Umbridge, detention, scars, and plotlines, oh my!,

[lupinlore]

No: HPFGUIDX 126091


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "eggplant9998"
<eggplant9998 at y...> wrote:
> 
<SNIP>


  The Order Of The Phoenix, the very book you are
> complaining about was number one on the French best seller list, the
> ENGLISH version of The Order Of The Phoenix. Not bad for a extremely
> poor writer, she must have something going for her. 

Good point.  <Shrugs>.  Did I say she had nothing going for her?  To
use a historical example, when Shakespeare (who was easily the
wealthiest and most popular playwright of his day) died it was said he
had never blotted out a single line of his writing.  To which Ben
Jonson replied, "Would that he had blotted out a thousand, so numerous
are his mistakes!"  Yet the same Ben Jonson was well known to have
adored both Shakespeare and the general body of Shakespeare's work,
and to have said "He was a man not of an age, but for all time."

Now, I'm not going to go that far in praising JKR, because I really
don't think she's THAT good.  However, I enjoyed PS/SS very much, and
CoS only slightly less.  I thought PoA was brilliant, and GoF I
absolutely adored.  OOTP, on the other hand, I found to be a
disappointing abomination, rife with severe mistakes and, yes, poor
writing, sometimes lapsing into extremely poor writing.  But that
isn't surprising.  Shakespeare wrote "Troilus and Cressida" as well as
"Romeo and Juliet" and "Cymbeline" as well as "King Lear."  "Hamlet"
is a classic but as for "Timon of Athens," well, there's a reason it's
almost never read, much less produced.

When you get right down to it, JKR can write whatever she wants, for
whatever reason she wants, using whatever style she wants, at whatever
length she wants, without regard to what anyone else in the entire
universe thinks or desires.  That is the right and privilege of a
writer.  Some people will love it.  Some people will hate it.  Some
will have a reaction somewhere in the middle.  All will have their
reasons for their love/hate of a given work by a given author, and
those reasons may or may not be shared by anyone else.  The right and
privilege of a reader is to love or hate anything for any reason
whatsoever, without regard to the opinions of anyone else in the
entire cosmos.  Another right and privilege of a reader is to buy
anything they wish with or without regard to anyone else's opinion.  

So, who is correct about OOTP?  Is it a brilliant piece of literature
taking the series into more mature realms?  Is it a deeply flawed and
disappointing mess that rambles meaninglessly from one implausible and
sometimes offensive plot twist to another until finally ending with a
few useful revelations garnished around an embarassingly clumsy
maguffin in the form of an obvious prophecy?  Is it a book of mixed
effectiveness that combines very good and very bad elements? I don't
know any good way to tell.  I don't even know that there is,
objectively, a right answer unless God Himself has an opinion -- and
if he does he ain't about to share it with me or anyone else.  I do
know what my opinions are and my reasons for those opinions, which I
BELIEVE to be correct, regardless of their popularity or lack thereof.
 The best I can do is remain loyal to the opinions I believe to be the
right ones, as to do anything else would make me a hypocrite. 

So, yes, I do think the Prefect subplot was clumsy and contrived.  And
that many of the characters acted in unbelievable ways.  And that much
of Dumbledore's speech at the end of the book was poorly written.  I
have given my reasons for those opinions, and many others, and I stand
firmly by them.


Lupinlore