see where the story goes from here. I am worried. I do not trust J.K. Rowling implicitly—and in some ways, I'm left amazed that she's created as much weirdness and complexity as she has—and I fear that she will not be able to close the story in anywhere near as resonant a fashion as this whole towering house of cards and wands deserves. But she's got one book left. I'm curious. And masochism springs eternal.
Oh, and go read the book. I need people to discuss it with now . . .
*To appropriate a line I read in someone's livejournal: HOLY FLAMING COW, does J.K. Rowling need an editor! (Okay. Caps-lock off. It’s safe to come out now.)
**I freely concede that I am biased in favor of classically-derived names, because I feel there aren't enough of them in current use, but she rarely stretches them to the extent that they become unintentionally ridiculous. Given how magic is frequently portrayed as a system that science has superseded—outcompeted by transistors and combustion engines; the relic of an older world—while Rowling's wizards are simply up-to-date on a different technological path, the sense of antiquity inherent in many of her characters’ first names effectively conveys both archaism and familiarity. Sirius Black serves as a handy example: one doesn't have to speak Latin to recognize the first name as old-fashioned and slightly mythical, while the last name might have been picked out of any phonebook in the English-speaking world. There's her modern wizardry right there: a fusion of times and traditions.
***The obvious bone of contention here is Snape, to whom she devoted a beautifully intriguing scene near the opening of the novel and a plot thread that I would have liked to see pursued in far more thoughtful detail than Rowling evidently felt necessary, and then I feel rather as though she hung him out to dry. I am not speaking in terms of good, evil, morality, any of that (although I am sharply afraid that she has dispensed, one way or another, with the ambiguity that initially caught my interest: we will have to see how Book Seven falls out). My objection is not even because Severus Snape is the character in whom I have the most intellectual and emotional investment. The point is that he is not irrelevant to the plot of Half-Blood Prince—all right, he's integral to several angles of the story—and I would have liked to see him given the weight in the text that his role demanded. But even if I leave Snape aside for a moment, the complaint remains. Draco? Narcissa? Tonks? Payoff suffers when a character essentially steps out of the woodwork to perfom their appointed plot-shove and then disappears back in again. And the woodwork in this novel was practically a revolving door at times.
****This footnote contains spoilers, although hopefully couched in terms obscure enough to keep me from being bludgeoned to death with unread copies of Half-Blood Prince. Between the Unbreakable Vow, Draco's assignment, what Snape tells Narcissa and Bellatrix about himself and what Dumbledore tells Harry about Snape, the Draco-Dumbledore-Snape triangle of obligations, duplicity, and lives at stake would have made a novel in itself. (I was vaguely reminded of The Scarlet Pimpernel, especially the 1934 film version with Leslie Howard, Merle Oberon, and Raymond Massey, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Oh, and while we're on the subject, I bet Raymond Massey would have played a marvelous Snape.) Except for the indisputable fact that J.K. Rowling clearly wasn't interested, I'm still not sure why it wasn't. I suppose watching characters pair off is just not my cup of herbal tea . . .
°My personal preference, of course; but all the scenes that really took my fancy were in the darker thread, and a number of them felt so hastily sketched for time that I might actually have been more annoyed with their unrealized potential than if J.K. Rowling had left them out entirely. The adolescent breathlessness of who's Ginny dating now? will Harry ever find a soulmate? is Lavender going to stop calling Ron "Won-Won" before one of his friends feels honor-bound to kill her? not only clashed with the increasingly darker atmosphere of the other storylines, but hardly made up for the loss of possibilities. See footnote #3, for the same problem approached from the angle of individual characters.
°*I will confess, Voldemort seems to be challenging Koschei the Deathless for Weirdest Places To Keep One's Heart—or soul; whatever—at the moment. I think I like that. I remain unconvinced that Rowling had the concept of the Horcruces planned ever since Chamber of Secrets, whatever Dumbledore may claim, but I'm fond of the idea that committing murder fragments one's soul.
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