Harry Potter News and Commentary
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Thank you!
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s not on topic for this particular post, but since this is most recent entry, I figure that this comment will get seen by most people if I post it here. I just wanted to draw everyone’s attention to a very negative review of HP7 by Andrew Rilston, who is usually a very perceptive reader and whose specific criticisms I find it hard to refute (even though I disagree wholeheartedly with his conclusions!) It’s interesting, and funny in places:
http://andrewrilstone.blogspot.com/2007/08/harry-potter-and-qualified-recantation.html
I couldn’t get through very much of that article.
Jane Austen broke all of Mr. Rilstone’s standards of good writing, too.
I’ve read the article. One of many negative reviews. So many critics seem to agree that Rowling is a terrible writer, the story is absurd, the editing scandalous… Frustrating. Maybe I should just quit reading this stuff. Still loved the books and I’m also a grateful reader of Travis Prinzi, even though I didn’t send the gift certificate.
Heavy criticism in all shapes and sizes is inevitable. It’s the finish to a spectacular series of books. Some do it for attention, others feel disappointed (having expected more), and others never liked the series in the first place.
I loved the book, and that’s all that matters. The reviews are very interesting to read, however. It’s best to alternate articles: good, bad, good, bad, etc. It softens the blows.
The reason I found Rilstone’s review so surprising is that he is usually the most astute and insightful of commentators. For examples of his work that have made me think “I wish I had said that”, see:
* His essay Lipstick On My Scholar, on the problem of why Susan is excluded from Aslan’s Country, at http://andrewrilstone.blogspot.com/2005/11/lipstick-on-my-scholar.html
* His question-and-answer session How To Mis-Read Lord Of The Rings on what LotR is and is not (and on whether balrogs have rings).
There’s a lot more, but these two pieces are probably enough to show Rilstone as a clever, careful and sympathetic reviewer.
Which is precisely why his review of HP7 caught me so off-guard.
My first reaction after reading Deathly Hallows through the first time was “Uh oh…here comes the back lash” because like Rilstone my knee jerk reaction was “That’s….it?! This is going to prove to all her critics that she stinks as a writer! What was she thinking? This is mud!!” It’s like the years of built up energy over finding out exactly what her point is is so great and so large that pretty much anything she gave us wouldn’t live up to the miraculous story and plot we spent years invisioning.
Having read through the book for a second time, however, I have a better understanding of her real point of the entire series. It’s not about a boy and his adventures to fight evil at all…and in understanding this you find the true vision and true amazement behind her writing style and approach. She’s one of few authors today that truly examines life and death and the struggle of losing people at different stages in our lives. It’s like a wave. the waves subside and we are safe, but the waves come up and one is snatched away from us. This is what she examines. Each moment the wave hits the shore. The grandparents we never got to meet, the uncle we met and had little time with, the parent-like figures which burn the hardest when lost and the peers who are our own age that life is snatched away from far too quickly. It’s really a brilliant piece of work.
Her gift to us was to allow us to read her quest of finding faith and understanding the process of death and treasuring the moments when the ocean is calm and the waves are not creeping up upon us. In understanding the cycle is meant to be this way, but not to be fearful because “To the well-organised mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
I read the Rilstone article. It is entertaining, especially the line about Snape:
‘It is revealed (for the sixteenth or seventeenth time) whether Prof. Snape is a dark wizard pretending to be a good wizard; a good wizard pretending to be a dark wizard; or a dark wizard pretending to be a good wizard pretending to be a dark wizard pretending to be a good wizard. (This is actually rather well done.)’
I actually agreed with some of his comments. JKR is not the world’s greatest word-smith, although comparing her disadvantageously to Robert Louis Stevenson is a cheap-shot: how many writers, dead or alive, would win that particular comparison? And we have commented here on the shifting relationship between the back story and the front story, the lessening emphasis on the school, and the fact that the conduct of some of the Hogwarts teachers, particularly Umbridge, constitutes child abuse. And I agree that the deathly hallows themselves are somewhat, although not “largely” irrelevant to the plot.
Where I part company with his criticism, however, is when he complains that the narrative structure of Deathly Hallows is “like the novelization of a third person quest adventure”, that Harry goes around looking for clues without interacting with the other characters, and that it’s not even a good detective story because the clues are so obviously spelled out.
Well, Mr. R., it is actually a quest adventure, and that narrative form is slight older than computer games (twenty-five hundred years older, give or take a hundred). And Harry does interact with the people he meets along the way, Dobby and Mr. Lovegood and the awful, awful remains of Bathilda Bagshot, and it is an excellent detective story: in case you didn’t notice, it had everyone on this website speculating into the late hours of many, many nights about the fifth and sixth Horcruxes, was Snape good or evil, and why was Dumbledore’s hand shrivelled?
But my most serious point of departure from the articulate if somewhat facile arguments of Mr. Rilstone is that JKR does not write boooks which have “novel-like” qualities, by which he means:
“psychologically believable characterisation, description which describes, and a plot which is more complex or subtle than fits into 90 minutes of cinema.”
JKR is a master of believable characterisation. Not so much with the good characters, perhaps, nor with some of the background characters. But she also has a host of vividly drawn (and intriguingly named) major and minor characters: Mundungus Fletcher, Arabella Figg, Marvolo Riddle, Barty Crouch, Horace Slughorn, Peter Pettigrew, Professor Lovegood, Kreacher, Alastor Moody, Gilderoy Lockhart, to name the ones that spring immediately to mind. And that’s without mentioning her most intriguing and contentious character: Severus Snape. In fact, her genius for creating these colourful characters reminds me a lot of Charles Dickens who similarly offered up cardboard cut-outs of virtue and unforgettable characters of mixed-virtue or outright villainy.
reyhan, very, very well said. While I’ve said before that I have my quibbles with Rowling’s writing (yes, I just used the word “quibbles”), I don’t see how Rilstone’s review is any better than Harold Bloom, and I thought that was a lot of self-important, uber-critical, over-generalized, ignorant nonsense. Alright, so maybe Rilstone’s review is better than that…but still, the depth of this series, and all the things still yet to be mined, give me pause when it comes to any complaints I might have.
Once I’ve exhausted discussion on the greatness of this series, then I might do a post on my few gripes. But that’ll probably be sometime in 2038 when no one’s reading this blog anymore.
And by the way, Mr. R., if you’d been following the Arthurian undercurrent to the series for the first 6 books, you might not think the Hallows quite so irrelevant.
The Rilstone article seems to define “good” writing as journalistic writing–spare and stark. I grant that is what many editors prefer these days (which is why, instead of real descriptions, we get stuff like, “She sighed. Sniffed the air. It was blond.”). I can’t swallow that one, though.
I admit that’s about as far as I could manage to read without choking to death on my laughter. Sorry.
If we knew for sure what constituted “good writing”, then Rilstone wouldn’t have needed to write his review. A.S. Byatt pushes the excellence of Victorian novelists, who irritate the crap out of me because they usually insist on describing everything in a scene, right down to the damn dustbunnies. Every Victorian Lit class I had to suffer through just reinforced my own belief that they were all writing essentially the same novel. It’s just that Thomas Hardy was trying to out-describe George Eliot. Even Tolkien, 70 years later, is guilty of falling in love with his own descriptions. LotR often slows to a crawl while Tolkien tells us about the shimmering of the dew in the trees of Fangorn Forest.
The only novelists of the era I’ve found to my liking are Dickens and Twain. They had fun with the English language in a way their contemporaries didn’t.
Granted, it’s a prejudice of mine. But it’s one I’ve never been able to get around…sorry…
Hemingway is accused of writing like a mysogenist — that his very language conveys his own mach ego and sexism. But I like it precisely because he tries to write like a poet: use as few words as possible, but choose them carefully and pack them as full as you can. The opening chapter to A Farewell to Arms is one of the most beautiful passages in the English language I’ve ever read.
Rilstone’s criticisms have a basis. We’ll all admit that Rowling can clunk up her writing with some unnecessary passages. But Rilstone ignores that Rowling also does all the things he says make for good writing. Particularly when it comes to detective fiction.
And when it comes to “quest adventure computer games”, Rilstone is ignoring the fact that most RPGs find their genesis in epic poetry — which is often about the hero traveling from one location to another to combine some clues and tasks into a pattern that tells him what is right and what is wrong — here, I think we’ve been referring to this as the “hero’s journey”…
Just a thought…
Dave the Longwinded, yes, all good thoughts. Except that I love lengthy descriptions of Victorian literature. I’m kind of weird that way. I like the way the plot suddenly pops out from behind those “damn dustbunnies” when you’re least expecting it.
Travis, and you’re perfectly free to do so! And I think you’re probably smarter for it. But, you’re also strange…very, very strange…
Ha! Yes, I will freely admit to being strange.