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rivkaI read the fifth Harry Potter book Saturday evening, finishing at 3AM Sunday. It took me a while to sink into - I think because I'd put Jo Walton's The King's Name down to read it. Jo's writing is so very good at the sentence level, and the protagonist's voice in The King's Name is so spare and distinctive, that the clunkiness of Rowling's prose irritated me quite a bit in the first several chapters. But then, fortunately, I got sucked into the plot.
In all, I thought it was quite good - and I couldn't really quibble with some of the parts that bugged me. Harry's angsty moody sarcastic unreasonableness, for example, seems like a perfectly fair portrait of a struggling adolescent. He's got the virtues of adolescence too, such as unwillingness to meekly accept injustice. So although I spent much of the first part of the book wanting to slap him, the portrayal of his character felt realistic.
I like that Rowling's books are growing up as her hero does. When he was eleven, his world was all clear-cut good and evil and moral certainty, and his faith in Dumbledore was unshakeable. As he grows older, the world as we perceive it through his eyes becomes more complex, less trustworthy, more shaded with grey. Good characters make mistakes, and thus Harry starts to doubt them - and then, as adolescents do, he takes the doubts too far and is, at times, reflexively untrusting. Bad characters may have unexpected redeeming qualities - like Aunt Petunia, for heaven's sake - or they may not, like the Evil Umbridge. And we, as readers, are being forced to mature along with Harry. We don't get to drift happily along through a world simpler and grander than our own, anymore, but there are compensations in the richness and truth of our new perspective.
I'm not finding myself with much to say about the plot right now. I'm intending to read it again, more slowly, so I might have more to say then. I'll confine myself now to mentioning a point I saw elsewhere - not sure where, sorry - on LiveJournal: it seems unwise to assume that anyone dying in a book with the word "Phoenix" in the title is irrevocably dead.
In all, I thought it was quite good - and I couldn't really quibble with some of the parts that bugged me. Harry's angsty moody sarcastic unreasonableness, for example, seems like a perfectly fair portrait of a struggling adolescent. He's got the virtues of adolescence too, such as unwillingness to meekly accept injustice. So although I spent much of the first part of the book wanting to slap him, the portrayal of his character felt realistic.
I like that Rowling's books are growing up as her hero does. When he was eleven, his world was all clear-cut good and evil and moral certainty, and his faith in Dumbledore was unshakeable. As he grows older, the world as we perceive it through his eyes becomes more complex, less trustworthy, more shaded with grey. Good characters make mistakes, and thus Harry starts to doubt them - and then, as adolescents do, he takes the doubts too far and is, at times, reflexively untrusting. Bad characters may have unexpected redeeming qualities - like Aunt Petunia, for heaven's sake - or they may not, like the Evil Umbridge. And we, as readers, are being forced to mature along with Harry. We don't get to drift happily along through a world simpler and grander than our own, anymore, but there are compensations in the richness and truth of our new perspective.
I'm not finding myself with much to say about the plot right now. I'm intending to read it again, more slowly, so I might have more to say then. I'll confine myself now to mentioning a point I saw elsewhere - not sure where, sorry - on LiveJournal: it seems unwise to assume that anyone dying in a book with the word "Phoenix" in the title is irrevocably dead.
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Date: 2003-06-23 03:29 pm (UTC)