11HARRY POTTER: A (VERY) CRITICAL REVIEW
A warning: If you are a passionately loyal supporter of the Harry Potter series, you would be well advised to chuck this piece of trash straight off into the dustbin, and take up, say, The Order Of The Phoenix instead. It is my painful duty to inform you that this article unleashes a bitter and completely unjustified attack against Harry Potter. It is definitely not meant for the highly strung reader, who is in constant danger of apoplectic fits.
What with all the hype and hullabaloo surrounding the publication of Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, the voice of reason is necessary to make the blind see the light, Like Mark Twain in romance, I have also designed some rules which govern the realm of fantasy:
1. The incidents in a fantasy should be "fantastic", that is, "extravagantly fanciful, capricious, eccentric, grotesque or quaint in design, excellent and extraordinary" (The Oxford Concise Dictionary). But the incidents on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix are grotesque and nothing more.
2. The incidents in a fantasy should be interrelated and form a coherent chain. But for example, the entire Occlumency episodes, not to mention Snape's Worst Memory, hardly contribute in any way to the story.
3. The rules state that a protagonist of a story should have his own vices, and that his character should not be a mirror image of that of Little Lord Fauntleroy. But Harry's character is as stainless as steel can be and his soul is so clean that you could eat your breakfast, lunch and Christmas dinner out of it, not to mention the cocktails in between meals.
4. The rules require that if the author has in the past stuck to incidents involving wonderful wizards and devious dark lords, she will continue to do so, and not diverge from the topic by introducing slushy writing that will not even be accepted by the lowest standards of base journals.
5. They further require that if a personage has in the past stuck to the Good Old Queen's English, he will not switch over in a day to a particularly low, corrupted form of American. But this is precisely what Harry does, the most obvious substitutes being "Yeah" and "Yep" for "Yes", and "Nope" for "No." Another striking example is "S'matter!" In passing, do wonder how the word "Yep" can be said grimly, as by Harry in Phoenix.
6. The rules state that an important character, who is rather likeable, will not suddenly die a most unnecessary and unnatural death. However, Sirius Black does, and we feel all the more embarrassed because a second before he has been taunting his opponent in a duel.
7. Finally, the rules require that certain "sidekicks" will perform activities which further and better the story, not merely stand around and look ornamental. But this rule has been flagrantly violated in Phoenix.
Now, the first thing I would like to draw attention to pertains to all the books. I call this the "spectac—ular anomaly." Harry Potter wears spectacles. True, we can't grudge him that: they are probably needed due to random errors in gene mutation. Now, these spectac—les are always getting broken and then re-fixed by magic. Does Harry realize that he can save time, effort and his wand undue wear and tear by simply removing his glassed, and correcting his eyesight by magic? No, of course not.
If Harry's soul is clean, his behavior definitely needs to be scrubbed thrice and hung out to dry. When he's not waltzing around going on dates and kissing girls, he is either acting the hero, or more often, playing the "angry young man." At no fewer than twenty-three occasions (there maybe more, for I am not good at counting) he screams out something to someone in BLOCK letters. At the end of the story, he is shouting at the venerable Dumbledore as if he is Kreacher the house-elf! And more often than not, his anger is completely unjustified.
The biggest anomaly I found in Phoenix was the appearance of beasts called "Thestrels" Now, a certain book published before by the same author, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, is supposed to be a complete treatise on magical animals Yet, you can search it from end to end for a year and a day, you will find no mention anywhere of these creatures. There are three possibilities to account for this:
1. These remarkable creatures, defying all Darwinism and the laws of Evolution, evolved from scratch in a year.
2. Newt Scamader, the author of Beasts is an incompetent amateur, and Albus Dumbledore is lying through his teeth when he calls the book a masterpiece.
3. All incidents involving Thestrels are utter fabrications to deceive the innocent.
The second possibility seems the most plausible to me. This being the case, Beasts should be promptly removed from the school curriculum, and Albus Dumbledore should be promptly removed from Headmastership due to lack of judgement.
Now, while coming towards the end of Phoenix we come across an incident which clearly highlights that the author has either completely lost sense of proportions, or is deliberately trying to delude us.
Around about the end, six students- Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Neville- and a completely new character called Luna Lovegood, who mysteriously fails to figure in any of the first four books- are in this place called the Department of Mysteries. They are cornered by twelve Death Eaters, wizards allied to the Dark Lord Voldemort. Can you guess what happens next? No, you never will be able to, so I shall have to tell you. The Death Eaters are after a glass "Phrophecy" held in Harry's hand. This prophecy, Harry later finds out, contains the key to either his or Lord Voldemort's destruction. Did the Death Eaters realize that they could make money by killing Harry then and there, and thus the prophecy would be rendered useless anyway? No, of course not. For skilled dark wizards, Rowling's death Eaters sure are stupid. Meanwhile, Harry, ice-cool under pressure as always, talks turkey and distracts the Death Eaters. The rest of the children smash up nearby shelves, and while chaos reigns, flee. What follows next is simply unimaginable.
Four fifteen year olds and two fourteen year olds then engage in guerilla warfare tactics that would have left Fidel Castro gasping. The odds are stacked up very heavily against them: twelve fully-qualified wizards, well-versed in Dark Arts against six kids. Yet, somehow, Rowling only knows how, they hold on long enough for the Order of the Phoenix to come to their rescue. Unbelievable, isn't it? But then, rescuing her heroes from impossible odds has always been Rowling's specialty.
A little after that follows an utterly unconvincing death of Sirius Black in action, a still more unconvincing show of grief/ anger by Harry, and then as usual, the happy ending with Harry safely ensconced in the train back home to the Dursleys.
But hold on to your hats and horses! Don't lose your marbles just yet! There is one more astonishing performance yet to come. On the journey back home, and attempted ambush on Harry by Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle fails miserably due to the fact that the place they have chosen is right opposite a carriage containing DA members- some sort of pleasure club founded by Harry earlier- where he coolly teaches Defence Against Dark Arts to students older than himself. For pure imbecility and thick-headed stupidity, this really takes the biscuit. Did Rowling not inform the Slytherin trio that the first thing you do before laying an ambush is to stake-out the place where you are going to lay an ambush? The fault was Rowling's not Malfoy's. Rowling has neglected to study various episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, or else she would not have made such a mistake.
All said and done, Phoenix fails miserably to live up to the hype created by the first four books. The pace is lost almost at the beginning, and the glorious Hogwarts aura and atmosphere is completely missing. The book contains a whopping 766 pages, out of which more than 400 are not required.
But all said and done, I did buy the book in hardcover the day it came out for Rs. 635. JK Rowling has publicly stated that after killing of Sirius Black she cried. Cynics say- and I agree- that she will be crying all the way to the bank.