The people to watch out for and relish are Harry's friends the Weasley twins and Hogwarts' headmaster, Dumbledore. There is an unavoidable element of redundancy to them, as the whole sequence is already chiefly about the processes of his mind.
Harry potter and the order of phoenix book series#
It is one of the curious features of the series that Harry's speeches almost always sound stilted and gawky. (Would that, incidentally, be the Muggle St Mungo, also known as the apostle of Cumbria, or a magical Saint Mungo? And who ordains sanctity? And, while we're at it, is anyone's birth celebrated when Hogwarts celebrates Christmas? How does the carol "God Rest Ye Merry Hippogriffs" go on? And is this getting too picky?) Harry's amazement is Rowling's anticipation of her ideal reader's, and so as such, seems a little too voulu, a self-conscious attempt to work up our awe.
We have lapsed behind real time now Harry is 15, in the fifth year, while his readers have aged two extra years since his last appearance and one may wonder at Harry's continuing amazement when an abandoned phone box turns out to be a lift leading to the Ministry of Magic, or a derelict department store turns out to be a front for the wizards' hospital, St Mungo's. That said, the learning process throughout Potter is slow. Le Guin writes seriously Rowling writes just the way an 11-year-old would ideally like to write. All children's authors have to take their worlds immensely seriously, and that is about all that Rowling and Le Guin have in common, once you have noted the superficial similarities. But reading this book has made me now realise that the comparison is specious - the two authors are barely involved in the same process at all. Although my heart does go out to all those parents who will be obliged to read the book aloud, Phoenix can be raced through fairly quickly by the solitary reader, which is itself a testament to the fluency of Rowling's narrative.Īs for "mumsy and artless" - that was my line, in this paper, when I compared Rowling unfavourably with Ursula Le Guin, who also wrote a series of books beginning with a young would-be adept being sent to wizard school in order for him to enhance and discipline his power, and learn to confront his destiny.
The book's prodigious size has proved an asset rather than a handicap.
Rowling has not been asleep at the wheel in the three years since the last Potter novel, and I am pleased to report that she has not confused sheer length with inspiration. I can't imagine anyone who is already happy with Rowling's world being disappointed with its latest manifestation (quidditch has never done it for me, but the kids seem happy enough with it). Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix also delivers more of the same, a shade more grown up, with extra explanation of the back story. The target audience, semi-officially, is in the nine-to-12 age range, and on those terms, the books are infallible. To complain about her, shall we say, conservative imagination, her somewhat stilted dialogue, or, as one critic cruelly put it, her "mumsy and artless prose", is in a sense to miss the point. Still, much of the criticism levelled against Rowling does seem to fall under the heading "category error". And besides, what highbrow critic ever dismissed Wagner because of his use of magical elements? (" Tristan is rubbish because it has a love-potion in it. What would Walter Benjamin have had to say about it? Or Karl Kraus? That its popularity was a symptom of a mass regression to infancy, perhaps? It may constitute a desire for a temporary flight from adulthood, but that isn't exactly the same thing. It is a phenomenon that one struggles to imagine the more austere cultural critics commentating on without perplexity. One became used, long ago, to the spectacle of adults reading JK Rowling's work in all kinds of public places, unembarrassed about being seen immersing themselves in a world of spells.
Harry potter and the order of phoenix book tv#
So, is this a childish phenomenon or an adult one? One may be arrested, as I was, by the image, during a break in the TV coverage of a cricket match, of an MCC member about a third of the way through The Order of the Phoenix (this some 12 hours after the book's publication) but the truly extraordinary thing about it is that it is not all that extraordinary. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
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