J K Rowling, Harry Potter Orders a Half-Goblet of Phoenix Blood at the Deathly Hallows (2000-07)

Between finishing my HP 5 re-read and opening HP 6 I clocked this comment by the estimable Abigail Nussbaum, detailing her theory that the whole series is structured around a set of balanced parallels (first as a childish game, then as an adult challenge) that 'hinge' about the fourth volume:

Goblet of Fire, with its story about a magical game that turns deadly serious, acts as the series's lynchpin, and the books around it mirror each other while reflecting that shift from childish game to adult matters with real stakes. As you say, in Prisoner of Azkaban Harry initially fears Sirius Black and then discovers that he is his closest adult friend; he also finds his father in himself. In Order of the Phoenix Harry loses Sirius forever, but not before getting a close look at his flaws and shortcomings, and finds out things about his father that make him regret the similarities between them. Chamber of Secrets and Half-Blood Prince both feature books through which Harry communicates with someone he comes to think of as a friend, but who turns out to be more sinister in real life (they also set up the three-way parallel between Harry, Voldemort, and Snape). Philosopher's Stone and Deathly Hallows have a weaker connection - though obviously since they bookend the series they mirror each other by definition - but the rather silly and childlike magical obstacle course in the former has some darker parallels in the quest for the Horcruxes and the Hallows in the latter. For all its flaws, I do respect Rowling for writing a series that grew up with its protagonist, and the way that the later books reflect the events of the earlier ones while recasting them in more mature terms is one of her primary methods of achieving this.

Very neat. It rather undermines my idea that the series as a whole has a five-act structure, of course. But never mind. Re-reading the latter four HP titles was harder work than re-reading the first three. All four are, I think, simply too long; and a couple are much too long. Goblet of Fire in particular is quite an uneven novel. The way Harry himself gets picked for the Quidditch World Cup generates an uncomfortable sense of authorial exceptionalism (he has to be at the centre of everything! Despite being, somehow, just a normal kid!) and the humour often depends upon Rowling lowering her own suspending-of-disbelief bar. For example, early on the Weasleys pop into the Dursley's house, and Mr Weasley attempts to show off his knowledge of Muggle affairs:

"They run off eckeltricity, do they?" he said knowledgeably. "Ah, yes, I can see the plugs. I collect plugs," he added to Uncle Vernon. "And batteries. Got a very large collection of batteries. My wife thinks I'm mad, but there you are."

Which is fine, and sort-of amusing I suppose; except that Weasley is one of the wizarding world's premier experts in Muggle affairs. It's his job! Get lost he doesn't know how to say 'electricity'. It would be like somebody who devoted their life to studying the world of the Harry Potter novels calling magic 'gammidge'.

Is this a trivial point? You bet your bippy. But triviality doesn't disqualify it. On the contrary, in fact; it indexes the way the novels move away from the earlier whimsy, the (pace Nussbaum) more deliberately child-like and larkish tone, towards a more coherent and adult vibe. In part this is Rowling playing into her own fans obsession with her created world. As Mad Eye (it's not the real Mad Eye who says this, of course, but that only makes it more neatly ironically-pointed) keeps insisting: 'CONSTANT VIGILANCE!' ('You need preparing. You need arming. But most of all, you need constant, never ceasing vigilance [217]). As the books go on, we need to be more and more beady-eyed as to the way details cohere into the large pattern. Because that's what it means to be a fan.

Some of the book’s targets (‘tabloid journalism—boo!') struck me as, shall we say, oblique to the novels’ main concerns, however large they have loomed in the author’s private life. So in sum: not as good as I remembered. And so to Order of the Phoenix; also over-padded, although here the padding is mostly concentrated in the early sections. Will Harry be expelled for using his magic to save Dudley from the Dementor? Won’t he? (150 pages is too long to discover—of course he won’t). And the prose seemed to me less disciplined in this one. Not that Rowling is ever exactly a Nabokov of prose-style even at the best of times, but mostly her writing is usually efficient and workmanlike. In Phoenix there seemed to me too much of this sort of writing—‘there was a soft whooshing sound and something white soared from the top of a dark wardrobe and landed gently on Harry’s shoulder’ [61]—where all the adjectives and adverbs could advantageously have been purged from the prose.

But I’d say Phoenix is better than Goblet. Sirius’s dark side (a bit unhinged; nasty to the house elf and so on) adds some actual depth to the characterisation; and the stuff about him and James Potter bullying Snape is believably pitched. Of course, there are, I’d suggest, more subtle ways by which a writer can suggest that a character is haunted by the memory of a difficult mother than having an immoveable (stuck with magic glue) magical portrait of that mother on the wall of said character’s house, literally screaming ‘Filth! Scum! By-products of dirt and vileness! Half-breeds, mutants, freaks … Yoooou! (she howled, her eyes popping at the sight of [her son]) ‘Blood traitor, abomination, shame of my flesh!' [74] all the time. So, generally, no: not a lot of subtlety or Henry-James-style obliqueness in this book. There does seem to be more screaming in this instalment in general; and more of the dialogue—whole pages, sometimes—given over to SPEECH RENDERED VIA CAPITALISATION!

On the plus side, Dolores Umbridge is a very nice piece of villainy; all the more effective as a baddie for not being a snaggle-toothed gargoyle. At the same time there’s something awkward about the way this instalment posits rules as such as the agency of evil: ‘Educational Decree Number Twenty-Four’ and so on. It strikes me on re-read that Rowlings attutide to 'rules' is confused on quite a deep level. In this she is very much of her class and nation (two qualities I happen to share with her, which is why I feel emboldened to mention the thing about rules). Rules are the structural articulation of authority and hierarchy. Umbridge, for instance, is obsessed with them, and 'we' (via our favourite characters) become heroic warlock-and-roll types for daring to break those rules, fuk da po-lice and so on. At the same time, the whole superstructure of magic itself, from which all the intricate plotting of the final four books depends, is all about the rules. To jump ahead for a moment: though I very much enjoyed the final chapters of Deathly Hallows, the actual climactic wand-dual between Harry and Voldemort was diluted and enfeebled to the point almost of narrative misfire by the tedious pages-long conversation the two have about the precise rules governing their respective wands, all trainspotterishly pivoting on the matter of by whom, and under what conditions, the Elder Wand had been obtained from whom, and which set of arcanely arbitrary magical rules were therefore liable to obtain in the battle that GET ON WITH IT. See also: terms of prophecy concerning the chosen one. See also: Fantasy's fetishization of 'magic rules' tout court. I peg this love-hate, or rather this resent-respect attitude to Rules as a distinctively English business. To quote Al Murray the Pub Landlord: gotta have rules. If you didn't have no rules, where would you be? France. And if you had too many rules where would you be? Germany. If this sounds like 'reasonable compromise' then you're missing the joke. Dumbledore's army is a revolutionary organisation whose business is the wholesale overturning of an unjust oppressive system. But at the same time, and with watery English compromise, it's a nice English middle-class sort of army, who don't really want to hurt anyone. The watchword, as far as rules as the structures of authority they index, is one of lukewarm water. Something similar is going on in these books with respect to 'blood'; but I'll come back to that.

And so to Harry Potter and the Half Blood Symbol-Formerly-Known-As. My re-read here was slightly stymied by an uncertainty as to whether I'd ever gotten around to reading it first time round. Certainly all my memories were of the film, which overwrote the often plodding prose with high-production values and visual flair. On the page I found the plot-coupon-collecting tiresome and the manner by which Tom Riddle's backstory gets filled-in over-elaborate and tedious. The interactions between the real-world and magical-world were clumsily handled (does the Prime Minister need to be a character? really?) and the humour felt strained to me ('Why are you worrying about YOU-KNOW-WHO, when you should be worrying about YOU-NO-POO? The constipation sensation that's gripping the nation!'). I daresay I'm being harsh.

Deathly Hallows, though long, doesn’t feel so padded as the previous two (it helps that it’s only the 600pp, not the 700+ pages of the earlier vols; plus that, as the filmmakers recognised, it contains enough story for two vols). After a small quantity of recapitulation we’re straight off with The Seven Potters, with characters being killed, robbing bank vaults and so on. Dobby is killed, and I wept long and heartfelt tears at this—well, no I didn’t. The first time round I thought the time in the tent in the forest overextended; this time it seemed to me much more absorbing.  The Snape backstory revelations makes for a satisfying tying-up of plottage (though the actual explanation is a little too expository) and the chapter where Harry goes into the forest to confront Voldemort is genuinely tense. Of course, this time through I knew how it was all going to end; but I remember my first time through when the will-Harry-live-or-die ratcheted up actual tension. The film, of course, turns a few pages of final showdown into a forty-minute SFX-spectacular battle, which may be crass, but does at least flag-up how closely the novel flirts with anti-climax. I'd say that in its novelistic form, the McCartneyesque Deathly Hallow-Goodbye needs more heft. Still, I finished it thinking more highly of the whole series than, perhaps, I had done before I started the re-read.

Now: as with the rules (see above), I did find myself pondering how far Rowling develops a coherent approach to 'blood'. On the one hand, there's the sustained critique of those Voldermortians (Voldermorticians?) and Malfoyers who believe that being 'pure blood' makes a person superior to mudbloods and muggles. Rowling makes the point repeatedly that they're idiots for thinking this; and quite right too. Plus you have Dumbledore's commendable and repeated insistence that a person is defined not by their birth but their actions. A bloodline is not some magic passport to special-ness or power. On the other hand is the fact that Potter's early life has been protected from being Death Ate by, precisely, his blood; or more precisely his mother's blood. And his aunt's. And Voldemort is undone by the same magic substance. ‘He took your blood and rebuilt his living body with it!' explains Dead-Dumbledore ('Dumbled-RIP'?); 'your blood in his veins, Harry, Lily’s protection in side both of you!’ [Deathly Hallows, 568]. So it turns out a bloodline is a magic passport to special-ness or power after all. It just has to be the right bloodline! Which, when we come to think of it, is precisely what the pure blood brigade have always claimed.

Now, you may wish to read this as a supple dialecticism on Rowling's part; or as a desire to have her chocolate frog and eat it too; or as a deeper problematic. For my own part, and to revert to my original post, I was at least pleased to see the Kibroth-Hataavah alive and well at the climax of the book. After his 'death', Potter awakes naked in a white place and hears

the small, soft thumpings of something that flapped, flailed and struggled. It was a pitiful noise, yet also slightly indecent. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he was eavesdropping on something furtive, shameful. For the first time, he wished he were clothed. [565]

Farrar would be proud.

One more thing: I stand by the implication of my blogpost-title, viz. that The Deathly Hallows sounds like the name of a pub. The French translators improved upon this: Harry Potter et les reliques de la mort. Much better.