More Plots and Idiots
Sep. 8th, 2005 11:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvessel30 Aug 2005
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling - Bloomsbury, 2005
* * *
Were it not that she has become one of the richest people in the country, it would be tempting to feel sorry for J.K. Rowling. The huge weight of expectations that the Bloomsbury marketing machine has generated must have placed a tremendous strain upon her as she was writing this book. In addition she has the problem of the law of diminishing returns that afflicts any sequel set in the same location and with the same characters. So how has she fared? Well, the good news is that on the whole this book is up to her previous standards - the inventiveness is still present, there is at least one entertaining new character (the celebrity-obsessed Professor Slughorn) and the dialogue sparkles as always. The bad news is that some of the plotting flaws are even more in evidence than in the previous one.
The book starts promisingly with an amusing chapter where the (unnamed) muggle prime minister is visited by Rufus Scrimgeour, the new Minister for Magic. This suggests that the satire of modern Britain begun in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will be developed. Sadly this isn't the case. There are a couple of interesting (and disturbingly prescient) scenes where Scrimgeour tries to recruit Harry to be the poster boy for the Ministry's ineffectual and unjust get-tough policy against the Death Eaters, but other than that the world outside Hogwarts more or less goes into stasis once our heroes arrive there. In fact the opening chapter and the following one should have been cut - they add no information that is not stated again later on, and they stick out awkwardly because they are the only chapters that are not told from Harry's point of view. One gets the impression that they were added at the insistence of Rowling's editor to aid the hard of thinking.
As usual, Rowling sets up a number of mysteries to be solved during the school year - What is Malfoy up to and how does he manage to disappear completely from the school grounds despite the additional magical protections that Dumbledore has placed? Who is the Half-Blood Prince, whose text book Harry acquires by accident? Why on earth is Dumbledore so insistent on showing Harry scenes from Voldemort's early life, rather than just telling him what's going on? - but compared to the plotting of the previous books, they seem ill thought through. One major problem is that there is an absence of significant developments during the middle of the school year. Harry spends weeks trying to find out what Malfoy is up to, for example, but simply fails. If this thread had appeared in some of the earlier books, Malfoy's machinations would have been more complicated, allowing Harry to find out a little at a time in a series of encounters. In the case of the Harry/Dumbledore thread, the plot is got moving again by a device that is so hackneyed that Rowling herself clearly has difficulty believing it, and resorts to a magical maguffin to paper over the improbabilities. The Half-Blood Prince plot is the most disappointing of all, suffering as it does from a bad case of idiot plotting with Harry, Ron and Hermione failing to spot something that should have been blatantly obvious.
Rowling covers up the longeurs in the mystery plots with sub-Buffy-style relationship developments (lots of hurt looks and petty misunderstandings) which are rendered somewhat less plausible by the requirement for the physical intimacy to stop at the snogging stage (I've come to the conclusion that there must be a spell cast on Hogwarts that prevents its adolescent inhabitants from having or even thinking or talking about sex. This would explain why sex education is absent from the school curriculum - nobody would know what the teacher was talking about).
All that said, the book is an easy and addictive read, and the climax is rather more of a page-turner than the previous one. The events that transpire are not exactly a surprise and appear to rest on more idiot plotting, but in this case I suspect that there is a rather cleverer reason for them. The other pointers set up for the next book are, however, ominous. For a start, there are so many loose ends that I can see it being longer than Lord of the Rings (to her credit, Rowling managed to vitiate my pessimistic prediction by producing a book that is 150 pages shorter than the previous one, though it should have been even shorter). I sincerely hope that it doesn't become the tiresome plot-token hunt that the set-up suggests that it might, but given the lack of thinking that has gone into this one, I wouldn't be surprised. Finally, the initials mystery really must be resolved in the very first chapter - I'm almost certain I know who it is, and if a semi-detached reader like myself can work it out, you can guarantee that the legions of die-hard fans will have done so as well and published it all over the web.
So, a good but flawed read from a good but flawed writer. I look forward to the final book in the series but only with moderate enthusiasm.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling - Bloomsbury, 2005
* * *
Were it not that she has become one of the richest people in the country, it would be tempting to feel sorry for J.K. Rowling. The huge weight of expectations that the Bloomsbury marketing machine has generated must have placed a tremendous strain upon her as she was writing this book. In addition she has the problem of the law of diminishing returns that afflicts any sequel set in the same location and with the same characters. So how has she fared? Well, the good news is that on the whole this book is up to her previous standards - the inventiveness is still present, there is at least one entertaining new character (the celebrity-obsessed Professor Slughorn) and the dialogue sparkles as always. The bad news is that some of the plotting flaws are even more in evidence than in the previous one.
The book starts promisingly with an amusing chapter where the (unnamed) muggle prime minister is visited by Rufus Scrimgeour, the new Minister for Magic. This suggests that the satire of modern Britain begun in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will be developed. Sadly this isn't the case. There are a couple of interesting (and disturbingly prescient) scenes where Scrimgeour tries to recruit Harry to be the poster boy for the Ministry's ineffectual and unjust get-tough policy against the Death Eaters, but other than that the world outside Hogwarts more or less goes into stasis once our heroes arrive there. In fact the opening chapter and the following one should have been cut - they add no information that is not stated again later on, and they stick out awkwardly because they are the only chapters that are not told from Harry's point of view. One gets the impression that they were added at the insistence of Rowling's editor to aid the hard of thinking.
As usual, Rowling sets up a number of mysteries to be solved during the school year - What is Malfoy up to and how does he manage to disappear completely from the school grounds despite the additional magical protections that Dumbledore has placed? Who is the Half-Blood Prince, whose text book Harry acquires by accident? Why on earth is Dumbledore so insistent on showing Harry scenes from Voldemort's early life, rather than just telling him what's going on? - but compared to the plotting of the previous books, they seem ill thought through. One major problem is that there is an absence of significant developments during the middle of the school year. Harry spends weeks trying to find out what Malfoy is up to, for example, but simply fails. If this thread had appeared in some of the earlier books, Malfoy's machinations would have been more complicated, allowing Harry to find out a little at a time in a series of encounters. In the case of the Harry/Dumbledore thread, the plot is got moving again by a device that is so hackneyed that Rowling herself clearly has difficulty believing it, and resorts to a magical maguffin to paper over the improbabilities. The Half-Blood Prince plot is the most disappointing of all, suffering as it does from a bad case of idiot plotting with Harry, Ron and Hermione failing to spot something that should have been blatantly obvious.
Rowling covers up the longeurs in the mystery plots with sub-Buffy-style relationship developments (lots of hurt looks and petty misunderstandings) which are rendered somewhat less plausible by the requirement for the physical intimacy to stop at the snogging stage (I've come to the conclusion that there must be a spell cast on Hogwarts that prevents its adolescent inhabitants from having or even thinking or talking about sex. This would explain why sex education is absent from the school curriculum - nobody would know what the teacher was talking about).
All that said, the book is an easy and addictive read, and the climax is rather more of a page-turner than the previous one. The events that transpire are not exactly a surprise and appear to rest on more idiot plotting, but in this case I suspect that there is a rather cleverer reason for them. The other pointers set up for the next book are, however, ominous. For a start, there are so many loose ends that I can see it being longer than Lord of the Rings (to her credit, Rowling managed to vitiate my pessimistic prediction by producing a book that is 150 pages shorter than the previous one, though it should have been even shorter). I sincerely hope that it doesn't become the tiresome plot-token hunt that the set-up suggests that it might, but given the lack of thinking that has gone into this one, I wouldn't be surprised. Finally, the initials mystery really must be resolved in the very first chapter - I'm almost certain I know who it is, and if a semi-detached reader like myself can work it out, you can guarantee that the legions of die-hard fans will have done so as well and published it all over the web.
So, a good but flawed read from a good but flawed writer. I look forward to the final book in the series but only with moderate enthusiasm.