Upload date: April 27, 2008

WELL!!

Well.

Weeeeell…

No. I’m sorry. All is NOT “well”.

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So. Here we are now, nearly a year down the road from the release of the final book of the series.

People’s reactions have mostly sorted themselves out, sometimes at a glacial pace, and people have been increasingly able to articulate just what those reactions actually were. Unfortunately, although one might have expected that the worst of the shock would be over by now, and everyone would be beginning to move on, from what I am observing, that expectation seems to have been grossly inadequate. The worst is not over at all. In fact, as time goes by and people become progressively more articulate about just what and how they are reacting to the series as a whole, the general dissatisfaction among a significant minority (or maybe it is a majority) of the older fans only seems to be increasing.

And as if that were not awkward enough, a counter-reaction appears to be gaining a groundswell, too. Some of the groundswell lot didn’t even like the book all that much on first reading themselves. But the initial whinging annoyed them — which was reasonable enough — and the steadily growing articulation of the sustained dissatisfaction has prompted them to make a determined effort to smother it. I do not know whether these are mostly people who are simply being pushed out of shape by the general lack of “nice”, or whether it’s the fact that having now expressed our dissatisfaction, we have not simply gone away leaving the field to the “JK Rowling, right or wrong”, fans that offends them.

Yes, I said “we”. You are all welcome to list me among the fans who do not regard ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ as a fitting conclusion to the series. It isn’t. On the strength of some of her earlier performance, I think we had a right to expect better from Rowling.

And, frankly, being perfectly capable of coming up with no shortage of snotty rejoiners of my own, I find myself tempted to tell the “groundswollen” to “just go away” themselves if they are so perfectly convinced that there is nothing more to be said on the subject because Rowling’s word is law. If that were the case, then, clearly, no one would feel any need to say anything, whatsoever. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be my experience, and neither does it seem to be a lot of other fans’ experience, either.

And I think one might as well get used to the fact that the dissatisfied are NOT going to be going away any time soon, so the whole thing is all just bound to get worse for a while. We, the disappointed, have just as much invested in this series as any of the Rowling-worshipers. And permit me to point out that to think that the final book was a train wreck doesn’t mean you retroactively reject the whole series.

For my own part, I’m still not altogether convinced that the “carpet book” isn’t a hoax on at least some — perhaps unconscious — level, after all. Although I am fully aware that it is all we are likely to get. Short of writing our own.

Frankly, I find it difficult to regard DHs as even being a part of the rest of the series, as it now stands. Even the style of the writing in it (to say nothing of the style of the reasoning) does not match up to that of the previous six books, and it hardly connects at all to the two books that preceded it, with which one would have reasonably expected it to have been most closely intertwined. Rowling may not have ever been a “brilliant” writer from a purely technical standpoint, but much of the storytelling (let alone the grammar) dumped on the reader in the final book is barely even competent. HBP was widely accused of “reading like fanfic” when it came out, but this was a truly jarring downward transition even from HBP. This was no “controlled descent,” this was a flat-out “crash and burn”.

I find myself still trying to determine just where it all went wrong. It’s irresistible. Like picking at a scab.

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ETA: it wasn’t until after I had already uploaded the whole revised collection back at the end of October that I finally came to the conclusion that the reason Book 7 doesn’t seem to fit the rest of the series, is because it really doesn’t fit. It really isn’t a part of the same series. You can make a fairly good argument that with Book 7 Rowling simply stepped outside of telling us a fantasy adventure story, and engaged in a bit of “therapeutic” writing.

In the course of which, after six books of “displacement activity”, she at last braced herself, rolled up her sleeves, set Albus up as a punching bag, set Harry up as her own avatar, and finally came to grips with the psychodrama of bringing herself to the point of being able to forgive a god who remained out of reach, wouldn’t answer a question directly, wouldn’t explain his plans, and had just sat back and let her mother die.

Which, considering that the whole Potterverse project is where she hid out during a time that she could hardly bear to deal with a world in which her mother was unfairly, and far too early dead, makes a certain kind of emotional sense, but psychodrama doesn’t always make for very satisfying stories for anyone but the person writing them.

It doesn’t really blend that well with the “other things” that you have been using to distract yourself from coming to grips with the main issue, either.

The main problem of course, is that therapy is a field in which one size manifestly does not fit all, and the average reader did not need to take an active part in JK Rowling’s private grief therapy, but found themselves dragged into it whether they wanted to be or not. For Rowling, the experience may actually have been a resounding success. But the exercise wasn’t exactly a story. And it certainly wasn’t the same story we thought we had contracted to read.

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One thing, at least, is evident. This was the kind of place where the average fanfic author has a tremendous advantage over JK Rowling.

Most fanficers use betas. In fact they are encouraged to use betas.

Fanfic betas discuss the story’s development as it is being written. They can help the author identify potential dead ends or plot holes, and they can suggest solutions. If you’ve got a good beta (or more than one) they can help make the story so much stronger than it would be if you just locked yourself in a room and wrote until you finished it.

Rowling couldn’t do this. The wizard locked up in his tower with a Great Work in train had nothing on JK Rowling.

My understanding (which is admittedly inexpert and 2nd-hand) is that professional editors usually only deal with the manuscript after it is finished. They will discuss things with their authors while a work is in progress if the author asks them to, but generally they deal with finished manuscripts rather than works in progress.

When your series of seven novels has morphed into a mega-media event, and people are wagering large sums of money on the outcome of the story, potential leaks have become a major issue. So you just do not discuss the story with outsiders. And I am not convinced that you can rely on someone in your editors’ office not to leak information. Leaks can be well-paid, either in legal tender of the realm, or in notoriety, which to some people is just as valuable. So you just don’t take chances.

Which right there may say something about the source of the veritable inundation of readily-fixable problems that we’ve had in the last three books in the series. Rowling didn’t have a beta.

She also claims not to reread her own work after it has been published. And I think we can take that statement at face value.

Lack of a beta surrogate could also account for the increasingly shallow and melodramatic tone of the last three books as well. And the increasingly confused rendering of their climaxes. Good editors (or betas) also help to steer an author away from excesses of tone. Rowling needs a firm editor, and she didn’t have one.

She did have an editor (possibly more than one) for the first four books. We know this to be the case. She has described various editorial changes to the first four books on her official website. But I haven’t seen any mention there of any editorial changes made to the last three.

And, for that matter, I don’t get the impression that either HBP or DHs were edited at all. Proofread, yes, but not edited.

Once you start viewing the last three volumes of the series as unbetaed fic, many of the problems a lot of us have with them fall right into place.

****

Not that I hadn’t a fair share of misgivings before the last book came out. HBP had a lot of problems. Many of them readily avoidable. OotP undoubtedly did too, but they weren’t quite as noticeable, since the story hadn’t veered so far off track yet. In retrospect, the overriding problem with OotP is that virtually nothing we were given in the course of it turned out to be of the slightest significance later. Most of that book turns out to have been a colossal waste of our time. You cannot say that of any of the first books. Particularly the first three books. Each of those books gave us something to build upon.

OotP just gave us a lot of distractions that kept us occupied us until HBP came out.

As anyone might have predicted: with the announcement of the title of the 7th book, the internet exploded in speculation.

The forthcoming final book of the series was to be entitled: ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.’

As I say; I had misgivings.

For one thing, do you think she have come up with something tackier if she tried as hard as she could with both hands for a week?

I was so not impressed.

Not that I thought it was likely to really matter. When you take a clear overview, Rowling’s books stopped being “about” their titles after PoA.

PoA came out in 1999. It also was the last of the series to escape before the media blitz became international and really kicked into top gear. Even though GoF came out only one year later, by the time it saw the light of day the fan community was an entirely different environment. Where the first three books were run-away successful children’s books, the 4th was a media “event”.

That was also the point at which the amount of necessary background information required by the story threw the page count out of control. And it was also the point that the editors lost their grip on their purpose. There were indeed edits in GoF, but already, meeting the release date had become paramount, and the book escaped with some real problems. In retrospect, I think this is probably the point at which the series really began to go off the rails.

And there was so much going on inside the series by that time that I think it slipped notice that the books were no longer about their titles.

A widely-known working title for GoF had been ‘HP & the Doomspell Tournament’. That was a fairly late working title, because that one actually went public before the book was released and the final title of “Goblet of Fire” came as a bit of a surprise to everyone. A title of “Doomspell Tournament” would have been at least as central to the story as “Prisoner of Azkaban” had been. It would have also been every bit as tacky and melodramatic as “Deathly Hallows”. (I think we can probably take it that the tackiness and melodrama are native to Rowling herself. I doubt that an editor would have come up with that.)

Goblet of Fire was not. The Goblet also didn’t have a whole lot to do with the story. The Goblet of Fire played the role of an inanimate Sybil Trelawney. It was carried in, got confunded, spouted something that tossed Harry into the soup, boogied off and we never saw it again. We didn’t need to. Everyone just had to deal with the mess. It was the McGuffin. It wasn’t the story. In fact, looking back, it was one of the first in a far too extensive series of disposable plot devices; use once and discard.

The Order of the Phoenix was the same thing. Harry was escorted from the Dursleys to Order Headquarters by a group of the Order’s members. He was introduced to them and spent the rest of the summer under their protection.

Did he join the Order? No. Was he asked to join? No. Did he take part in their plans? No. Did he interact with the members of the Order in the course of their duties in any meaningful manner throughout the entire book? Nope. Not even that. He spoke to his Godfather and Remus a couple of times, but he’d have tried to do that anyway, Order or no Order.

The Order was just about totally irrelevant to the course of the actual story — until they finally showed up like the 7th cavalry to rescue Harry and his friends when they had disobeyed their instructions to stay out if it and not meddle with Albus’s scam du jour. The Order was some bright, shining promise of inaccessible adventure out on the periphery. It was not the story. It never became the story.

The Half-Blood Prince was a somewhat different proposition, I agree, but he wasn’t the story either. Or not the main story.

He surfaced early in the year and was Harry’s little helper, very much as Tom had pretended to be Ginny’s “friend that she could carry around in her pocket.” Except that the Prince wasn’t pretending; the fellow scribbling in the Potions book didn’t know that Harry existed.

And while Harry was happy to take the Prince’s potions advice and use his spells, once he realized that the half-blood Prince could not very well have been his own pure-blooded father, he didn’t much care who the Prince might have actually been. Although he couldn’t help being a bit curious.

Not nearly as curious as he was over what Malfoy was up to, though.

It was Hermione who got the bit between her teeth and was determined to prove to Harry that the Prince was not the wonderful fellow Harry thought, kicking up a continuing mystery over his identity. And that was primarily because the Prince had her nose thoroughly out of joint. (Hermione seems to have gone through the whole of Year 6 in a jealous snit over one thing or another.)

And by the time we got our noses rubbed in the Prince’s true identity, it didn’t really matter. It was a nice little slap in the face for Harry — who one rather wanted to slap by that time — to discover that his mysterious Prince was only a teenaged Severus Snape, but Harry had already learned his lesson that the Prince was just as dangerous as any other wizard, and that to blindly follow anyone is likely to prove to be a mistake (a lesson he did not think to apply to Albus). We were never even told whether he took the trouble to rescue the potions book from the Room of Hidden Things later in hopes that it might reveal some of his “enemy’s” secrets. The impression one is left with is that once he knew who the Prince was, he couldn’t care less about him or his secrets.

Unlike the Order, however, the Prince himself did take an active (if unconscious) part throughout the book which bears his name. Ron would not have survived if Harry hadn’t had access to the Prince’s book. Nor would Harry have won the bottle of Felix that enabled him to retrieve the critical memory from Slughorn, and to get his closest friends through the first “Battle of Hogwarts” unscathed.

But the story wasn’t really about the Prince the way PoA was about Sirius Black. It was about Malfoy’s mission, and the official Riddle backstory. The Prince, scribbling away in the margins of his own textbook back in the 1970s, had nothing to do with either of those.

In fact, by the end of the book it was clear that the whole Half-Blood Prince subplot was completely irrelevant to the story of what was going on during Harry Potter’s 6th year at Hogwarts. Harry desperately needed access to the information in the Prince’s old potions text, but he never needed to know the Prince’s identity. If there was any reason at all for Harry needing to know that the book was Snape’s old potions text, that was a shoe that had yet to fall. In fact, it is a shoe that never did fall. The whole issue simply didn’t matter.

So, I thought that we might be putting way too much emphasis on the Deathly Hallows of the final book’s title. We would encounter them, certainly, (whatever they were), and they would probably be pivotal in some manner or other. But the story would probably not be primarily about them. Either they would be the McGuffin that kicks off a major part of the adventure, or they will be some gaudy peripheral issue that Harry cannot access, until the final showdown.

(Boy howdy, did I ever call that one correctly.)

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As long as we are playing around with the books’ titles, maybe we ought to make a list of the titles we’ve got and take a capsule look at them all before moving on:

All of 3 (the first three) out of the 7 titles were of things that Harry legitimately needed to find, or find out what they were, or confront, in order to discover how they related to what Voldemort, or whoever the enemy du jour was up to.

Philosopher’s Stone: it was the target/bait. Harry had to find out what it was before he could know that Voldemort was after it. Then he felt he had to personally keep Voldemort from getting it. He ought to have just kept out of the whole business, since his interference only made a bad situation worse, but he did not realize that. Many readers still don’t.

Chamber of Secrets: Harry needed to find out what it was, find out where it was, get into it (for which he was uniquely qualified), and then destroy the monster in it that was attacking people. Until he found it he couldn’t do anything to put an end to the situation.

Prisoner of Azkaban: Harry thought he needed to keep Sirius Black from finding him. Actually he needed to confront Black in order to learn the truth about his parents’ deaths.

Goblet of Fire: the Goblet was the McGuffin that pitched him into the action. I suppose you could say that he needed to find out who had rigged it. But mostly he just needed to rise to the challenge it threw at him and keep from getting himself killed.

Order of the Phoenix: Harry didn’t really need to do anything in Year 5 but keep his head down, his mouth shut, and pay attention to his schoolwork. Later, he needed to learn to block out Voldemort’s interference with his mind. He didn’t do a focused job of any of these. And ultimately (as in PS/SS), he exceeded his authority and made a bigger mess of matters than necessary, even though it did put an end to an ongoing situation which had been ongoing for far too long.

Half-Blood Prince: Harry needed to ignore the distractions and pay attention to Albus’s assignments. Yes, he was facinated by the novelty of the Prince’s secret spells and potions instructions, but he had comparatively little interest in finding out who the Prince actually was, once he realized he couldn’t be his father, James Potter. It was Hermione who was determined to follow that thread.

What Harry was running after in Year 6 was what Malfoy was up to. From where Harry was standing, Malfoy had no connection to the HBP of the potions book whatsoever. And, again, this was a situation Harry had been told repeatedly to keep out of.

Interestingly, when he finally got his nose rubbed in the answer to the mystery of just who the Prince was, it was the last thing he wanted to know. So the whole big mystery of who the HBP was eventually just boiled down into the punch line of a very ironic joke on Harry.

Deathly Hallows: the Hallows were Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald’s little obsession nearly a century earlier. They had absolutely nothing to do with the underlying problem of Tom Riddle, although, interestingly, over the years Tom had managed to get hold of two of the “Hallows” without any idea of what he had. Albus, who in the last year of his life now knew where all three of the Hallows were, convinced himself that they might give Harry an edge and made a half-arsed effort to see to it that Harry should find out what they were, and to try to make them all accessible to him.

He couldn’t be bothered to do the job in a straightforward manner, of course, and that Harry finally ended up with them at all owed more to authorial fiat than to Albus. I’m not convinced Harry, or any of us, needed to actually know about them, although Harry would still have needed some plot device or other form of assistance to get him past the Dementors to get to his suicide appointment with Tom. And it seems in the cards that he was always going to be escorted to that meeting by his parents.

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That said, during the final waiting period before DHs came out, the more I re-examined and committed to the probability that the expected Snape confrontation would have to be traversed successfully before the showdown with Voldemort. The longer I considered the matter, and the example of PoA was examined, the more likely it seemed that Snape was going to be the one to give Harry some key element or information that Harry was going to need before he would be able to face Voldemort with any hope of success.

And I called that right too. Not that the issue was ever really in doubt.

****

Permit me to make a pause, and state here and now that J.K. Rowling is an aggravating writer. She never comes right out and tells you what you think you need to know. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s deliberate to some degree. And it certainly engages the reader more than the passive “sit back and I’ll tell you a story” approach.

By the spring of 2006, my respect for Rowling’s skills in plotting was gradually recovering from the shocks of HBP. It never quite reached its former high point, before DHs blew it away altogether, but then I always have been quick to point out that we were, after all, dealing with a new, basically inexperienced writer who had yet to manage to finish telling her first story. And since at least what at first appeared to be two of the most egregious contradictions in HBP’s storyline, on closer examination turned out to look like fairly major clues to fairly major issues, I was once again inclined to recommend extending her the benefit of the doubt.

I was even willing to entertain the notion that she may have actually had a convincing reason for spending five and a half books setting up the contention that you cannot Apparate or Disapparate anywhere in Hogwarts Castle — which Dumbledore confirms on pg 60 of the U.S. HB edition of HBP — then underscores by informing us that the Headmaster personally lifted these restrictions for the Apparation class in the Great Hall — and only in the Great Hall, and only for the duration of the lesson — and then turns around and claims that Montegue, who hadn’t even managed to pass the test, somehow managed to Apparate into Hogwarts from the cabinet. (No such luck.)

However, we were already beginning to get some clear signs that she isn’t as good at tieing off a tale as she is at spinning one out. This is not an uncommon problem, and one that even outstanding authors may be prone to.

But she did now appear to be stacking the deck against herself.

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Imho, neither of the previous two books had really been all that satisfying, and the endings of the previous three (#s 4, 5, & 6) were all unnecessarily muddled and melodramatic. Rowling does not have a sound touch for drama. She keeps going for flashy when she would have a far more powerful statement by sticking to simple.

Plus, a lot of her imagery is right out of video games, which, I’ll admit that at my age, I have a hard time regarding as a legitimate art form, regardless of how clever the special effects or sophisticated the animation. The fact remains that the printed word is not animated.

For that matter, computer whiz-bangs do not constitute a story, damnit. And, when irrelevant, they do not improve a story either. They are distracting, they are annoying, and they are the kind of cheap shot that even very good writing would have a difficult time pulling off. From a purely technical standpoint, Rowling’s writing skills are not up to it.

The previous three books were also where the series spun completely out of control. And the balance seems to be somehow off in all of them. GoF has problems (largely due to its ludicrous premise, and the fact that virtually nothing which was originally assumed to be jumping-off spots for future action turned out to be anything of the sort) which may or may not be partially due to the major retrofit that Rowling claims she had to perform in the middle of it, on a deadline, after a fairly grueling 1 year = 1 book schedule which had gone on for 4 years.

OotP was so thoroughly out of balance that every time Dolores Umbridge showed up I just wanted to quit reading, and had to push through a wall of resistance. Encountering the villains ought not to make the reader want to quit reading a book! When this happens, something has gone badly wrong.

HBP was much easier to get through than OotP, which was a relief, but then it drove me nuts with all of its contradictions to earlier canon and the persistent failure to build on the foundation of new information that had been laid in OotP.

And the book itself was disgracefully padded. However offended I may have been at the discovery that I’d been sold a series of school stories about a teenaged dropout, by the time DHs was pending I had finally realized that by HBP Rowling seemed to have gotten fed up with the whole school story framework herself.

The school story framework no longer really served the story she was trying to tell, either. The subplot of HBP does not have anything to do with the central plot, and the plot, subplot, and background information which she seemed to be trying to give us over the course of the book all appear to have been arbitrarily stretched out over the framework of a whole school year, stapled down in the few places where a handful of key incidents were allowed to happen, and the gaps filled in with Quidditch woes and chest monsters.

Neither of which advanced the plot At All.

Dumbledore could have shown Harry the whole Pensieve presentation of the Life and Times of Tom Marvolo Riddle by Halloween, certainly by the Christmas break. Instead he drags it out until about what, April? Rowling had a story to tell us, and she made it fit into one school year, but she didn’t really have enough *story* to fill a full school year, given how much information she still wanted to keep holding back on us. We ended up spending much of the book spinning our wheels and being bored to death by ’shipping developments. All of which were played strictly for laughs, when they really weren’t particularly funny.

And having the Half-Blood Prince turn out to just be Snape did nothing but please the Snape fans by giving them the “überSnape” to play with for a couple of years. At the end of which period Rowling snatched him away, and wouldn’t let them keep him, when they really would have liked to.

Instead, he got replaced somewhere in the middle of in DHs by clueless!Emo!Snape, who came out of nowhere and doesn’t seem to even have the potential to develop into the “half-blood Prince” — who we are now supposed to believe was the *same person* writing his clever little spells and brilliant potions procedures in his textbook at the very same time that this gormless new iteration was being nagged and browbeaten by a “best friend” who was looking for an excuse to dump him. I’m sorry, but the Snape of ‘The Prince’s Tale’ is simply not the same person as the Half-Blood Prince of HBP at all.

And, after the fact, it really doesn’t even turn out to matter what the true identity of the Half-Blood Prince was for the purposes of the story. The whole discovery serves only as the punch line of a protracted joke on Harry. (And perhaps to underscore the fact that when the subject is Snape, Harry never seems to get it right.) It’s the tail of a shaggy-dog story. If there ever was a purpose to it, it never managed to surface. Once that sinks in, the whole exercise becomes just plain annoying.

We can tell when we are being palmed off with fluff.

****

Smoke and mirrors. There is just way too much smoke and mirrors in this series. I was finally beginning to be relieved by the prospect of Harry not returning to class in Book 7. I hoped that maybe without forcing the final segment into the artificial frame of the school year, Rowling would finally settle down and tell the story without the kind of dreary time-wasting that she subjected us to in HBP. And give us some decent pacing for heaven’s sake.

(Oh, if only, if only. Instead, she decided she had to string the action out over the time required to get us through Tonks’s pregnancy. It was only once Teddy Lupin was properly born that she finally stopped screwing about and finished the story off in a rush.)

By the beginning of 2007, I truly suspected that the whole 6th book was a massive piece of misdirection. Rowling had blindfolded us, spun us around, and pointed us in the wrong direction.

That’s allowable. But then she went farther, and got up our collective noses by ignoring or dismissing all of the issues that she had raised in OotP and had flagged as important. Metamorphomagi? Get over it, Tonks is just another silly, lovesick girl. The Locked Room in the DoM? Legilimency and Occlumency? The Veil?

Fuggedaboutit! Doesn’t matter. None of it matters. At the end of the series it still doesn’t matter.

We’d been faithfully following along, like good little fans, for anything up to a decade, gathering up all the clues and hints she dropped and trying to sort them out and piece them together into a coherent pattern, and she suddenly blew us a raspberry, mocks us with a deliberately silly teen lurve soap opera, and introduced a whole new storyline. (Which she then threw out in turn, and dragged us all off into winter camping and grief therapy.)

We spent three bloody years of our lives waiting for Book 5 and now she tells us that what was in it doesn’t matter?! That what really matters is these new Horcruxy things? Of course we’re offended.

As readers we enjoy being tricked, especially if the trick is clever. Why on earth would people read murder mysteries otherwise? But this wasn’t even clever. It was insulting.

It took a while to recover our balance.

****

It was during this interlude that I belatedly came to the realization that reading the Harry Potter series is rather like watching ‘Moulin Rouge’. Both are obviously cobbled together of predominantly recycled elements. Rather trite elements at that. Interspersed with intentional silliness.

So here we have a musical with songs that were never designed to relate to one another, dance numbers that never quite ever materialize, and the whole tied to a transparently thin and basically ludicrous storyline, with huge set pieces that are just sort of there without any really convincing logic to them at all.

‘Moulin Rouge’ is fractionally more cynical and self-consciously “ironic” in its presentation, and Potter a tad more conservative-minded and mean-spirited, but both are highly entertaining. And both are such awkward bundles of stuff that it is laughably easy to find a hook somewhere in there to hang “meaning” upon.

Rowing has demonstrated a fine talent for assembling pre-existing elements into an entertaining product. Her writing skills unfortunately, are fairly rudimentary, which is a bit frustrating. I wish that I could see what someone with really good writing skills could have done with the same elements. But that is something that none of us will ever see. Or not out where we can recognize it, probably.

But even years ago I was beginning to wonder whether the fact that Rowling was such a newbie may not be the reason she had managed to keep the balls spinning in the air so long. Her experience at writing wasn’t varied enough to be aware that it usually doesn’t work that way.

****

I’m afraid I’ve come more and more to the opinion that Rowling is the kind of author who simply doesn’t think. So to look for an analytical interpretation of anything in the series is probably an exercise in frustration. She paints what is intended as impressive word pictures, essentially vignettes, mainly on the basis of how they are supposed to push your buttons and make you feel, without ever considering how they are supposed to fit together. This sometimes produces a considerable emotional impact, if you are at all sensitive to that kind of jerking around, but it doesn’t necessarily make sense. And sometimes they just plain backfire. Such as when Snape and Yaxley meet in a dark lane, enter through the gate, cross a dark garden, are admitted into a dimly lit entry hall, and are ushered into a sitting room lit by a roaring fire, and then pause for their eyes to adjust *to the “lack of light”* WTF?! Aren't their eyes already attuned to low light?

Several of these issues are still slowly coming into focus. And one of the sharpest is the awareness that the world Rowling assembled is simply a lot bigger than the narrow-focused, smug, anglo-centric view of it she gave us.

Because when you come right down to it, it is clear that she never really intended to build a solid secondary world to put her story in. She simply didn’t do the groundwork. Instead, she has ended up with this weird amalgamation that she threw together — which is highly detailed in some areas, and only vaguely sketched in elsewhere with several great gaping holes where you least expect them, to fall right out of the story through.

But, back when she assembled this pretend world, she used the best possible materials available.

She mined folklore, and classic (written) tales that have been pretty fully absorbed by the culture, as well as ancient myth, and symbolism that has been around for centuries, she mimiced the really traditional “tropes” of how stories are put together and how they work, and she did it with a free hand.But I’m no longer convinced that she did it all consciously. I think she slung a lot of them together because they just felt right together. Sure, sometimes she tweaked them before she deployed them, or renamed them, or trivialized the hell out of them (unicorns are NOT equines, regardless of what you try to tell me. They’re monsters), but she hardly ever invented something new. Most of her elements already existed. The only thing in the Potterverse that is really original are some of her combinations.

Consequently, as I say, she ended up with something that is a lot bigger than she is. And which upon first encounter comes across as a lot more etrudite than she probably really is too, because all of the elements she used came already equipped with their own baggage, and a whole pre-existing collection of associations which all originally led someplace. And most of them are so widely known and/or so universal that even with a 2nd or 3rd-rate education, you are able to recognize them, and are at least somewhat aware of what those particular elements usually mean.

And they are all thoroughly documented, so you can find out what the original source meant if you are at all curious. But that doesn’t mean that she ever intended to use any of that. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is certainly bigger than the shallow, petty, and mean-spirited viewpoint that she keeps pushing into the foreground and expecting us to use as a lens.

And it’s very small wonder that — now she has invited the public to come and check it out by getting it published, a lot of the fans are determined to keep it for themselves. It’s small wonder that — even as awkward and incomplete as her version is — once a lot of fans find their way into the Potterverse, they aren’t in the least bit ready to leave just because Harry’s story is over.

They want to explore this incomplete world, and have a go at patching some of the holes themselves. Closing off Harry’s story was as welcome as being finally rid of an irritating docent who keeps going on and on about the glories of the accomplishments of one modern splinter group when what you want to do is to examine the base that the splinter group was building upon.

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But, then, I’m also noting that there have been any number of other writers in the past 25 years or so who break into the field and then settle down to writing series fiction, and it takes several books before it gradually dawns on you that they are just writing the same story over and over. In Rowling’s case, she’s been still writing the same story, and it really is the same story! Or at least it was supposed to be the same story. The acid test will be when she tries to write something else, and we then see whether that turns out to be the same story too.

But the thing is that the story that we’ve got does pretty heavily resemble the teen soap opera that a lot of the fans disparaged it as after working their way through HBP. This world is missing large chunks of the necessary foundation, and various of what look like major elements have never been explained any more than Sateen’s elephant (i.e., why an elephant?) — until you have to wonder whether these are real elements of the story, or just set-dressing deployed to serve as local color, or a vaguely looming threat in the background.

While the series was still open, we could still hope that there would be a payoff due regarding the inconsistencies. And we expected that there would be for at least some of them. But we knew there wouldn’t be for all. There were just too many of them by then.

And I think it was the fact that the series was so close to its recycled components which is why so many fans read it, were entranced by the character (stereo)types’ interactions, and decided; “Hey, I can do that!”. And in a remarkably high percentage of the time, they could. There is a reason why the Potterverse has spawned so much fanfiction.

But “story” in itself is not “literature”. It is an essential component of literature. Literature cuts and polishes story and deploys it like the central gem in a well-designed piece of jewelry. The Potter series is practically pure story, given just enough facets to make it sparkle, and then dumped naked into the marketplace. All of the veils of “literary meaning” that have been draped around it by its more serious-minded fans, most of whom were familiar with the components that Rowling built her world from, were just as likely as not to turn out to be hallucinations. And many of them have.

And yes, my respect for Rowling as a writer suffered a major hit after HBP, since it appeared that she spent most of the book contradicting everything that she had spent the previous 5 books establishing. Particularly things she had just established in OotP — which we had waited for three years to get. I felt like I had been caught in a nasty little piece of bait-and-switch, and I was Not Amused.

After 2-3 months, however, I finally began to recognize that some of the most infuriating of these contradictions could just possibly be clues. And if those were, some others may be as well. And some of the apparently irrelevant details dropped in passing might not be irrelevant at all.

I did suspect that not all of the maybe-clues that I was noting would turn out to be anything of the sort. But a few of them probably would. Up to that point I seem to have had a 1 out of 3 track record fort accuracy. Which isn’t all that bad, considering.

But while my respect for the overall planning of the series had mostly recovered, my respect for the handling of the material had not. The actual writing was clumsy and excessively melodramatic. And her editors ought to be smacked. Hard. (Which goes double in spades after DHs. I don’t think anyone even tried to edit that book.)

But a story gem is still a story gem, even if it is badly cut and rattling about loose in a cardboard box painted with tacky seaside slogans.

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As rather more a point of concern; by the end of HBP Rowling appeared to have now evicted herself from an environment which she had proved that she could handle engagingly, and leaped into the middle of one, i.e., high quest fantasy, which requires an entirely different skill set, and is, moreover, a form that she was now publicly claiming that she didn’t particularly like.

Nothing in any of the 3300 pages that she had given us to that point suggested that she possessed the necessary skills to be able to bring off a piece of high quest fantasy with any kind of style or coherence, and while her tendency to “embrace the cheese” may work in film, especially in the sort of neo-“matinee movie” genre exemplified by George Lucas and early Spielberg, on paper, embracing the cheese is apt to come across as merely, well, cheesy.

Part of the problem, of course, is that Rowling is good enough at what she is good at, that it tends to raise expectations to a higher level than her purely technical skills can be depended upon to deliver. Fans keep getting taken up short by the fact that she simply isn’t good at everything.

And very little that I’d seen to that date suggested to me that she hadn’t finally bitten off more than she could chew. I simply did not quite have the necessary confidence in her technical ability to wrap this story up as well as it needed to be. Even if my respect for her skill at plotting was on the mend.

The problem is that plotting isn’t writing.

By then, however I had also recalled that when we finally got OotP into our hands, it seemed to present a jarring shift of tone and story from the four previous books too — although the plot itself appeared to be a linear extension of the previous books.

So I began to wonder whether in OotP Rowling introduced us to only half of the problem, with the opposite half being what she gave us in HBP; the two halves scheduled to finally collide in Book 7.

I supposed that it was at least a viable hypothesis. It was certainly blatantly obvious that in OotP we weren’t getting the full story. And there was a lot obviously going on off the page in HBP as well. But I was reluctant to count on it.

Plus, in HBP we got a heavy dose of the down side of a grown woman spinning together a story from an outline that was originally hammered out over a decade earlier by a 20-something. The headings and subheadings may not have changed. But the infill appeared to have shifted.

We’d also been left with enough odd, dangling strings, and loose ends, and clues apparently pointing to nowhere to conclude that some of these may be artifacts of abandoned plot elements that simply never developed and that she would never manage to get back to. Which had injected unnecessary confusion into the story, and is untidy.

****

As a theorist; sifting minutia is a large part of my standard approach to reading the previous six installments of the Adventure of Harry Potter and the Dark Lord (or; ‘Harry Potter and the Seven Riddles’, as it has been dubbed by a certain LiveJournalist, and is a title I rather like). Consequently I’ve stumbled across more than one of these suspected bits of flotsam, although there are undoubtedly plenty more of them that I have either dismissed or overlooked.

Of course not all fans are theorists, and not all fans are fixated on issues of misfitting minutia, or the lazy logic of claiming that the story is about choices, when your villain has been set up as a raging (and apparently hereditary!) sociopath who, from birth, was manifestly incapable of making proper choices, or the enshrined hypocrisy of just about every one of her protagonists.

No. Post HBP, many were convinced that any objections one might have to the direction the series was taking must be about the ’shipping.

Post DHs, Rowling’s dittoheads are convinced that any objections must merely be sour grapes because Rowling took the story in a direction the dissatisfied didn’t like.

Read my lips. ’Shipping bores me.

From all indications it isn’t all that high on Rowling’s list either.

Rowling can’t avoid it of course. She’s dealing with 16-year-olds. Even Percy had a girlfriend when he was 16.

But her handling of this “vital issue” was such as to suggest that she thinks that the whole subject is simply funny. Or at least as funny as boring old History! And her jokes on each of these subjects are every bit as insulting as her jokes on the other.

(Why, oh why couldn’t Hermione have got her little beaded bag in HBP and given us a running joke that was funny.)

*sigh* And after she put in all that work in OotP to try to show us an essentially “gender-blind” society, too! (Fuggedaboutit! Doesn’t matter!)

Well, given that enacting the stereotype is the greater part of what Teen Love is all about, I suppose we ought to have been warned. But then I also suppose that trying to write Teen Love in a way that will still be entertaining to 9-year-olds presents its own challenges.

(What? You forgot the small fry were still with us? Hey, just because you’re no longer nine years old...)

Having been creebing about Rowling’s dismissive and disrespectful treatment of History for years, I admit that when HBP came out I got a certain mean satisfaction by this practical illustration that it is all a question of just whose ox is being gored.

And, so far as I am concerned, she could have taken Book 7 in any number of even less promising directions than she did, and welcome, if she had made an effort to be convincing about it. But she didn’t.

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Although I will have to say that I think that calling the Harry/Hermione ’shippers delusional was a bit in excess of the requirements. They had every reason to think that they were interpreting something that was actually in the series.

Even though that particular reading seems to have been largely movie contamination. A lot of the H/Hr ’shippers probably saw the movies first. Which set their underlying assumptions, and even reading the books has never shifted them.

I mean, really. How could anyone seriously “’ship” movie!Hermione with movie!Ron? Particularly if they haven’t read the books yet. It’s inconceivable. And the fact that Rowling is generally stated (by fans and studio publicists alike) to have approved the screenplays (whether she actually reviewed them in any kind of depth or not) just makes the perceptions they bring in from the movies seem all the more convincing, in defiance of the actual text. In the movies, Harry is the Hero. Hermione is the Heroine. Of course they belong together. Ron? Who’s he?

Shall I be honest here? I despise the movies.

The bottom line is that I heartily disapprove of the fact that the movies were being made before Rowling had finished writing the series.

And it’s not like they are immortal examples of cinematography, either.

The first two were hardly more than hackwork and the third, while it was a reasonably entertaining movie, was not the story. And while the fourth was even more entertaining, it isn’t really the whole story either. How could it be in only three hours, or thereabouts? (Haven’t seen the 5th and don’t particularly intend to.)

And the films are doing nothing but skewing the perception of what is actually in the books. Even if someone goes back and reads the books.

But, then, I am a theorist.

And if you’ve been listening to me for any appreciable length of time you already know that there are no “movie-based theories” to be found on this site. And probably not more than one or two references to the “celluloid things I try not to name” in the whole collection. Which one correspondent has rather convincingly (and embarrassingly) pointed out to me is about twice the overall length of OotP.

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One of the things that most put my nose out of joint over HBP, in addition to the above-mentioned canon inconsistencies, gender stereotypes, lazy logic, and enshrined hypocrisy, was the continuing lack of a clear distinction between Dark and Light magic and a continuing avoidance of anything that could be construed as a plausible history of her world.

On a second reading I found that she had at least finally given us a hint of what the nature of the Dark Arts presumably is, but still no real distinction between the Dark Arts and “normal” magic. And we were still left stranded and trying to balance on the top of a “history” constructed of no more than a wobbly structure of variously silly jokes. She didn’t give us any kind of a clarification on that.

Book 6 was the point — or so it seemed to me — that Rowling really needed to get down to brass tacks and explain certain fundamentals like the aforementioned distinction between Dark magic and everything else, and the underlying structure of the series’ backstory. If you are presenting a story and dressing it up in the costume of being a tale of the eternal conflict between good and evil, you need to define just where, for the purpose of this particular story, evil starts.

And she didn’t. In fact, she didn’t so thoroughly that I finally concluded that she didn’t intend to. Which struck me as incredible.

The lady presumably is not stupid. And for all her pose of not being a fan of quest fantasy, her knowledge of folklore seems clearly fairly broad, and she knows how this kind of story is put together. There is always a line drawn in the sand somewhere, distinguishing between what is classified as “Dark” and everything else. And she still hadn’t shown us where that line is drawn in her Potterverse.

Or even if it is drawn. And if she hadn’t done so by that time, the omission had to be deliberate. Either she was running an experiment of her own of telling a story in which there IS no line in the sand, and leaving it up to the reader to draw it, without prompting or clues, or she had held the information back because she had a bombshell to attach to it before she lobbed it at us.

And both possibilities looked about equally likely at that point. It seemed to me that such a fundamental omission could hardly have been made by accident.

But the continuing omission caused me to finally stop crediting her with having ever attempted to construct a viable secondary world to set her story in. Even if she had merely done it poorly. It’s a fairy tale. A very long and involved fairy tale, to be sure, but still a fairy tale. Her social mechanics are all pasted on. They do not support the society she presents, they decorate it. She’s tossed in various broadly-recognizable trappings as set-dressing because they evoke a mood and they looked “traditional” without any consideration as to whether they made sense in the context she was using them, or even of whether she had included the tradition which produced them in her universe. There is no history here. And a functioning society does not just spring, fully-formed out of the void without one.

She didn’t even take the traditional low road of postulating that her world is “just like” our world — only with magic. Because her world is NOT like our world. There are just too many indications from what she does tell us that her world couldn’t plausibly have gotten to where our world is. It didn’t start from the same point.

Once you go to the effort of putting yourself into it, the Potterverse often turns out to end up being as uncomfortable, and irritating, as a cheap suit. The sort which only fits where it touches. And the seams always rub.

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Rowling admits some of this. Soon after the release of HBP a now rather notorious interview appeared in TIME — one which was clearly written with a quick-quotes quill by a Mr Lev Grossman.

The most objectionable statements, and there were quite a few of those, were put into Rowling’s mouth by the journalist — who obviously prides himself on not reading fantasy, and consequently wouldn’t recognize a valid work of fantasy if it bit him on the kneecap. He further chose to flaunt his ignorance by setting up a straw man to describe to his readers just what fantasy is; an example which was so ludicrous that it simply underscor