Good writer (was: Harry IS Snape!)

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 141269

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "lupinlore" <bob.oliver at c...> wrote:

> I think it's several things.  In the case of HBP, I think the romance 
> hurt a lot.  It just wasn't well done or particularly believable, 
> even taking into account that these are teenagers.  


Pippin:
I  agree with this in a way. The romance does sound a bit forced, though
the way the characters themselves act and speak is very believable --
they sound _just_ like the kids in my carpool. Maybe that's part of the
problem -- we oldsters would like to remember the magic of young
love and forget all the parts that were mundane, not to say miserable.

But I think JKR, as she says, really wanted to convince us that Ginny
was Miss Right and Hermione was not, and I think she tried a little
too hard, perhaps not realizing that her conviction was going to
come through anyway. 

Lupinlore:
> However, I think more to the point JKR is hurt by the way the 
> different books come together, or rather fail to come together.  The 
> radical changes in tone from one book to another are jarring and work 
> hard against suspension of disbelief. 

Pippin:
It's true that the fairytale atmosphere of the earlier books has 
well-nigh evaporated. It's like the difference between The Hobbit and
LOTR.  In both cases, there was something darker and dystopian
swimming below the surface in the earlier works that was easy to
ignore -- casual contempt for Muggles emerges even in the first
book along with Dumbledore's triage-like approach to saving 
Harry. What we have yet to learn is whether Rowling has anything
to say that's worth the loss of the whimsy and sheer escapism. 

That has nothing to do with the quality of the writing per se--rather 
poorly written books have changed the world: Uncle Tom's Cabin, and 
four little religious tracts composed in (I am told) indifferent Greek 
come to mind.

Lupinlore:
> Also, be honest, who that has ever played D&D could read about 
> the "quest for the seven horcruxes" and not at least titter, if not 
> outright guffaw?  It was like she walked into a comic-book shop and 
> decided to use the plot of the first old D&D module she found lying 
> in the Clearance Sale box.

Pippin:
Yup. They're pure McGuffin and proud of it. What's important is
not the horcruxes but what Harry is willing to sacrifice to get rid of
them, and what Voldemort and his allies are willing to do to defend
them.  What kind of solution to the problem of evil is destroying
seven soul fragments? What kind of solution was throwing a
magic ring into a volcano? As Ursula LeGuin remarked, the only
people who are troubled by this are those who think there really
*is* a solution to the problem of evil.

Lupinlore: 
> Worst of all, JKR has a bad habit, as I've said before, of writing 
> herself into corners and then getting out by, well, cheating.  It's 
> like the old Saturday matinees where you see a car go over a cliff 
> with the hero inside and spend all week wondering how he's going to 
> survive, only to return the next week and be treated to a scene where 
> the hero jumped out of the car BEFORE it went over the cliff.

Pippin:
If the filmmakers establish that Our Hero is an escape artist, show
him struggling to escape, and allow you to see the door crack open
just before the camera cuts back to show the dreadful plunge, then
the viewer has got no cause to complain -- though there will always
be those who hate the hero and want to see him crash and burn.

Harry spent all of OOP learning to accept the reality of death.
That's what that whole thing with the thestrals was about , IMO,
-- finding that he's not the only person who can see them, that 
they were there all along, and that he can harness and control 
them. 

He also had to accept the reality that wise, kindly, loving adults 
can still fail him (something, in my experience, that can be horribly
difficult for someone from an abusive background to understand.)
Though he thought for most of Phoenix that Dumbledore abandoned
him because he didn't like him any more, he also found that Sirius
and Molly, not to mention Ron and Hermione, were good people who
still cared about him, yet were unable to help him very much and
sometimes made things worse.  So he was prepared, in a way,
both to lose Sirius, and to find that Dumbledore could fail, both 
as Sirius did by having concerns  that were more urgent
to him than Harry's welfare, and as Molly did by having the wrong 
idea about what's good for Harry.


IMO for Harry to begin HBP as shattered and rebellious as he was at
the beginning of OOP would negate a very long book. I am reminded 
of the story that a woman came to the Buddha and asked him to 
restore her dead child to life. The Buddha agreed, provided she would
bring him something from a household that had never known loss.
Of course she failed, and had to bury her child and accept her grief. 
What Harry went through in Phoenix was something like that. He saw
that Hagrid, Luna and Neville had been living with the loss of a 
parent for most of their lives, and though Harry's never thought they
were fully functional, in OOP they were all managing better than
he was. That was a powerful incentive for Harry to draw on his
immense resources of resilience and recovery, which Rowling
has certainly established that he had.

I don't think anything got swept under the rug, though obviously
a lot of situations are hanging fire until the conclusion. 

Pippin