Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

This book does not mess about.

Seriously, characters start dying just a few chapters in.  I'll admit it, I'm a sucker for a book that's not afraid to knock off large segments of its cast.  I like a good fictional bloodbath.  This is especially true when it comes to the final book of a long-running series.  Rowling has spent six books building up to a magical war against Voldemort, with the series growing progressively darker during that time.  It's the sort of thing you have to deliver on, and Rowling delivers in spades.

That said, between the bloodbaths at the beginning and end, this book has a tedious middle.  There's a lot to be said for the structure provided by the Hogwarts school setting: it means that there is always something happening, even when the main plot is not progressing.  Whether it's classes or Quidditch or just interactions with the other students, there's a sense that the characters are always doing things.  This book throws that structure away, and it flounders a little.  There are long parts where it's just Harry, Ron and Hermione teleporting around England with no concrete direction, and it gets a bit tiresome.

The ending makes up for it, though.  It really is an amazing conclusion, and I can't think of many long-running fantasy series that have done as well as this.  All the themes are tied in, all the characters get a satisfying wrap-up, and just about every element introduced earlier in the books plays a part.  I can think of very little I wanted to see that wasn't included.  A series often lives or dies by its ending, and I think that Harry Potter will live for a very long time.

I have only two complaints, one exceedingly minor and one that is quite a bit bigger.  The minor complaint is barely even worth mentioning, as it's more a thing I thought would have improved the ending than something that is a genuine problem.  I was never satisfied with Harry becoming an Auror, and thought it would have been a much more fitting wrap-up to the series for him to take the mantle of teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts.  Think about it: the position had six different occupants during the series.  It was an ongoing subplot about the position being "cursed".  Harry even starts teaching it, after a fashion, when he starts up the DA.  Having Harry become a teacher would have wrapped that sub-plot up nicely, I think.  But that's just me doing a little armchair-writing, trying to tell J.K. Rowling how to do her job.  Because I'm so much more successful than her, you know.

The major complaint, and one I've voiced before, is about the house elves.  That's a sub-plot that was introduced around the middle of the series, and the way it's dealt with is problematic to say the least.  I don't want to get too deep into it (because I might write a whole essay about it in the future), but all I'll say now is that one of the very last lines of the last chapter is Harry hoping that Kreacher will bring him a sandwich.  For a series that does so well in every other area, it's a shame that it stumbled here.

So where next?  I'm in a re-reading mood, and I can see The Wheel of Time taking up an entire shelf of my bookcase.  So I'm tackling The Eye of the World for the umpty-umpth time, but for the first time since the series finished.  I'm really rather looking forward to it.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling

I'll admit this up-front: I don't have a hell of a lot to say about book six of the Harry Potter series.  That's not a knock on it's quality: it's really very good.  It's just that I finished it a while ago, and the details have started to inter-mingle with the rest of the series.  I have a few observations I want to share, though.

The Harry Potter books are generally structured as mysteries.  Each book has a central question that Harry and co. are trying to find the answer to, and that the book revolves around.  Who's trying to get into the Hogwarts vault?  Who's been opening the Chamber of Secrets?  Who entered Harry in the Tri-Wizard Tournament?  One of the things that has become apparent about these mysteries is that Harry Potter is always wrong.  He usually jumps to an early conclusion, often accusing someone he doesn't like, and his accusation gets slowly disproven as the book progresses.  What I like about Half-Blood Prince is that this is turned on its head.  Harry works out really quickly that Draco Malfoy is up to some shady business, and tries his best to stop him.  This time, he's right.  Draco was neck-deep in it.  It didn't do Harry much good, but I did like the reversal of the usual structure.

The other mystery here involves the titular Half-Blood Prince, whose potions textbook Harry acquires early on, and uses to great effect.  I was never quite satisfied by the reveal of Snape as the Prince.  It makes perfect sense, but as a dramatic payoff it didn't work for me.  I'm not really sure what the significance of Snape's book was, or why it was important at all for Harry to possess it.  I'm probably missing something subtle here, but there's just something about this subplot that left me cold, and I can't put my finger on it.  Perhaps it was Rowling trying to set up Snape's double-agent role, but I still can't see it.

Also, is this the book where Harry hooks up with Ginny?  Because I always felt like that came right out of nowhere.  Literally, in the space of one paragraph, Harry is suddenly smitten, with zero indication that he had any feelings for her before that.  I'm not convinced by their relationship at all (to be honest, I find that romantic relationships are the weakest aspect of Rowling's writing, expecially where teenage boys are concerned).

I think that's about it, but there was a ton of stuff I liked.  The secret history of Voldemort was awesome.  The whole sequence with Harry and Dumbledore in the cave trying to get the Horcrux was beautifully eerie.  Dumbledore's death was perfectly done.  It's a great book, and a great set-up for the finale.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling

I've mentioned it before, but when I first read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix some ten years ago, I was disappointed.  The previous volume had ended with some serious business going down, and my expectations were high.  After all, Voldemort was back, and he was actually for real killing people.  There was no way that book five could be more of the same Hogwarts boarding school drama.

And yet, when it came out, that was exactly what I got.  More of Harry and his friends at Hogwarts, and very little of Voldemort and his crew.  I had not gotten the book I wanted, and that, combined with this being the first in the series that I had to wait for, led to disappointment.

Here's the thing: I was wrong, because this is a cracking book.  A little long in the tooth, but cracking nonetheless.

The lack of Voldemort was one of the things I criticised it for in the past, but what I've realised during my reread is that Voldemort is really not all that interesting.  He's effective as a super-evil villain, but as is often the case with super-evil villains he's a bit one-note.  The real villain of the book is the Ministry of Magic, particularly Dolores Umbridge, and that's a much more complex thing.

Umbridge herself may just be the best villain of the whole series.  I never had a particular hate for Voldemort, despite the frequency with which he tortures and murders people.  Umbridge, on the other hand, I have genuine loathing for.  She just so easy to hate, much easier to hate then Voldemort, even though her brand of evil is a lot less extreme than his.  I think I know why that is.

I think most of us has met an Umbridge in real life.  We've all been punished by vindictive teachers, or become the victims of bureaucracy, or met seemingly lovely people who are horrible, horrible racists.  Hers is a real-life brand of petty evil, whereas Voldemort is on another level entirely.  I doubt many people interact with murderers and would-be despots on the regular, at least not the sort of people reading Harry Potter novels.  It's not very likely that I'm going to be tortured when I go to work, or suffer from ethnic cleansing.  Plus, Voldemort's a badass.  He's got that I'm-a-killer coolness factor going for him, the sort that only fictional killers have.  Umbridge has no coolness, she's just a terrible person of the sort we have to deal with every day, and therefore she's much easier to hate.

I don't have a lot of other notes about this book, except to say that it really is better than I remembered.  I finished it ages ago, so the details are hazy.  Hopefully I'll do better with book 6, but I finished that a long time ago as well.  As usual, I've been slack.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

It took me a little longer to get through this one; it is something of a paving slab, especially in comparison to the previous books in the series.  I think that this is the third time I've read it.  I can't quite remember, but what I do remember is that I bloody loved this one at the time.

What struck me immediately upon beginning my re-read is just how much more grown-up it is.  Harry is noticing girls.  Voldemort is murdering people.  Ron is making jokes about Uranus.  This is the pivotal book in the series.  Before this it's a series aimed at 10-year-olds, and after this it's firmly YA, aimed at young teens.  This is one of the smartest moves Rowling ever made, and it came right at the point where the series gained a lot of attention from adult readers.  The focus moves away from classes, bullies and candy, and more towards romantic subplots and Voldemort's rise to power.  No wonder this was my favourite book in the series.

That said, it's not as efficiently plotted as the first three books.  The Tri-Wizard Tournament keeps things ticking along, but it's a good 200 pages before that even begins.  I wouldn't say that the book was boring; it held my attention throughout.  But there is a lot of meandering around at the start with the Quidditch World Cup that seems superfluous in hindsight.  I get the feeling that this book was the point where Rowling gained the ability to do whatever the heck she wanted, without much interference from her editors.

As usual with Harry Potter, this book is a mystery story.  This time around, I was caught completely blindsided.  I've read the book before (probably twice!) and I still didn't see the twist with Moody coming.  I remembered that Barty Crouch jr. was involved (mostly because of David Tennant's unfortunately manic performance in the film) but the finer details had escaped me.  I was taken by surprise, and the mystery all made sense in the end; can't ask for much more than that.

Coming up next is Order of the Phoenix, which I remember as being greatly disappointing at the time.  I think perhaps I had built up my expectations too much.  Voldemort was back!  Shit was getting real!  I expected the next book to be all-out war against the Death-Eaters, which was really quite foolish of me given the format of the series.  Of course Harry goes back to school.  Of course his school year is mostly business as usual.  This time around, free of expectations, I hope I can assess this book on its own merits.

ADDENDUM: What is up with the House Elf subplot?  Hermione gets indignant about it, a bunch of people tell her that the House Elves are happy being slaves, really, and then it goes nowhere.  In a few decades time, people will be cringing at this stuff the same way we look back on all the evil dark-skinned guys in Tolkien.  It's really awkward, and I'm hoping Rowling redeems it before the series ends.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

I flew through this book in a day.  I'd forgotten how addictive this series can be.  (It also helps that I've been home all week with the plague.  Being sick is great for catching up on pop culture.)  This is probably my third time through the book, and once again I enjoyed it a great deal.

What strikes me, though, is how passive the protagonists are throughout the book.  In Philosopher's Stone and Chamber of Secrets they spend a good deal of time trying to unravel the respective books' central mystery.  Harry's primary concern in Prisoner of Azkaban is sneaking down to Hogsmeade to buy candy, and playing quidditch.  Keep in mind that the central mystery of this book is far more personal to Harry than the other two were: the man who supposedly betrayed his parents is breaking into Hogwarts to kill him!  You would think Harry might try to get to the bottom of the whole thing, but in general he just goes on about his school business, and the plot only resolves when Sirius Black makes his final move.

That said, the Sirius Black plot was a very interesting one.  I never bought into the idea of him as a murderer, even the first time I read the series; I had learned by this point that whatever conclusion Harry jumps too, it will be the wrong one.  I didn't see the reveal of Peter Pettigrew coming though, nor everything else that surrounds it.  As I said in my previous post, I'm a sucker for back-story reveals, and this book delivered in spades on that front.

I have a final observation that doesn't really relate to this book in particular, but more the series as a whole.  I had been under the impression that the magic in Harry Potter was pretty well-defined, with solid rules that Rowling stuck too pretty well.  I don't know where I got that idea from because it's all pretty loosey-goosey.  She does keep it pretty tight within each individual book, but across the series she's constantly introducing new things, and very little of it is rigidly defined.  This isn't a negative; on the whole I think she does a fine job of keeping things consistent while maintaining a sense of whimsy.

I had previously mentioned how tightly plotted the first book ended up being, with the second book slightly less so.  This book is looser still, yet it still manages to pretty well integrated at the end.  The next volume is a brick in comparison, and I get the feeling that it will be the tipping point, where Rowling started plotting more for the series as a whole than for the individual novel.  We'll see!

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

I finished this book a few days ago, and I enjoyed it about as much as the first in the series.  I think this is the third time I've read it; maybe it's the second.  I can't remember, and you probably don't care.

Chamber of Secrets isn't quite as tight as Philosopher's Stone.  It almost manages the same trick of tying a whole bunch of disparate elements together for the finale, but doesn't quite pull it off as well.  Gilderoy Lockhart, despite being entertaining to read, is a major part of the book that ends up being largely unimportant to the resolution.  There are other smaller things that don't get tied in, like the whomping willow, and the quidditch matches aren't as well-integrated either. 

I also didn't really buy the reveal of Ginny Weasley as the one who was opening the Chamber of Secrets.  All the foreshadowing was there, but perhaps Ginny was too minor a character for it to work for me.  I also wonder how a first-year with no invisibility cloak can go around killing chickens and painting on walls with no-one to see her.  It doesn't seem quite plausible.

The conclusion, with Harry drawing the sword of Gryffindor from the sorting hat, was another thing I had problems with.  It's a cool moment, but it really does seem to come out of nowhere.  Nothing in the narrative sets it up.  Perhaps there's something to be said for the meta-narrative trick of "pulling something out of your hat", both in-story and out, but I feel like this could have been set up better.

So if I'm doing so much complaining, why did I enjoy it so much?  I think a big part of that was the focus on Voldemort's past.  I'm a sucker for the books that reveal bits of back-story, and I'm an even bigger sucker when said reveal leaves more questions than answers, as long as there's the sense that those questions will get answered eventually.  Rowling walks that tightrope very well.

On top of that, it's just a fun book whose charm vastly outweighs any minor niggles I might have.  Imagination, wit and charm can carry a story a long way, and will probably stay in the reader's memory long after a solid plot structure and good foreshadowing.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

I'm on a bit of a re-reading kick at the moment, and I decided to crack into Harry Potter again.  What I really wanted to read was A Song of Ice and Fire, but that goes against one of my reading rules: I don't re-read a series until it is finished.  I could have done Wheel of Time, but that damn thing takes up a whole shelf on my bookcase; I'd be reading it all year.  So, by process of elimination, Harry Potter got the nod.

That said, I'm a fan of the series.  It's not one that consumed me like the aforementioned hefty fantasies, but I was there buying the books on their day of release.  I think this is my third time reading the first book (my rule only came into place a few years ago, as a way of stopping myself from re-reading too much).  I can be a bit hipster about Harry Potter, because the first time I read it was when it was assigned to me at Uni in 1998, before it became a massive thing.  I can remember reading that Rowling intended for the book to last seven volumes, and scoffing at the notion.  I guess she had the last laugh there.

At first Philosopher's Stone felt to me a bit "kitchen sink".  It's held together very well by the boarding school structure, but there's the sense that a whole lot of disparate elements have been thrown in that are extraneous to the plot.  It turns out that I was fooled, because everything in this book ties back into the main plot, even down to the bloody wizard trading cards.  Rowling sets about world-building with abandon, throwing all sorts of bits and pieces of the wizarding world at the reader, but the great thing is that nothing is there purely for world-building alone.  It's quite remarkable that the book feels both rambling and tight at the same time.

Rowling's other particular skill is that she can establish character very quickly.  It helps that she's working in children's fiction, where broadly drawn characters are more acceptable.  Even so, she's good at it, and good at hinting around the deeper things going on with certain characters.

If I have one complaint with the book, it's the Dursleys.  They are bastards on an absurd level, to the point where the wizard characters seem more realistic than they do.  It's very effective at getting the audience's sympathies pointed at Harry, but there are times where it feels like way too much.

So I'm done with Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, and I enjoyed it so much I'm cracking straight into Chamber of Secrets.  I remember liking that one a great deal, but that was over a decade ago.  Let's see how it holds up.