OOP: My review

[marinafrants]

No: HPFGUIDX 61611

Let's cut to the chase -- I loved this book.  I'm sure that over the 
next couple of years, as I analyze every sentence to death, I will 
find plenty of things to nitpick.  But this didn't didminish my love 
of the first four books, and it probably won't do any harm to this 
one either.

This is by far the darkest book so far, and probably would be even 
without Sirius' death, but the darkness doesn't just come out of 
left field.  It builds on a foundation that's been carefully laid, 
one little piece at a time in the previous books.  One of my 
favorite things about the series as a whole is the way the wizard 
world becomes more and more of a complicated and scary place as 
Harry grows older and sees more of it.  In the first book, it's a 
shiny fairy tale world, a place where Harry can escape the misery of 
his life with the Dursleys, a world that would be perfect if only a 
few unpleasant people would go away.  In the second book, we start 
seeing the dark bits: house elf slavery; prejudice against Muggle-
born wizards, complete with "Mudblood" as a racist epithet to fling 
at them; the discovery that the Minister of Magic is a spineless non-
entity with uncomfortably close ties to Lucius Malfoy.  Hagrid gets 
dragged off to Azkaban on a mere suspicion, <i>and</i> we discover 
he was wrongly expelled years ago.  But the darkness is still 
confined to the bad guys -- only the Malfoys are seen owning house 
elves and using the term Mudblood, Hagrid's troubles are 
straightened out, and Dumbledore is still a respected and formidable 
figure in the Ministry.  

In PoA, the stain is still spreading.  The Ministry of Magic employs 
dementors.  Lupin faces prejudice from the good guys as much as from 
the bad guys.  Lucius Malfoy basically buys Buckbeack's conviction, 
and there's nothing Dumbledore can do about it.  And, of course, 
there's the little Matter of Sirius and his twelve years of wrongful 
imprisonment.  By the end that book there was no doubt in my mind 
that while Voldemort is evil and monstrous and has to be stopped, 
the society that opposed him was corrupt and bigoted and needs to be 
reformed from the ground up before the series ends.  If there *had* 
been doubts, they certainly would've been dispelled by GoF, where we 
see the travesties of the courtroom scenes in Dumbledore's pensieve, 
and discover that Hogwarts is run by enslaved house elves and that 
Sirius never got a trial.  We also see that anti-Muggle prejudice 
isn't restricted to Voldemort's supporters, and that half-giants 
have almost as rough a time as werewolves do.  And then, of course, 
there's Fudge's denial at the end, and the realization that 
Dumbledore will have to work against the Ministry as well as against 
Voldemort.

OotP picks up on all these threads.  Voldemort is a scary but remote 
threat through most of the story.  The conflict that really drives 
the plot is not with him, but with the Ministry, which is paranoid, 
cowardly and tyranical.  It interferes in Dumbledore's running of 
Hogwarts, passess repressive and arbitrary laws to suit its needs, 
and appears to control the mainstream press.  Dolores Umbridge, the 
Ministry's representative at Hogwarts, is by far the most hateful 
villain ever to appear in the Potterverse, and possibly anywhere 
else.  I don't think I've ever wanted to scratch a fictional 
character's eyes out before.  

Of course, Harry himself isn't exactly being all sweetness and light 
either.  The events of GoF have left a definite mark on him, and not 
for the better, we can see it right from page 1.  He's paranoid, 
angry, and his temper is on a hair trigger.  he mouthes off to 
<i>everybody</i>, friend and enemy alike, and gives in to frequent 
bouts of jealousy and self-pity.  It's not just your basic 
adolescent angst, this kid is genuinely and deeply messed up, and I 
have never liked him as much as I did in this book.  Harry has deep 
and very real flaws, and they make his virtues shine all the more 
brightly.  I love this kid.

Besides Harry, the characters who come through most strongly are 
Snape, Sirius, Ginny Neville.  Neville really shines in tihs book, 
gaining strength and confidence in Harry's DA classes while still 
retaining his essential Nevilleness.  This growth, combined with the 
very poigniant scene with his parents at St. Mungo's, forever kills 
any vestiges of comic-relief Neville from the earlier books.  I 
nearly cried when he put that gum wrapper in his pocket as he walked 
away from his mother.  Ginny, having apparently overcome her crush 
on Harry, finally reveals a spine, a brain and a sense of humor.  
She doesn't turn into some paragon of perfect feminity for Harry to 
drool over -- she turns into a bright, likeable teenage girl.  Go, 
Ginny!

Snape gets surprisingly little screen time for such a long book, but 
what we do see of him adds major and important depth to his 
characterization, and his relationship to Harry.  The biggie, of 
course, is the pensieve flashback, because it gives us not only 
Snape, but MWPP and Lily, too.  This is crucial to Harry's 
development -- throughout the previous books, he had built up this 
super-idealized image of his father: James the perfect paragon, 
handsome, noble, heroic, inhumanly flawless.  Harry's view of Sirius 
was also very similar -- a replacement James, slightly more human, 
but still always in the right.  Now he abruptly finds out that Snape 
was not, in fact, making it all up just to be spiteful.  James and 
Sirius really were arrogant bullies.  The "we were fifteen" excuse 
only goes so far; as Harry indignantly points out when Sirius tries 
to use it, <i>he's</i> fifteen, and he knows enough to recognize 
that what he witnessed was wrong.  And yet, people do grow out of 
their adolescent horridness.  Excusing cruelty on the grounds 
that "boys will be boys" is wrong.  But forever judging a man based 
on what he did as a teenager is equally wrong, and it's a mistake 
that both Snape and Sirius fall into regarding each other.

In the present day, the Occlumency lessons briefly offer an 
opportunity for Harry and Snape to reach some level of mutual 
understanding, however reluctant.  With no witnesses around, Snape 
still clearly despises Harry, but he does actually attempt to teach 
him rather than just humiliate.  And by accessing Harry's memories 
during the lesson, he gets a chance to see that Harry did not, in 
fact, spend his whole life being spoiled and pampered.  But then 
Harry goes and wrecks it all by snooping in the pensieve.  And Snape 
compounds the mess by stopping the lessons in retaliation -- a huge 
misstep on his part, since, unlike Harry, he knows exactly what's at 
stake.  They both mess up big time, in ways that are totally in 
character for them, and this turns out to be a large contributing 
factor in Sirius' death.  Which, of course, is likely to revive 
their hatred more than ever.  Harry will not forgive Snape for 
outliving both James and Sirius, and we just <i>know</i>, don't we, 
that he's going to blame Snape as much as he can, because Snape 
makes such a handy target.

Sirius... Damn, I still find it hard to talk rationally about 
Sirius.  I was really hurting for him, trapped in that horrid, 
gloomy house, so obviously full of painful memories, with his 
mother's portrait shrieking at him and Kreacher muttering insults -- 
it must've felt like Azkaban all over again.  Throughout the book, 
there were little warning signs that he was emotionally 
disintegrating -- the mood swings, the desperate leaps at any 
pretext to get out, that one time Harry showed up to find him 
smelling of booze, the way he kept retreating upstairs with Buckbeak 
when things got too tough.  It's no wonder he ran off to try and 
protect Harry, and no wonder he fought so recklessly that he got 
himself killed.  It was crushingly painful, and it made perfect 
sense, and dammit, I <i>so</i> didn't want it to happen.

I wish Lupin had had more to do in the book.  I was so glad to see 
him again, but then he was hardly more than background scenery most 
of the time.  He had one or two really good moments, but I wanted to 
see more.  Particularly, I wanted more of his reaction to Sirius' 
death.  He, along with Harry, is the one with the most to grieve.

I have lots more thoughts, but if I try to cram them all into one 
review, it'll be almost as long as the book itself.  I'll probably 
post more later, but this is it for now.

Marina
rusalka at ix.netcom.com