I am as excited for the new Harry Potter book as everyone else. I mean, come on, you want to see the end of even a bad movie, right?
But Jane Galt echoes something that I have been thinking for a long time about the series: Harry can be such a tool and his buddies aren't the sharpest tools in the shed either. I sympathize with Snape half the time. I understand. Being surrounded by well-meaning incompetence is enough make anyone turn to the dark side. At least Voldemort knows how to run an adequate organization, though being constantly confounded by school children draws even his capacities into question.
I think it was Order of the Phoenix when I started thinking this, largely because the book is composed of 600 pages of whining and 100 pages of actual events.
Anyway, Jane Galt writes similar things:
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.
Having just seen the Order of the Phoenix movie, Harry -- tool though he was -- would have been completely justified in saying: "Well you know what, Dumbledore? Sorry just ain't gonna cut it because you have really screwed me here. The only justifiable reason you would have withheld information of this nature is the desire to shield me from the possibility of death by friendly fire."
Now it is possible that Rowling will pull this all together in the end with an act of unexpected competence or insight on the part of any major character. However, I think the much more likely scenario is as Galt puts it:
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.
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Sounds like you and Galt are forgetting it's a children's book. You are trying to hold it to the standards of an adult novel - it's not. The fact that it may be an anagram for something a 7 year old recognized is exactly the point - kids like to feel smart, like when they figure something out in a book a long time before it happens.
Listen, I have no expectation that these books will be Dickens, but I do think it is a reasonable expectation that books addressed to children will have characters that children should desire to emulate.
On balance, Harry is an emulatable character until book 5, when he becomes a total goober that no kid in their right mind should imitate. Oddly enough, this corresponds to him become a teenager...
Also, I think kids like to feel smart, but if you low-ball their intelligence by making it too easy it won't work. Not only will you not make them feel smart, you will insult their intelligence. That is hardly a way to inspire them to read more.
Books 5 and 6 were flabby and needed a lot more editing. I suppose that Rowling has been getting constant pressure from her publishers to pump out manuscripts since book 3 or 4. She stopped writing tightly and has ended up with bloated whales of books. Well, I'm still reading them all but I think the last few could have been a lot better if the author had been given more time for writing and revisions.
Remember how they tied the x-files together at the end? That was pretty amazing. I doubt Rowling is capable of such a thing.
Given the choice I'd pick Harry Potter over Dickens any time. True, in books five and six Harry certainly was not a role model, but what male teenager is? I'm looking forward to your post on the ending of Harry Potter, though, because there is one thing I'm not quite sure I understood right.
I know that the first thing I do when reading a novel with an unsympathetic character is rearrange the letters in their name, to see if it's something significant hidden in a way only specially-aware people would notice.
Oh, wait - no I don't, because that would be totally insane.
I gave up on the Harry Potter series several books ago. Not only did they need major editing to tighten up the story, every novel had the same plot:
I know you can reduce most novels to an absurdly simple level, but for the HP series, that's all there was. I just didn't see what all the fuss was about.
>>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
Sounds like Galt might have missed out on the fact that the anagram thing was revealed several books earlier...