Some Words

Against my better judgment, I just motored through the last Harry Potter book. Spoilers and stuff below.

Before I start in on this, I do want to say that Rowling appears to be a very natural story teller. Despite the fact that some things had me groaning in pain, I was always enjoying myself.

But on to some structureless ranting…

Personally I don’t think that Rowling is really one of those writers who you have to savor every word of. It’s pretty easy to read her work quickly. Plus, the faster you read it, the less you notice her sentence construction. There were several points where I had to stop and re-read a few sentences to figure out what she was saying. Was she worried that editors would leak the book? Someone had to have been able to point this stuff out.

What the fuck is going on in the middle of the book? Nothing. It’s a big long camping trip that she clearly put in their for a reason, but the payoff isn’t big enough. She could have spent more time on cooler things if she handn’t spent 200+ pages on: “Camp, camp, camp. All they did was camp. They were grumpy from all the camping, and none of them knew what to do. From time to time, they took a break to camp some more. Things were going on in the world, but I won’t tell you what they were, because I like saying camp… listen to the way it rolls of the tongue… camp. macp ampc pmac” Meanwhile, back at the farm… interesting things were going on.

Killing off half the b-list characters does not equal killing the emotional impact of killing a major character off.

Does Rowling even know what’s going on in her action scenes? She’s fairly evocative, when she isn’t describing the morning sky as colorless. Why does that go out the window as soon as people start fighting?

If you think that Snape is a good guy, or that Harry will live, it’s pretty easy to know you’re right long before Rowling stops trying to use those things to keep the tension high. If Snape is evil and has Dumbledor’s pensieve, everyone is double plus fucked. If Lupin and Tonks are dead, leaving their child with his godfather Harry, Harry probably isn’t dying.

How many times in one book can things look utterly hopeless, only to turn out mostly alright through luck? Harry goes to the Malfoy Mansion? Very low tension, it’s hundreds of pages from the end of the book.

I mean, I enjoyed the whole thing. But part of me can’t help but feel that Le Guin accomplishes in the 200 pages of the first Earthsea book, what Rowling spends thousands of pages not quite accomplishing.