oh, very well

[calimac]

Figuring that somebody will spill the beans on the surprises sooner or later, I went to the bookstore yesterday and read the last 150 pages of Harry Potter VI.

It took about half an hour. Big type. Lots of white space. Lots of skimmable sludge.

I remember actually enjoying the first book in this series, but there's not a power in the 'verse could get me to go back and read the first 500 slabs of this tome.

I opened the tome in the middle of a long conversation between Harry and Dumbledore. They're trying to figure out what Voldemort is trying to do. It's not a patch on conversations in which Frodo and Gandalf are trying to figure out Sauron. It's difficult to keep reading the page when one's eyes are rolling over picayune back-reference distinctions between what Voldemort did two years ago, what he did four years ago, and what he did five years ago. I've never been able to remember which things happened in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Secrets and which happened in Harry Potter and the Fire of Ashbacan.

Throughout the new book, Harry lectures down at his professors and other superiors like an arrogant little sh*t.

I found out who the Half-Blood Prince is. I did not find out why it matters.

I found out who got killed. It was exactly the person I had expected. What I did not expect was the identity of the murderer. By using that person, Rowling has thereby undercut what I'd considered one of the most charming aspects of her series all the way back to book one. The remaining characters spend the closing chapters wondering why the victim had been foolish enough to trust the murderer. Good question.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Well, the evidence is there that the murderer was in fact acting a part in an agreement with the murderee.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

You mean the murderee agreed to be murdered?

"If you kill me," said Obi-Wan, "I shall become more powerful than you ever imagined." And Darth thinks this is a good idea, so he agrees to pretend to be bad?

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

First of all there was that poison that was drunk, and then just before the murder, the victim was begging--and I really think was begging for an ending.

It's all fairly obvious, to make it more bearable for the kid reader--I suspect if you'd trod through the previous 500 pages, you'd see where it all was going.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That doesn't make the murderer an angel of mercy, any more than Gollum is one for Frodo.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

No angel of mercy indeed, but someone on the right side though hiding, someone made difficult through years of mistreatment, who might end up being the actual hero of all the stories, and not Harry.

(Which was not obvious in the early books...my wonderment is, is the author re-shaping the character to fit the splendid actor who plays his cinematic self?)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

So the child reader is supposed to get all this, but Harry, Ron, and Hermione do not?

Rowling is a bad enough writer that I can well believe it will turn out in book 7 that Harry totally misinterpreted the murderer's scowl of revulsion and hatred just before the event.

I wouldn't buy it, and I don't buy the connection between the murder and the poison either. That was some time earlier; he had ceased being in quite such a state of extremis.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Well, we shall see!

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

As I have been saying, Bruce came to that conclusion without any prompting from me (he read the book after I did, and I don't burden him with my fannish proclivities), so I have the feeling that it's the reading (that the murderer was doing what the murderee wanted) that Rowling intends. I certainly hope so.
I wouldn't like the series half as much if what I consider the best lesson therein (don't let your prejudices color your actions) is undercut by a "ha ha, this person was EXACTLY what he was thought all along"....

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

If that is the reading the author intends, then I have to come to the conclusion that she's become an extraordinarily bad author indeed, after a promising start. See the other comments on this post.

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

When I originally read it, I thought that it was murder (since, like you, I wanted to know what happened, and so I read the last three or four chapters first). When I read the whole book, it seemed extraordinarily clear that Rowling intended this to be a mercy killing of sorts, or at least something that the person being killed WANTED done and in fact ORDERED done. YMMV. I do think that Rowling is a good storyteller in the sense that she can suck you into the world, despite authorial choices that are cliche or badly thought out, and despite plot holes that make you wince when you think about them, but you still need to know what happens. I care about the characters quite a bit, even though I recognize that they are cutouts indistinguishable from a thousand others in children's literature.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I read more than the last few chapters. If it's supposed to be a mercy killing because the victim was so severely under the weather, to put it mildly, from previous activities, then I don't buy it: 1) I thought the victim had been beginning to recover; 2) the killer showed no signs of awareness of this or that this was his intent; 3) if it had been clear, Harry should have figured it out, and he didn't.