Discworld and Member Articles
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It smacks of the dark arts
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Written by terrypratchettbooks.org
Thursday, 28 July 2005 |
Tibor Fischer reviews Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling.
(Telegraph Arts)
For a reviewer, tackling a Harry Potter book is truly a unique experience. Those of us who contribute to books pages often suffer from a sense of futility and solitude. Front pages, sports sections, film reviews, business news - these sections all have their devotees, but I fear that, apart from the literary editors themselves, there are few readers who work their way through every book review on offer (I certainly don't).
But, when it comes to Harry Potter, it's not a case of suspecting your critical extrusion will waft away inconsequentially, you know it will; J. K. Rowling is above it all.
For writers, this is J. K. Rowling's most admirable achievement; not just the hugely enviable royalties and readership, but the ascension. Like her creation Harry Potter, she is the Chosen One. It may not happen very often but I can assure you that Salman Rushdie or Ian McEwan will walk into a room or sit down at a dinner party and hear questions like, "so what do you do?" or "should I have heard of you?' J. K. will never phone her publisher and be asked by a temp to spell her name. She will never walk into a bookshop and discover that she is not stocked. Odd territories, like Poland or Korea, won't taunt her by holding out against her books.
J. K. is above all that. It gives me enormous pleasure just to think of how her publishers must get right down on the ground and grovel before her.
And she made it on her own. You will find few writers in the best-seller lists who have got there without the bunk-up of an award, a film or television adaptation or a publisher splashing out on T-shirts for booksellers and sushi for the literati. Long before the hype-machines were switched on for Harry Potter she was sauntering through reprint after reprint.
Is she that good? Is she 1,000 times better than the writers she outsells by that ratio? Of course not, but that isn't to say there aren't sound reasons for Potter's domination. There's a fantastic irony that the most successful writer ever has appeared in a country where literacy may soon be seen as a quaint 20th-century activity and at a time when children have access to limitless electronic temptation. It's not just the scale of the success, but the speed that's remarkable (the first volume was only published in 1997) and that smacks of the dark arts.
J. K. Rowling is a skilful writer (she walks all over, for example, Dan Brown or Jeffrey Archer) and, judging from the manipulation of her characters, a skilful chess player. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the sixth in the series and, we are informed, the penultimate volume.
If you haven't read the earlier instalments you'll miss out on some of the fun, but one of the main reasons for the book's 607 pages is regular recapitulation of the previous adventures, as well as regular recapitulation of the goings-on in HPATHBP.
Clearly, I'm not the target audience for this book, but I enjoyed most of it enormously, chiefly the humorous elements. The world of Harry Potter is a cunning amalgam of Billy Bunter, Narnia and Star Wars, and while Good slugging it out with Evil is all very familiar, the jokes are fresh. Rowling is very close to the imaginative gags of Terry Pratchett and Robert Rankin, if somewhat bowdlerised (however sex, in the form of snogging, is everywhere, since Rowling's protagonists are growing up).
Many of the children may miss it, but Rowling is a dab hand at satire; indeed at times she seems to be fighting the urge to shapeshift into Ben Elton, as she makes fun of the spin-doctoring at the Ministry of Magic (although I thought the evisceration of New Labour was better done in the last volume, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix).
Rowling can be very good on character, too. Many of Potter's schoolfriends are anodyne (I keep hoping Ron will die) but every volume has some strong additions. I liked the new face, Professor Slughorn, the lily-livered, crystallised-pineapple munching snob and networking addict. I also adore the sinister Snape, who is my favourite among Rowling's creations. I can't believe Rowling hasn't been influenced by Alan Rickman's performance as Snape in the films, since his sneering has become positively Rickmanesque in this book.
The question of Snape's allegiance has been one of the most powerful engines of the series. Is he or isn't he working for the Dark Lord, Voldemort? I admire Rowling's front in playing that card again and again, and very well, but the issue seems decisively settled in HPATHBP, as the book ends with Snape apparently killing one of the good guys.
Yet, Rowling is terribly sneaky. I will have to read the final volume, just to be sure.
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