Rowling’s Finale: Reading as a Writer

Last night, I finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling, the finale of her Harry Potter series.  As I’ve looked back at my reading of this series, I’ve found that I’ve written twice here about the books: Reading as a Writer: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and For the Love of…Adverbs.  To my amazement, I didn’t write about the sixth book in the series, so I’ll include some comments about it in this post about the last book.

These last two novels both exceed 500 pages in hardcover and I found them unwieldy to take with me to read on the bus or while I’m waiting for an appointment somewhere.  They were also both hard to hold lying down in bed so I rarely read them lying down.  Both could have benefited from judicious editing.  Rowling has a weakness for the overuse of adverbs.  She also writes off on a tangent and includes scenes that have nothing to do with the story.

Once again, however, her characters  won me over as well as the predicaments she created for them.  Harry, even as a teen, is a likeable protagonist.  Snape, who stands in for Voldemort as Harry’s nemesis, has begun to show some cracks in his villainy.  Could it be true that this mean man could actually have a heart?  Harry doubts it, and both books continue in his point of view, i.e. omniscient limited third.  We know only what Harry knows.  Rowling also deepens Harry’s relationship with Dumbledore and his two best friends, Ron and Hermoine, especially in the sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  I have so enjoyed Rowling’s characters in this series, it’s easy to understand the popularity.  I believe they will endure.

Rowling also puts poor Harry through the wringer.  The biggest loss comes in the sixth book.  Rowling set it up with care, wrote it with vivid assuredness.  But the most emotionally moving scenes followed it.  I cried which surprised me.  Rowling describes Harry’s response with  moving detail, and takes the reader into his mind and heart so we know him even better than we did before.  He is a good person.  The mystery of who the Half-blood Prince was was threaded through the book, revealed, in the end, by the person least likely.  I liked that a lot.

In the last book what impressed me was how it differed from the two-part movie based on it.  Movies must move, however, while Rowling enjoys taking her time in getting where she wants to go with her characters.  I thought the “lost in the wilderness” section of this book was far too long and repetitious.  It took too long to get to the silver doe patronus and the sword.  Then I had the same issue as I did with the movie about that wonderful sword — the last we see it is at Malfoy Manor.  Rowling does not explain how it gets from there to Hogwarts by the end.  In the movie, it just shows up, as I recall, and Neville grabs it.  In the book, he pulls it from the Sorting Hat which produced it once before when Harry needed its help.  It would have been simple to have Bellatrix bring it with her to use as a taunt — see what I have!

The last half of the seventh book moves faster than the first half, but there were times I thought Rowling had made a mistake.  The first comes with Harry looking at Snape’s memories in the Pensieve — she includes so many memories in this section that it slows the story’s momentum to a stop.  A good question she should have asked herself (and the writer equivalent of Monday morning quarter-backing applies here) could have been: what does Harry need to know from Snape?  And cut everything else.  Even Harry skips the memories he’s already seen.

I believe Rowling could also have combined chapters 28 and 29, and cut out some of the extraneous details.  This may be anathema to Harry Potter fans, but it would have made more sense in the context of the story.  I liked that Harry encountered Neville on his way to the forest at the end, and mentioned to Neville that Nagini needed killing.  That encounter, if I remember correctly, doesn’t happen in the movie, and Neville strikes with the sword on his own.  This led me to think after the movie that Voldemort’s true nemesis was Neville (also born the same day as Harry, right?) and not Harry.  But the novel makes absolutely clear why Harry and Voldemort must face off.

Again, Rowling brought me to tears, as I cried also at this scene in the movie, when Harry uses the Resurrection Stone.  She takes the reader into Harry’s mind so effectively here that we feel Harry’s loss and joy.  It took a long time to come, but the final showdown between Harry and Voldemort is far more satisfying than the movie’s and explains so much more about Harry’s power as a wizard.  I loved that.  I did not love the “Nineteen years later” chapter.  Although, I understand that it may have been necessary to assuage the fans.  I suspect writers of fan fiction have picked it up and run with it.

I’m glad I’ve read J.K. Rowling’s fantasy series and I suspect it could be a candidate for re-reading in the future….

 

For the Love of…Adverbs

As I’ve been working on the revision of Perceval’s Secret, I’ve been trying to remember who advised what to do with adverbs during revision — to circle each and every one and then assess whether each can be replaced with a stronger verb.  The problem with adverbs is that they tend to pile up in writing because they’re easier than stopping to think of a strong verb.  On the other hand, I think that sometimes an adverb is necessary, just as sometimes use of “to be” is necessary.

My mulling about adverbs coincided with my reading of J.K. Rowling’s fifth novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  I think Dolores Umbridge is perhaps the loveliest of all villains.  I could feel myself cringe inside every time she showed up and I thoroughly enjoyed her, shall we say, interesting encounter with a magical creature introduced to her by Hermoine.  That Hermoine!  The last quarter of this novel challenges the reader’s heart in deep ways that the previous four books had not.  But again, I think Rowling’s editor failed her with this book, too.  It was too long by at least a third and each chapter could have been tightened — one of my additional entertainments while reading was to note how I’d tighten each one.

Which brings me back to adverbs.  Rowling crowds her prose with them.  Some beg for clarification.  An example: “‘It is enough that we know,’ said Snape repressively.” (Italics mine)  I’m still trying to discover what Rowling meant here, i.e. what Snape sounded like to sound repressive.  In general, an adverb used in this way could be replaced with action.  For example, replace the attribution with “Snape stepped closer and his eyes bore down on Harry” or with an action toward a substitute object that illustrated repression.

Whether Rowling has favorite adverbs, I don’t know.  I noted that she used very often, and almost always modified the attributive “said” with an adverb instead of noting an action that illustrated the speaker’s emotion or manner of speaking.

Here are some other examples courtesy of Rowling:

“You just need some breakfast,” Harry said bracingly.  He could have done something to show that he was trying to give Ron support.

“Only!” said Hermoine snappishly.  In this case, why not “Only!” snapped Hermoine?

Malfoy laughed loudly and sycophantically.  While I could guess at what she wanted here, I have yet to imagine what a sycophantic laugh sounds like.

Can one love adverbs?  Why not?!  In speech, especially, people use adverbs to modify their verbs.  I tend to assess adverbs in dialogue along with every other adverb, but I’m more lenient with them.  They will help give the dialogue the naturalness of speech.  I will leave in an adverb after determining that no verb exists to take its place.  I agree with the rule to use adverbs as often as one would pee in public without having four legs and a tail.

Rowling did two things in the fifth novel that I admired to the skies.  First, she created and sustained Dolores Umbridge.  She chose a name for this worthy adversary that screams what this character is: dolor from the latin for pain, grief; or dolere to feel pain, grieve.  In English, dolor means mental suffering or anguish.  Her last name resembles umbrage which has a meaning: reason for doubt or suspicion.  This character’s name was the first time that I noticed Rowling using the name to reflect or illuminate the character.

The second thing occurs during the big confrontation between Dumbledore and Voldemort.  Throughout all the novels, Rowling has emphasized through her characters the power of a name, i.e. Voldemort, and the advice against using it.  Harry has no fear of this name and uses it often.  Dumbledore also has no fear but he doesn’t call Voldemort by that name or by “Dark Lord.”  During their confrontation, he called him Tom.  With that name, Dumbledore reduces him to his human proportions, to Tom Riddle, the young wizard who had suffered great loss and pain.  Wow.  That was brilliant.  It also showed Dumbledore’s position relative to Voldemort’s, which is the point for the others in the fight with him.

Adverbs, created for the lazy writer, conquered by the determined one…..in the wizarding world of the English language….

Reading as a Writer: “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”

This year, I’ve been working my way through J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. I thoroughly enjoyed the first three novels. Rowling’s imagination in creating her wizarding world in such fun and wacky detail inspires awe and respect.  I have seen all the movies.  Perhaps it’s accurate to say, however, I’m not knowledgeable about all things Harry Potter.  I’m reading these books as a writer.

 

I’ve just finished the fourth, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.  Once again, Rowling has maintained her Hogwarts world and given it a darker, more paranoid aspect.  Because I was already familiar with the story, I just sat back and immersed myself in that world, enjoying Harry’s adventures and trials.  I loved the imaginative and original detail from the owl post (and owls with individual personalities), to living paintings, weird creatures, and Mad-Eye Moody.  The heart of Rowling’s novels, however, are the characters and their relationships, their loyalties, and Harry’s story.  She writes from Harry’s point of view, which can be claustrophobic at times, but also ratchets up the suspense.  The reader knows only as much as Harry.  I really admire and respect the world and characters Rowling has created, and it’s abundantly clear from the first three novels that she can write well.

However, Goblet of Fire was bloated with digressions and at least one subplot which did nothing to move the story forward, reveal character or both.  When I saw the physical size of the book, I was astonished.  The bloating made for slow reading, too, without the crisp pace in each of the three previous novels.  Since I’m in the middle of my own revision work on Perceval’s Secret, perhaps I’m especially sensitive to things like word choice, digressions, and flubs.  Some examples of things that leaped out at me:

POV issue: This could also be “word choice.”  An example in chapter 17 of the difficulty…”Karkaroff’s face was burning.”  If Rowling had written this from Karkaroff’s POV it would be fine, but it was from Harry’s POV.  “Burning” is a physical sensation that only Karkaroff could feel, not Harry, so how could Harry know that the man’s face burned?  From Harry’s POV it would make more sense as “Karkaroff’s face, the color of fire, looked as if it burned” or something like that.  These issues are subtle and infrequent, but they leaped off the page at me and made me stop reading.

Consistent character action/detail: The single example that I can remember is a whopper.  When Harry, Hermoine and Ron visit Sirius at the mountain cave, he changes from his dog form to human form out of sight, and he’s dressed before they see him again.  But in chapter 36, Sirius begins as a clothed human when Harry first sees him in Dumbledore’s office.  Dumbledore asks him to return to dog form in order to stay with Harry in the hospital wing.  Sirius obliges.  But what happened to his clothes?  No mention of them.  If he’d still worn them, someone would have commented about a dog wearing human clothes, right?  But no.  During a serious and important meeting in Harry’s hospital room, Dumbledore asks Sirius to return to human form.  Oh. My. God.  He does and I started giggling.  Poor Sirirus!  Standing there buck naked in front of Hermoine and Molly Weasley!  Where are his clothes?  But no one remarks on his nakedness.  He then returns to dog form and leaves.  But this flub was horrible to me — it made me laugh at an extremely serious point and took me right out of the story.

Unnecessary subplot:  Rowling juggles an awful lot in this book, keeping up with relationships formed in earlier books, dropping more clues for who’s an enemy and who’s a friend regarding Voldemort, the connection between Harry and Voldemort, and so on.  She adds the subplot of George and Fred Weasley’s bet at the beginning with Ludo Bagman.  This subplot ends up revealing character — Ludo’s and Harry’s.  But the Rita Skeeter subplot?  I believe this was totally unnecessary and most of it could have been left out.  Rita interviewing Harry in the broom closet works well.  I understand how Rowling used Rita to add tension and adversity from Draco Malfoy and his gang, but Harry has more than enough to deal with.  Having said that, I enjoyed how Hermoine finally got the better of Rita.

I concluded that Rowling’s editor failed to serve her or the story well with the work on this novel.  I hope Rowling had a stern talk with that editor or even sacked him/her and got a better one for the next novel which I am really looking forward to.

Some miscellaneous questions about Harry and his world:

Why isn’t Harry angrier at the Dursleys for the way they treat him?  Especially after he sees how other kids live.  I’m happy Harry is a good boy, but even good boys are human and subject to resenting that kind of treatment.  The times he seems to retaliate are by accident rather than intent.

Why don’t the Dursleys treat him far better after he begins his studies at Hogwarts?  Rowling mentions that they fear him and his abilities with magic but they continue to treat him badly.  I’m surprised they wouldn’t be nicer to insure they won’t get zapped at some point in the future.  People like the Dursleys tend to think that way, don’t they?

Finally, I expected there to be a class at Hogwarts called “How to live in the Muggle World” or something like it.  For the kids with no experience in the Muggle world, like Ron Weasley for example, they have problems operating in the Muggle world.  It would make sense that there would be a class for 4th year students and up.  Maybe in the next book….

Summer Reading

The lazy, hot and steamy days of July are upon us!  When I was a child (clearly I’m not anymore although I frequently feel like one), my family left town and moved to our summer lakehouse for June, July and August.  While my parents puttered around the yard, gardens and house, we kids went swimming, fishing, hiking, water-skiing, boating and canoeing, and played with the neighbor kids.  Free of school, although not chores, I also spent long hours reading.

What are some of your favorite summer reads?  Share them with us, please!

My favorite book when I was ten years old was Mary Stewart’s The Moon-Spinners.  One high school summer, I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  The summer I studied at Cornell University, between junior and senior years in high school, my favorite book was Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.  One junior high school summer, can’t remember which, I read through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes canon.  The summer of Star Wars, my favorite novel was Watership Down by Richard Adams.  Then there was the summer I finally finished Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina after 18 months of ploughing through it.

This summer, I’m working my way through J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.  I didn’t read them when they first came out.  Instead, I went to the movies.  Recently, I saw the Deathly Hallows Part 1 movie on DVD in preparation for Part 2.  So far, my favorite movie is the third, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.  I just finished the novel of the same title last night — could NOT put it down.  I’m hooked.  My review will come after I’ve finished the series, though, as far as writing, character, story, plot, structure and dialogue.  Will they be my favorite books for the summer of 2011?

Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter series competes for that honor.  I’m also reading memoirs this summer and more science fiction novels.  As much as I’m enjoying Rowling’s novels, my favorite for this summer could be a book I haven’t even thought of yet….