How the HP Books Let Me Down: A Tragic Tale

[Barry Arrowsmith]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "Eileen Rebstock" <erebstock at ...> wrote:
>
> Back in August of 2000, when I first read the four HP books then existing, I'd no idea of 
the depth of obsession the HP books would inspire in me. In fact, it wasn't until about a 
year later that I began to delve into their murky and ambiguous text and subtext to bring 
forth the marvelous treasures that lay hidden within it. I was just getting a handle on the 
secrets of the Potterverse when Hurricane Jo came along with OotP and laid waste to my 
careful interpretations. I'm still particularly annoyed by the way she slaughtered my 
intricate backstory for Avery by making Rabastan Lestrange the Fourth Man in the Pensieve 
scene. What has Rabastan Lestrange done since his introduction to merit that cruel crack 
down? Fourth Man!Avery had so much more potential, and yet all that theorizing has been 
cut off by the fiat of the author. 
> 
> 

Ah, yes.
The first four books. 
Make that 3.75 for me.
Does anyone else think/suspect/feel/imagine/deduce/surmise that there're differences
between those four and the last two? Besides length, that is.

Maybe familiarity breeds contempt (not really, but you know what I mean), but those 
earlier vols were stuffed full of fascinating detail that you just knew had to mean 
something. The later ones - there was detail, but not nearly so fascinating and it read 
more like background than the "you'll be sorry if you don't take note of this" feeling of the 
earlier books.

Could there have been a reassessment during that l-o-o-o-n-n-g break between PoA and 
GoF? A feeling that "if I carry on like this I'll never finish" sort of thing? 
Dunno.
Certainly most readers favourite volumes tend to be among the earlier ones
 
snip  
> 
> Still the nagging suspicion wouldn't go away, possibly due to the increasing infantilism 
of JKR's work. As each book grew shorter and shorter, with a more simplified vocabulary, 
and much less death, violence, or general havoc, it became very hard to ignore it. Words 
cannot explain how horribly devastated I was by the Pensieve scene in OotP, where it was 
demonstrated once and for all that Rowling mindlessly adored the Marauders and nothing 
they did could possibly ever be wrong. She continued this simplification, of course, by 
unambiguously turning Snape into an unconflicted worshipper of Voldemort in HBP.
> 
> 

Less death. 
Yet the over-arching theme *is* death, according to Jo.
There are much more interesting subjects than death, especially in the books, IMO.
As a matter of fact, I've just had a Kneasy moment. Possibilities for a major post, here.
Hmm. Needs some thought. Maybe in a few days...

The Marauders were a bit of a let-down, but not yet a totally lost cause. Pippin et al 
still have a beady eye on Lupin, and I still have deep suspicions of Sirius. 
Never did like flash bastards.
 
> 
> Mainly, however, it's the way she tossed aside the promising Crouch subplot that irks 
me most. Sure, Barty Sr. was dead and Barty Jr. soul-sucked at the end of GoF, but Barty 
Sr. could have come back as a ghost, something that I proved beyond a doubt on HPFGU 
back in the day. I think it should be obvious how much this would have improved the plot, 
particularly if it'd turned out that Winky really had been sleeping with him. (As an example 
of how JKR likes to cut down on soi-disant pointless fan speculation, I refer you to an 
interview where she denied that Winky would ever get over her current alcoholic 
depression.) When I became a fan, I thought I was reading a Political Story, not some 
childish fantasy adventure, and that current volumes would feature less Ginny and more 
Percy. Incidentally, I'm still waiting for the latter to be justified in his complex political 
stance against his family's more naïve response to the situation. Suffice it to say, I 
sincerely doubt that JKR will redeem my faith in her by this last book.
> 
>

Yes, the Crouches. There's a nice little theory that Barty Jnr was set up to be caught;
a plot to bring down Barty Snr, allowing the more malleable Fudge into a key position. 
Bagman, too, where's he gone? And yes, Percy. Come to that, where the hell is Trevor?
Ripe seams for exploitation, all of them - well, perhaps not Trevor, but I still feel that
there ought to be a plot-connected tale or two centering on him as well. 

The kids I'm not paricularly interested in, never have been, and it looked for a while 
as if it was the adults that had the greatest potential. Sure; the books are "Harry Potter
and whatever" but he's more like a chess piece, a bemused teenager being manoeuvred 
around by those who really know what's what. But, admittedly with one book to come,
it looks as if young Lochinvar will be girding up his loins and polishing his wand before
the traditional showdown. 
Um.
Breaking the genre?
 
snip
> 
> Ah well, let bygones be bygones. In truth, the middle name thing doesn't matter very 
much. It's just symbolic of a larger problem, the way all our favourite avenues of 
theorizing are being removed from us. Alas, this is not a new dilemma. I remember far too 
well the despair among Tolkien fans back in the late 1940s when the Return of the King 
came out, shattering our favourite theories. I'd figured that Faramir was going to play a 
very important part in defeating Sauron, and instead he spent most of the book lying 
about in the hospital. What's more, in a mark of disdain for his fans, the self-absorbed 
professor included a few hundred pages of Appendices, leaving *nothing* to the 
imagination. Gone were all my Sauron-origin theories, plus then he said in an interview 
that Aragorn did not mean "One Tree King" as had previously been widely accepted among 
fans. As you all know, the result of this disastrous move on the Professor's part, has been 
that no one likes his books today, well no one *intelligent*, and there is a complete dearth 
of theorizing about the gaps in what passes for a Tolkien fandom. Rowling should take 
heed of this dire warning.
> 
>
  
Well, the excuse is that he deliberately wrote a 'closed universe' fantasy, it's not open to 
theorising and extrapolation, there is no contact, no contiguity with our world, so our
real life experiences and expectations aren't transferrable in the way that they are in HP. 
Can't comment on the validity of that, that's for committed fans and critics to dispute. 
By all accounts he was a mind-numbingly boring lecturer at university.

> 
> I am exhausted and somewhat numbed by the existential grief that has filled me as I 
reflect on all this. I'd like to finish, however, by quoting a man who understood the numb 
pain that Rowling has provided her fans with. 
> 
>  
> "I'm looking through you. Where did you go?
> I thought I knew you. What did I know?
> You don't look different, but that's the game.
> I'm looking through you. You're not the same.
> 
> 
> Why, tell me why, did you not treat me right?
> Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight."
> 
> 
> And so it has. 
>

Early-ish Beatles lyrics. '64? '65?
Don't see those about very often.
Reminds me of the good old days.
It's that nostalgia thing again. 

Kneasy