A brief Harry Potter review
A load of old lazy, cheating, drawn out toss. A massive confidence trick played on the reader. Bollocks, it is*.
*Why? Those not bothered about spoilers should highlight the text below.
[Thanks to the convoluted mother's-love plus Harry/Voldemort-blood-transfusion plot contortion, Harry has effectively been immortal since the end of Book Four.
Rowling could have skipped books Five and Six (and a good portion of Book Seven), cut to the chase and have Harry jump up again every time he got killled. He could have waded in good and proper instead of all that poncing about in the woods. In retrospect, the last three books were completely without jeopardy or suspense and therefore pointless. All that hinting about killing the boy wizard off was sales-generating chicanery.
See? A total bloody con. People have gone to prison for less. Rowling should give the sodding money back.]
Posted on July 25th, 2007 at 7:56pm under Culture, media and sport, Miscellaneous misanthropy
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• 12 Comments |
I thought it was great. Best yet. Even better than OotP, let alone PoA. Maybe you should have tried reading it without being determined not to like it.
How do you know I was determined not to like it? I’d got this far, for flip’s sake, I had to give it a chance. As it turns out the first and second thirds were really good – fair zipped along. Much better than the plotless padding and time-watching of books five and six.
It just turns out that the whole premise was built on a convoluted trick. It’s dishonest storytelling, if you ask me.
Anyway, I’m taking this far too seriously. I need a laugh. Nick Cohen’s latest book next, maybe?
Well, it could have been worse. At least we avoided another tedious Quidditch match and the body count was fairly satisfying, if slightly deficient in big-name constituents.
For me though, the damning indictment was that the two most moving deaths were both non-human minor characters. Surely there must be something wrong with a novel where the reader is disengaged to such a degree that they’re unmoved by the deaths of more major characters.
Oh, and the epilogue didn’t really add much, the climax seemed to lack impact, and the adverbs; don’t start me off on the adverbs. Can no one in these books doing anything without the burden of an unnecessary adverb?
It was great, although the final duel was a bit disappointing.
Dishonest? Did you expect the title character to die in a fifth or sixth book of a seven book series?
And as I read it, Harry could have been killed in the fifth and sixth books, Voldemort would just have to do it twice, first to kill the horcrux.
He was also vulnerable in the final duel, but Voldemort would have had to use a different wand, which makes it pretty stupid for Harry to declare himself the master of the elder wand just before.
Who.
Gives.
A.
Toss?
nice trick with the invisible text. i’ve never seen that before.
I don’t think that he was immortal, was he? Did he not have to have the ring. And why was Malfoy the true owner of the Elder Wand.
And why does everyone think that Rowling planned all this when she’s patently been making it up as she goes along? Horcruxes, my arse…
DK
Oooh, invisible text. It’s like its 1998 and I’m reading Digitizer. The web needs a reveal button.
Err, Harry Potter? Don’t know much about him but I was at the Bloomsbury Waterstones last Friday. Seemed terribly exciting.
DK, malfoy disarmed Dumbledore in book six.
He was only “immortal” to Voldemort. So definitely in peril any time anyone other than Voldemort was trying to kill him, which was plenty of times.
The end battle was a bit cr*p though – rather like the convoluted, over-detailed description of the battle at the end of Order of the Phoenx, I just kept thinking how much better it’s going tobe when done on screen with some decent editing.
Most disappointed by the number of panto bad guy mistakes. Carrying his snake around him when it’s the last Horcrux? Letting Nagini bite Snape, rather than using a curse? James Bond has faced smarter bad guys than that.
But yeah, it’ll probably make for a cracking film. Giants slapping eachother to bits is worth the ticket alone.
Strange thing, this Potter phenomenon. I did a stand-up gig in Brighton where I threatened to read out the last page (naturally, I’d made it up – this was after all supposed to be comedy).
The number of adults in the audience who put their fingers over their ears and shrieked “No, no, no” was highly disturbing, if hilarious. I can understand that behaviour from 10 year olds (even then, that’s pushing it), but a bunch of Brighton so-called sophisticates? Has our culture actually ended up infantalising us?
As for Ms Rowling, she’s almost impossible to read out loud – Stephen Fry really does have his work cut out with her – but at least she’s not Dan Brown. Now THERE’S a tosser!
Re: the above.
Apologies to all – of course, audience members place their fingers IN their ears, or their HANDS over them. The lights were bright and I couldn’t see very well. Good noise, though.