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Oh, JKR will find a way to make it take place in and around Hogwarts: she’s too married to the school-story template to give that up, even though it became a serious liability about three books ago and nearly cripples the narrative this time around.
I mean: We’ve got open warfare, killing sprees, dope, wands, and magic in the streets—or so we’re told. But because of where we are, the war remains mostly a rumor, a background inconvenience—it only becomes real in the final chapters, in a small-scale raid on Hogwarts that about 80% of the students sleep through, and which results in exactly three casualties. I’m not suggesting that Hogwarts be the site of a Beslan-style siege or something, but here at last was an opportunity for La Rowling to expand beyond her formula... and she wimped out on us.
Y’know, Tolkien worked in a similar atmosphere of little people caught up in big events, with cozy English villages humming with murmurs of distant, dreadful conflicts: but eventually he managed to get his provincial little Englishmen up and into the big world and onto the front lines. The hobbits didn’t have to sit around forever waiting for the war to come to them.
More thoughts on structure and technique: With its relentless single viewpoint, the Potter series is really a detective story, isn’t it? I mean, we don’t find out anything until Harry does, and much of the story is spent getting Harry in a position where he can find things out. Extendable ears, invisibility cloaks, house-elf and ghost spies, veritaserum, polyjuice potions, secret passageways, pensieves, bottled prophecies—much of the magic and mytsery of these stories goes towards gathering and retrieving information, piecing together clues. The stories are not so much about things happening to Harry as about Harry learning about things that have happened. “Bowl of Exposition”? hell the whole series is exposition!
(I don't think it's any coincidence, Baz, that the chapters that worked the best were the only ones not told from Harry's viewpoint. He's a nice kid and all, bu being uinside his head all the time—it gets claustrophobic after three thousand pages or so.)
Baseless assertion: If you restructured these books as Event Stories rather than as Idea Stories, and made judicious use of the third-person omniscient voice, then you could knock a third off the page count of any of these books.
On sexuality: I find it amusing that La Rowling, perhaps intending to head the shippers off at the slash, spends Book 6 busily heteronormalizing the Potterverse. Hermione ends up with Ron—I think we could all se that one coming; Harry somewhat belatedly and unconvincingly realizes that he has actually fancied Ginny Weasley all along. Neville Longbottom is matched with Luna Lovegood (whose guileless, occasionally excruciating forthrightness plays nicely off Harry, who moves always in a web of deceit and half-truths), while Lupin—speaking of unconvincing—is paired off with Tonks, despite his protestations that he’s really not the marrying kind
Draco, though.... ah, dear Draco. The Snape/Harry fans will be disappointed by this volume, but the Draco/Snape contingent will be soiling their green-and-silver underthings. They’ve got some primo scenes this time around, mm-hm. Even more amusing: even though some early scenes rather perfunctorily try to establish Draco and Pansy Parkinson as a het pair, he spends much of the book, as usual, hanging around with Crabbe and Goyle—only C & G are polyjuiced into the form of young girls. (At one point Harry, invisible, glides up beside a disguised Goyle—knowing it’s Goyle—and whispers unnervingly in his/her ear, “You’re very pretty, aren’t you...” Laugh? I nearly spunked.)
One last thought (for now): Re: the Horcruxes: Book 6 of a seven-book series is kind of late in the day to introduce a whole new set of MacGuffins into the mix, isn’t it? |
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