OOP: A satire on real events?

[Dan Feeney]

No: HPFGUIDX 63614



The irritating thing for some on reading OOP is that it is (certainly to me) a pretty fair satire of the response of the large media and certain
governments around the world to George Bush and his so-called war on
terrorism. Of course, media manipulation happens all the time, but rarely so 
dramatically as in the last couple years. I mean, didn't shrub say 
 that we quite possibly will never know all the things the US
military is doing? Didn't he say we shouldn't know? Well, yes, he did, in
fact.

I projected, as many did, that, as it progressed, the series would 
 have to deal much more intimately with 1 the relationship between
the magical and muggle worlds and 2 with the inherent class
differences in the magical world. This has in fact happened - the series cannot be taken as innocently as it could before. Jolly good, I say. Bloody 
right.
 
 As an adult reader of Rowling, I find such protestations and whinings about the change in tone, percieved or real, in OOP to be laughable.
 Also, the books are NOT puzzles, but it seems some need them to be. I submit that the puzzly aspects, the 6-2-4-4-2 on the telephone
spells magic thing, for example, to be chrome, not the story.
 
 The whole series is bound up with the question of desire, fate and 
 choice - how the characters negotiate circumstances, their lives 
 "weighted" differently, their choices echoing, or falling silent. 
 These are big themes. And they are now on the surface, but they 
have always, I say, been operating in the books. What was secret - 
leaving  HP on the doorstep, e.g. - is now overt - the OOP
at  the station. Does this mean the boy in the closet now realizes
that  getting out might be possible, the boy in the trap of ignorance?

 Remember my theory that the imagined magical world operates for HP
in the muggle world the way the books operate for we in the so-called
 real world? Well, the big change in OOP occurs precisely around 
that point. The poster who mentioned HP's honest response to Snape,
 regarding HP thinking of what curse to cast on Draco, as the most 
 important line in the book, hints at the such a change. What 
prophecy has meant before now becomes less a passive, ignorant, unseeing
 thing, becomes a more conscious thing. Does our consciousness not 
eke out spaces, like the space, as it were, around the HP/LL encounter
at the end of OOP, from the momentum, from the weighted world moving
 forward in darkness and fear, where prophecies seem more like sentences?
 
 As for the book being too long - pshaw! I could have kept reading 
 another 800 pages, another 1600.
 
 dan f
  
 "'Yeah, Quirrell was a great teacher,' said Harry loudly, 'there
was just that minor drawback of him having Lord Voldemort sticking out
of the back of his head.'"