J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Stone Chamber of Azkaban Philosopher-Prisoners (1997-99)

Let's entertain the notion that the first three HP novels together constitute a 700-or-so-page singleton. This, you see, would put them on a par with the much fatter later novels. Not that I'm suggesting, you understand, that Goblet of Fire marked the point where Bloomsbury's entire annual accounts had come to depend upon Potter to such an extent that nobody dared actually edit Rowling's submissions any more ('Joanne, I'll be honest: there's a really good 300-page novel struggling to get out from under the weight of this 700-page splurgefest about the Quidditch World Cup and attendant plot-coupons ...'). Certainly not.

Take it this other way, then. Posit HP as a five-part drama, like a Shakespeare play. These first three titles, taken together, are Act 1: setting the scene, introducing the characters, laying down the narrative- and worldbuilding rules readers will need to keep in mind if they are properly to enjoy what follows. Act 2, Goblet of Fire, is mostly keeping the various plates spinning atop their bamboo poles, but it does two new things: it brings Voldemort properly back into the world of the novels; and it kills off a proper character, Cedric Hotdiggory.* This is a skilful way of ramping-up the series: it brings the villain out of the shadows, and shows us that something important is at stake by adding the George-R-R-Martin patent narrative destabliser, that characters we like, perhaps (gulp!) even main characters, could die.

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*Note: 'hot' is my 12-year old daughter's assessment of Robert Pattinson, rather than her judgment on the character as he appears in the novel; and it therefore has little actual bearing on this discussion. My own view? He's not even that hot.

It's such a good narrative trick that Rowling repeats it in the next three acts. In Order of the Phoenix, Voldemort's power in the world grows (Dolores Umbridge takes over Hogwarts, for instance) and Sirius Black dies. In Act 4, Half-Blood Prince, Voldemort grows yet more powerful, the plot-coupons get a new names ('Horcruxes', which I don't like: the plural, surely, should be horcruces) and Dumbledore dies (boo!). That sets up Act 5, Deathly Hallows, where Voldemort establishes his Thaumaturge Reich, the plot coupons are all cashed-in and several characters die, not least snakeface himself. Taken as a whole, I'd say Goblet and Phoenix could have been combined into one 700-page book, were concision needful (Harry Potter and the Gobbling Fiery Phoenix. Or, wait: does that make it sound too like a turkey?)

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. I have a couple not wholly joined-up things to jot down about the first three skinny volumes, occasioned by my re-reading them. So here we go. In sum: better, worse, better.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was better than I remembered it: less twee, funnier and more efficient, in the sense that it very deftly introduces both the world and the key characters, includes a number of very readable set-pieces and does it all in approx. 200 pages. The songs are a mis-step, I think ('You can keep your bowlers black/Your tops hats sleek and tall,/For I'm the Hogwart's sorting Hat/And I can OH GOD PLEASE STOP'): an attempt to Hobbitify or Roald-Dahl-tint the text that misfires by skewing too groaningly twee. There were more of these, apparently, in the first draft of Chamber of Secrets, but Rowling's editor wisely cut them out. A good editor's worth is above rubies, you see (vide. my first paragraph above).

The other thing that struck me re-reading this novel was how solid a character structure the core triad is: Harry, Ron, Hermione. I take the point of those who regret the sidelining of this latter (hard to argue with this justly famous 'Hermione Granger and the Philosopher's Stone' satire). But, working with what we've got: Harry as ego, the figure with whom the reader tends to identify; Ron as id, a creature of more prominent appetites (sweets in the early books, snogging in the later), quicker to terror and envy and so on; Hermione as super-ego, driven, hard-working and rule-bound. It's a less caricature version of the Kirk-Bones-Spock triad that served OS Trek so well. And the three are well drawn qua friends. Friends of the qua. The triad structure works because it externalises something important about our own developing psychodynamic.

On the other hand, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was considerably worse than I remembered it. In part this was because I had forgotten how nails-down-a-chalkboard annoying Dobby is. Partly it has to do with the arbitrary way the school rules are applied by notionally 'good' authority figures (when Dolores does this arbitrary-authority thing in Phoenix it's coded as very wicked indeed). Harry and Ron fly a car to Hogwarts and are warned that further infractions will result in them being expelled. They break about a hundred subsequent school rules, putting themselves and others in danger of death; as a result Dumbledore rewards them. What particularly irked me about this was the sense that Malfoy and his kind are bad because they don't think the rules apply to them; where Harry and his friends genuinely don't think the rules apply to them, and we're supposed to love them for it as free spirits. (Wendy Doniger asks: 'Why not just use magic to get all the questions right in exams?' and answers herself: 'because it’s no fun that way; so the quill pens used in exams are bewitched with an Anti-Cheating spell.' Using magic to do well in his exams is exactly the sort of cheating trick Malfoy would use, if he could get away with it! But, wait: how is that different to Hermione using a time-turner in Prisoner of Azkaban to get ahead of her classmates in her studies?) What's objectionable here is the idea that some people (Harry and his pals) are just better than others, and not to be judged by the same criteria as the rest of us -- which is precisely the moral opposite of what the books purport to be saying.

But, actually, the thing I disliked most about Chamber of Secrets was that it just struck me as technically not very well put-together. The first half, more or less, is draggy and slow, with not much happening. The second half, by contrast, feels rushed and over-stuffed, with too much action and drama and suspense.

Still, I come not to carp, but to .. er, some other kind of fish. Prisoner of Azkaban was a real pleasure to re-read. The narrative bait-and-switch with Sirius Black (he's a dangerous madman! He's your bestest adult friend of all!) is well handled; it generates actual suspense in the early portions of the novel, and properly effective twists in the later sections. The Dementors are creations of genuine imaginative brilliance. The Scabbers/Peter Pettigrew revelation is very clever (though it carries with it the slightly icky implication that for the first two books pre-pubescent Ron has been cuddling an evil, seedy, middle-aged man on his lap). But best of all is the business with Harry seeing his father's Patronus, believing his Dad has come to save him, going back in time and having to save himself episode. The aforementioned Wendy Doniger puts this well in her LRB review of the novel:

In the third book, Harry is haunted by his mother’s dying screams, but now that he is older he moves on, in Lacanian fashion, to come to terms with his father. Thanks to a wonderfully complex and subtle episode of time travel that traces a Möbius twist in the chronological sequence, Harry encounters himself in the loop where past and present come together and overlap. The first time he lives through this period, he sees, across a lake, someone he vaguely recognises: perhaps his father? No, his father is dead, but that person sends a silver stag which saves him from present danger. When he goes back in time, he runs to the same place to see who it was, and there’s no one else there: he is the one who sends the stag to save himself in the future. ... The moment when Harry realises that he mistook himself for his father is quite powerful; and it is, after all, the only real kind of time travel there is: each of us becomes, in adulthood, someone who lived some thirty years before us, someone who must save our own life.

What's especially nice about this is the way it points to a strength of the books: the way they tell a story about kids growing up that includes parents as part of the picture, both in the sense that real-life kids growing up necessarily have many dealings with grown-ups (something with which the Famous Five or the Pevensies aren't troubled); and in the sense that grown-ups are what kids are growing up towards.