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Harry Potter #4
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From: Maia <maia>
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 20:50:51 -0700
Well, I caved in and read Harry #4. As with all of the HP books, I needed a few days to consider my thoughts - so here is my opinion on~day 4 post Harry.
Many of the causes for complaint that I have heard here and elsewhere did not resonate with me. I didn't think Hermione was being shallow for dancing the night away with Victor; rather, I thought she once again demonstrated depth beyond the other youths in seeing past the class/school warfares to the fact that Victor was a very lonely boy who needed a bit of a shoulder. Gather this, Hermione was the thing Victor would most miss? The poor boy must be rather lacking in relationships, seeing as his interactions with Hermione to that date had been very limited. (I did find it a bit unlikely that Cho would be the thing Cedric would miss the most; but perhaps the judges were limiting their scope of
"most" to other youth?) Anyway, if somehow Hermione wasn't supposed to play for a night, well good grief. She seemed to have a quite reasonable head on her shoulders about the hair on her shoulders, and we all like to play with masks sometimes. Later, I enjoyed the romantic implications of Ron's and Hermione's bickering, though I have a hard time seeing them make a match of it; he's too much of a lump.
Harry having a crush on Ron? I read the book, hoping for it, but simply saw a boy who was angry and frustrated by his circumstances and the lies told about him, and who needed his best friend. I can't really see Harry making any truly rebellious act, or diverging from the main course - he seems too obedient to the norm, Voldemort or no. I confess that I still don't really like Harry, he seems too status quo to me: things happen to him, and he responds, but he is much more reactive than active, and rather anti-intellectual and anti-thoughtful. (I wonder how many of us could stomach the Harry books without Hermione's presence?)
The veelas, the house elves, unicorns and dragons, etc... If Rowling in fact doesn't like fantasy ("if" because I don't trust reporters or interviewers any more than she obviously does), then things make more sense. For what Rowling seems to do with HP is steal a thousand little ideas from everywhere, and throw them together in the hodgepodge of Hogwarts without reference or respect offered back to their worlds. For insiders to fantasy (or the classics) this may be briefly appealing, but that the allusions rarely go any further than jokes or asides makes the books seem, to me, shallow or worse.
What I didn't like about the series I still don't. Only Hermione seems to think, there is constant immediate gratification offered, and in contrast, no recognition of the values of commitment, discipline, or thoughtfulness, the books are unnecessarily and cavalierly violent towards non-human creatures (disemboweling frogs as a punishment?)... all over, it is like eating a gigantic pile of trick-or-treat gained candy. You come to the end, and it's been quite a rush (yes, the similarity to mysteries struck me too), but what did you get out of it? For me, not much. Well, one thing.
The Harry books give me the creeps. I wasn't expecting it so much at the end of number 4, I didn't even recognize it until I was heading for bed, but as I tucked in I became aware that Harry had once again left me with a sense of wrongness. It's not Voldemort (who seems so caricatured as to be pointless), it's not even Snape, or Rita Skeeter it's something about how Rowling takes a thousand myriad beautiful things and marries them to an insatiably consuming story, a story that doesn't really seem to mean anything, but echoes the shadows of things that do. Her stories are like those from Piers Anthony's eternal series, but with less humor and more, well, meanness? I don't want to live in the world that she is creating, which seems like a skewed version of the lusts of 20th/21st century sub/urban society
- a world where only the human, or superhuman, has value, a world where greed is king, a world where power is accumulated for its own sake and where without power-over you are nothing, and a world where the mysteries turn on you, or fritter themselves away.
Myself, I'd be mighty bummed to find Hogwarts around my corner. I'd be concerned for the frogs.
Maia
-maia at littlefolktales.org www.littlefolktales.org the Spirited Review: www.littlefolktales.org/reviews
To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish: these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. - CS Lewis
To be obsessed with an appearance of maturity, to reject the child and the adolescent in all their passion and compassion, these things mark an individual who has rejected his or her own soul and root. - Maia
Received on Tue 26 Sep 2000 10:50:51 PM CDT
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 20:50:51 -0700
Well, I caved in and read Harry #4. As with all of the HP books, I needed a few days to consider my thoughts - so here is my opinion on~day 4 post Harry.
Many of the causes for complaint that I have heard here and elsewhere did not resonate with me. I didn't think Hermione was being shallow for dancing the night away with Victor; rather, I thought she once again demonstrated depth beyond the other youths in seeing past the class/school warfares to the fact that Victor was a very lonely boy who needed a bit of a shoulder. Gather this, Hermione was the thing Victor would most miss? The poor boy must be rather lacking in relationships, seeing as his interactions with Hermione to that date had been very limited. (I did find it a bit unlikely that Cho would be the thing Cedric would miss the most; but perhaps the judges were limiting their scope of
"most" to other youth?) Anyway, if somehow Hermione wasn't supposed to play for a night, well good grief. She seemed to have a quite reasonable head on her shoulders about the hair on her shoulders, and we all like to play with masks sometimes. Later, I enjoyed the romantic implications of Ron's and Hermione's bickering, though I have a hard time seeing them make a match of it; he's too much of a lump.
Harry having a crush on Ron? I read the book, hoping for it, but simply saw a boy who was angry and frustrated by his circumstances and the lies told about him, and who needed his best friend. I can't really see Harry making any truly rebellious act, or diverging from the main course - he seems too obedient to the norm, Voldemort or no. I confess that I still don't really like Harry, he seems too status quo to me: things happen to him, and he responds, but he is much more reactive than active, and rather anti-intellectual and anti-thoughtful. (I wonder how many of us could stomach the Harry books without Hermione's presence?)
The veelas, the house elves, unicorns and dragons, etc... If Rowling in fact doesn't like fantasy ("if" because I don't trust reporters or interviewers any more than she obviously does), then things make more sense. For what Rowling seems to do with HP is steal a thousand little ideas from everywhere, and throw them together in the hodgepodge of Hogwarts without reference or respect offered back to their worlds. For insiders to fantasy (or the classics) this may be briefly appealing, but that the allusions rarely go any further than jokes or asides makes the books seem, to me, shallow or worse.
What I didn't like about the series I still don't. Only Hermione seems to think, there is constant immediate gratification offered, and in contrast, no recognition of the values of commitment, discipline, or thoughtfulness, the books are unnecessarily and cavalierly violent towards non-human creatures (disemboweling frogs as a punishment?)... all over, it is like eating a gigantic pile of trick-or-treat gained candy. You come to the end, and it's been quite a rush (yes, the similarity to mysteries struck me too), but what did you get out of it? For me, not much. Well, one thing.
The Harry books give me the creeps. I wasn't expecting it so much at the end of number 4, I didn't even recognize it until I was heading for bed, but as I tucked in I became aware that Harry had once again left me with a sense of wrongness. It's not Voldemort (who seems so caricatured as to be pointless), it's not even Snape, or Rita Skeeter it's something about how Rowling takes a thousand myriad beautiful things and marries them to an insatiably consuming story, a story that doesn't really seem to mean anything, but echoes the shadows of things that do. Her stories are like those from Piers Anthony's eternal series, but with less humor and more, well, meanness? I don't want to live in the world that she is creating, which seems like a skewed version of the lusts of 20th/21st century sub/urban society
- a world where only the human, or superhuman, has value, a world where greed is king, a world where power is accumulated for its own sake and where without power-over you are nothing, and a world where the mysteries turn on you, or fritter themselves away.
Myself, I'd be mighty bummed to find Hogwarts around my corner. I'd be concerned for the frogs.
Maia
-maia at littlefolktales.org www.littlefolktales.org the Spirited Review: www.littlefolktales.org/reviews
To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish: these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. - CS Lewis
To be obsessed with an appearance of maturity, to reject the child and the adolescent in all their passion and compassion, these things mark an individual who has rejected his or her own soul and root. - Maia
Received on Tue 26 Sep 2000 10:50:51 PM CDT
