The Sorting Hat

Harry and the rest of the first years enter Hogwarts for the first time.  In front of the whole school, each of them gets placed into one of Hogwart’s four houses by the magical, talking Sorting Hat. Harry [...]]]> I’m re-reading the Harry Potter series from start to finish in the name of over-analysis. Spoilers ahoy.

The Sorting Hat

Harry and the rest of the first years enter Hogwarts for the first time.  In front of the whole school, each of them gets placed into one of Hogwart’s four houses by the magical, talking Sorting Hat. Harry is relieved to be placed in Gryffindor, after worrying that he might end up in Slytherin, Voldemort’s old house.  The first years join their new houses for a sumptuous meal. During the meal Harry catches sight of a mean-looking professor and finds that his scar starts burning ominously as soon as the professor looks at him. After dessert, he and the rest of the Gryffindor students make their way to their dormitory tower.  Harry falls into an exhausted sleep, and has a darkly portentous dream.

Thoughts

Rowling really knows how to make a reader hungry. The Hogwarts feast is probably the first time the book really got its hooks in me.  Good fantasy has to bring you into its world, and the only way it can do that is to offset its high-flying impossibilities – magic, dragons, what have you – with the familiar trappings of our own world.  Sure, I’d love to be able to levitate things and teleport and fly on a broomstick, but if I’m going to vicariously live in Rowling’s wizarding world, they had better have some good food. And Hogwarts doesn’t disappoint.

The description of the feast is a good example of how much more specific Rowling’s writing is getting.  Hogwarts didn’t get much description from the outside but now it’s really starting to take shape; the Great Hall, with its thousands of floating candles and its magical sky-ceiling, is the first location in the book that really sticks.

Keeping with the important grounding-in-reality approach, Harry’s emotions as he enters Hogwarts should be immediately familiar to anyone who’s ever had a first day at school. His legs feel “like lead,” he’s incredibly nervous, and he’s utterly convinced that he’s there by mistake and that at any moment someone will discover his ruse and kick him out.  He also feels everyone’s eyes on him, staring and judging, although unlike most of us Harry is not just using his imagination; everyone is staring at him, because he’s a celebrity.  This part should theoretically be hard to relate to if you’re a non-celebrity like most people, but it fits in so cleanly with Harry’s general sense of nervousness that I barely thought about it.  Everyone feels like they’re conspicuous and different on their first day of school, whether they actually are or not.

The matter of Harry being selected for Gryffindor will come up again, at the end of this book and even later. Harry has already learned that he has some strange connections to Voldemort and the last thing he wants is to end up in his old house. Yet he clearly fears that he will, powerless to do anything about it.  It’s heavily implied later on that the Sorting Hat doesn’t really choose the house; the student does, so Harry naturally gets his wish.  But that fear of being drawn to darkness is telling.  It’s a good quality for a hero to have, which is why it’s such a common trope: Luke Skywalker, Frodo Baggins, and Odysseus all had to gaze into the abyss and confront their own evil impulses before they could complete their respective journeys.  Harry will have to do the same, literally (in the form of the Horcrux he carries with him) and more figuratively (in growing up and putting his emotional baggage behind him).

Speaking of the houses, I still don’t get the sense that Slytherin is anything other than the “evil” house, something that’s always bugged me.  Gryffindor is for the brave, Hufflepuff is for the loyal and hard-working, Ravenclaw is for the studious (it always seemed like Hermione should’ve ended up there, doesn’t it?), and Slytherin is for “cunning folk [who] use any means to achieve their ends.”  That could almost apply to Fred and George, but it’s still a pretty unconvincing euphemism for “these people would paint a house with your blood if they really liked the color.” I tried to remember if anyone ever came out of it who was basically good but just really ambitious to the point of ruthlessness; the closest I could get was Professor Slughorn, who’s not evil but still a pretty slimy bastard, and…

Snape!  Why there he is, that perennial red herring and morally ambiguous double agent, sitting with the rest of the teachers and throwing Harry the first of many nasty looks.  I’m a fan of Snape, and I’m glad to see him appear.  That’s not to say I like Snape, but since Rowling tends to paint her evil characters with pretty broad, sometimes vaudevillian strokes, it’s nice to have at least one character whose motives are complex, and who can be a major unsung (until the end) hero of the series while still being a petty, reprehensible twit most of the time.  He’s far and away the most complicated character in the books.

So the first thing he does when he spots Harry is give him a dirty look, since he sees the face of his young tormentor James Potter looking back at him.  But then Harry gets his telltale oh-crap-it’s-Voldemort burning sensation in his scar.  Of course if we read closely:

The hook-nosed teacher looked past Quirrell’s turban straight into Harry’s eyes…

Aha, very clever, Ms. Rowling. Yes, Quirrell is now sporting the turban that hides the fact that Voldemort has taken up residence on the back of his head. It’s a much more obvious hint than I remembered; Rowling points it out and calls it “ridiculous” as soon as Harry recognizes Quirrell, and later Harry has a dream in which he’s very meaningfully threatened by a giant version of the turban. And now, I guess Voldemort was looking at Harry through the turban at that moment too, or maybe his nasty thoughts jumped onto Snape’s glance and hitched a ride, or maybe I’m overthinking things.  It’s misdirection, and surprisingly effective misdirection at that; did anyone actually peg Quirrell as the villain before the reveal? I certainly didn’t.  But the clues are right there.

Other stray thoughts:

• Dumbledore’s often-overlooked goofiness gets a few nice moments here, particularly in this segment, which has always been a favorite of mine:
  

  Before we begin our banquet, I would like to say a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!

  Dumbledore’s not crazy by any stretch, but he seems like he could attend the Mad Hatter and March Hare’s tea party and have a lovely time while he was there.

• A good number of other side characters get introduced: Lavender Brown, the Patil twins, Dean Thomas, Seamus Finnegan. Some of the other first years’ names sounded familiar although I wasn’t sure if they appeared later. And of course the ghosts: Nearly Headless Nick, the Bloody Baron, and Peeves the Poltergeist. They’re not major players but they give Hogwarts a really nice bit of otherworldly color.
• Harry certainly has a lot of meaningful dreams over the course of the series. Rowling overuses this device a bit, although not nearly as much as someone like Stephen King.

Stay tuned, because our first real introduction to Snape is still to come.

The Journey from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters

Harry rides out the remainder of the summer with nervous expectation.  On September first, the Dursleys drop him off at King’s Cross station in London.  A friendly red-headed family, the Weasleys, help Harry [...]]]> I’m re-reading the Harry Potter series from start to finish in the name of over-analysis. Spoilers ahoy.

The Journey from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters

Harry rides out the remainder of the summer with nervous expectation.  On September first, the Dursleys drop him off at King’s Cross station in London.  A friendly red-headed family, the Weasleys, help Harry find his way through a magical entrance to Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, where he boards the Hogwarts Express.  On the way to the school Harry meets Ron Weasley, the youngest brother in a large family of wizards who already feels overshadowed by his siblings; Hermione Granger, a brainy Muggle-born girl who talks at great length; Neville Longbottom, an awkward boy who’s always losing things; and he is reintroduced to Draco Malfoy, the upper-crust bully he met at Diagon Alley earlier.  Other side characters make their first appearances.  After enjoying some wizard candy for the first time, Harry disembarks and follows the rest of the first-years across a still lake to the massive castle of Hogwarts.

Thoughts

This is a busy chapter, with a lot of major character introductions.  It’s clear that the characters are Rowling’s focus in this section; she offers spare details on the exact look and feel of the train, the passing countryside, and even Hogwarts itself, which is described only as “a vast castle with many turrets and towers.”  The characters don’t get a lot of physical description either.  Here’s what we know about what these (mostly major) characters look like:

Ron: “Tall, thin, and gangling, with freckles, big hands and feet, and a long nose.” Like all the Weasleys he has “flaming red hair.”

Mrs. Weasley: “Plump.”

Fred and George: No description aside from the hair.

Percy: He “looked like the oldest.”

Ginny: “Small.”

Hermione: “She had a bossy sort of voice, lots of bushy brown hair, and rather large front teeth.”

Neville: “Round-faced.”

Draco: “Pale.”

Crabbe and Goyle: “Both of them were thickset and looked extremely mean.”

Rowling has demonstrated in interviews that she knows exactly what her characters look like, even down to their eye color, so it’s surprising that she doesn’t describe them more thoroughly. She seems more focused on presenting their personalities through their dialogue and actions – showing and not telling, which I appreciate.  Although she flatly tells us that Crabbe and Goyle are mean, she lets us figure out for ourselves how nasty Malfoy is, and Ron’s description of the Malfoy family’s dodgy history doesn’t come until after we’ve already seen him in action. Likewise, Fred and George’s mischievousness doesn’t get brought up until we’ve watched them goof around at length.  The telling reinforces the showing, rather than lazily replacing it.  It’s pretty solid character writing.

I wouldn’t mind a bit more description of the environment.  Then again, I don’t recall having an issue with that first time I read the books.  It’s hard to say if that’s an issue with the writing or if I just want and expect different things as a re-reader.  Reading a book the second (or in my case, third) time around is like that.  On a first read, the text is fluid; your imagination will insert details and descriptions alongside the canonical ones, without much caring which is which.  It isn’t until the re-read when you find out which details you imagined, or were contradicted by other details that you missed.  The text is no longer fluid, especially because you know how it ends, which gives each plot point a sense of finality that wasn’t there back when you were still guessing as to the ultimate outcome.  So as a re-reader, you’re not just going back over the story; you’re retracing your own steps as a first-time reader.

You’re also spotting details that seemed innocuous at the time that you now know are quite significant, one of the best parts of a re-read.  This chapter has two such details: Scabbers the “rat,” and a casual mention of Grindelwald on Dumbledore’s trading card.

Scabbers, of course, is actually the treacherous Peter Pettigrew hiding in plain sight. I’m not entirely sure why he’s been hanging around the Weasleys all this time instead of hightailing it to Patagonia or somewhere; only Sirius Black knows he’s still alive, and he’s locked away in Azkaban. Is he waiting for Voldemort to return?  Does anyone besides Quirrell even know that Voldemort is still alive?  I can’t recall how well this is explained in the third book, so I guess we’ll have to wait until we get there.

What I find interesting here is that Scabbers/Wormtail actually defends Ron by biting Goyle when he tries to steal Ron’s candy. Perhaps he’s gained some affection for Ron over the years, or maybe he was never a fan of Goyle’s father the Death Eater and decided to take it out on his son. I like to think it’s the latter; that would be a nice little touch.

Grindelwald, I’m pretty sure, won’t be mentioned again until the very last book, although I’ll keep an eye out. I get the sense that Rowling was planning something significant between him and Dumbledore very early on. At this point in the books the most significant thing about him was that Dumbledore defeated him in 1945.  Obviously, when a British wizard defeats a German conqueror in 1945, that’s not an accidental choice, although I don’t believe Rowling makes the parallels between Grindelwald and Hitler any more obvious than that. Voldemort has many such parallels too, with his obsession with racial purity and his campaign of fear and domination. More on that later.

Grindelwald’s mention also brings up the fact that Dumbledore is gay, and Grindelwald was his lover, which Rowling has made explicit in interviews but never in the text.  This caused some very minor controversy when the last book was released, but by that point fundamentalist Christians had already burned enough Harry Potter books to be bored of the whole deal.  Some people – myself included – would have liked to see Dumbledore presented as openly gay on the page.  It would have been a daring choice for the world’s most popular books to make.  But I’m not going to get up in arms about it; maybe Rowling was intimidated by the potential response, or maybe she just preferred a chaste depiction of her older, wizened characters (no one has ever asked about McGonagall’s sex life, after all. Although, as per Rule 34 of the Internet, I’m sure some of the fan fiction has explored it. Google it yourself, because I’m sure not going to).  Either way, that’s how she chose to write him. I could deal with this by spending some time deconstructing whether Dumbledore ever “acts gay,” or I could just move on with my life. I’ll be doing plenty of overanalysis of his dialogue and actions in other respects anyway.

The chapter ends with the first years just about to walk into the Great Hall for the first time. Join us next time for a grand feast and a peculiar hat.

Diagon Alley

Hagrid escorts Harry back to the mainland and into London.  There, Harry is introduced [...]]]> I’m re-reading the Harry Potter series from start to finish in the name of over-analysis. Spoilers ahoy.

Diagon Alley

Hagrid escorts Harry back to the mainland and into London.  There, Harry is introduced to Diagon Alley, a hidden magical thoroughfare where wizards and witches do all their shopping.  He visits Gringotts, the heavily guarded wizards’ bank, and buys all his needed equipment for Hogwarts, including his magic wand.  He also meets a fellow first-year who comes across as an elitist jerk.  After his shopping is done, Hagrid takes Harry to King’s Cross station so he can board a train for home.

Thoughts

All right, now we’re getting to the good stuff.  As familiar as Rowling’s wizarding world is to me by now, I still get a little vicarious thrill reading Harry’s first introduction to it.  One of the things that keeps me coming back to these books is their deft balancing act between fantasy world-building and a well-paced story.  Both are critical to good fantasy writing, but they’re often at odds with each other.  The fantasy genre is a naturally attractive one to writers who are, well, fantasists, and so it’s usually the world-building that gets in the way of the story; linger too long on the minutiae of your magical city, or the particular breeds of trolls you’ve invented, and you can easily lose your readers to self-indulgence (Eragon, especially the last hundred pages or so,  is a prime example of this).

Rowling is pretty good at avoiding this trap.  She tends to work in layers; we get a nice broad overview of Diagon Alley in this book, but we’ll return to it many times, and on each trip we’ll get to see a new side of it.  This patient approach makes the world feel lived-in, and keeps the various settings from feeling superfluous; Gringotts is a cool little setpiece now, but it’s also a Chekov’s Gun – if you set up a place as absolutely theft-proof, of course our heroes are eventually going to have to break into it.

So we get to see Diagon Alley, but we don’t really linger here.  This whole chapter is just a taste of things to come.  There’s actually a lot of foreshadowing in this chapter:

• The first mention of Harry having his mother’s eyes.  This is a point that comes up a lot over the course of the series, and Rowling acknowledged that it was an important one.  I think a lot of people, myself included, suspected that this had some magical connotation that would factor into Harry’s final battle with Voldemort.  I was pleasantly surprised when this turned out to be wrong; it’s all a buildup to a small but significant moment at Snape’s death.  It’s a sweet, very sad scene, and it says a lot about Rowling as a writer that she considered it as meaningful as the big climactic battle that follows.

• This exchange with Griphook the goblin is our first introduction (Voldemort killing Harry’s parents aside) of the inherent dangers of the wizarding world:
  

  “Stand back,” said Griphook importantly. He stroked the door gently with one of his long fingers and it simply melted away.

  “If anyone but a Gringotts goblin tried that, they’d be sucked through the door and trapped in there,” said Griphook.

  “How often do you check to see if anyone’s inside?” Harry asked.

  “About once every ten years,” said Griphook with a rather nasty grin.

  Children’s literature is not a very safe place for children, is it?

• We meet Professor Quirrell, this volume’s more-or-less villain.  No mention of a turban, so presumably he’s not hosting Voldemort on the back of his skull just yet, but I think at this point he’s already met the Dark Lord.  His introduction is something of a throw-away moment, which helps set up Snape as the red herring later on.

• I’d never noticed this, but the first fellow Hogwarts student that Harry meets is none other than Draco Malfoy.  We don’t know his name yet, but his stuck-up dialogue is unmistakable. It’s interesting that Harry is defined, so early on, by his connections to his enemies.  Close as his friends will become, they’ll never be quite as close as his foes.

• Speaking of which, we also get our first hint of Harry’s connection to Voldemort, when Harry gets a wand with a core feather from the same phoenix.  We’ll come back to this a lot, so I won’t touch on it just now, but it’s a core plot point and a major theme of the books.

This chapter also introduces Hogwarts’ four houses, along with Quidditch and wizarding money.  The latter two are both reflections of the somewhat random nature of the magical world.  Quidditch has a bizarre scoring system that heavily skews the game toward a single player; wizard money counts seventeen Sickles to a Galleon and and twenty-nine Knuts to a Sickle –  "easy enough," according to Hagrid. Even though the wizarding world has consistent rules, the mischievous nature of magic ensures that those rules will often be silly and arbitrary, in contrast to the real world.  The wizarding world is not nearly as concerned with convenience or efficiency as ours; that’s part of why it’s so much more fun.

Other thoughts:

• I felt a real twinge of melancholy when Harry picked out his owl.  Hedwig!  Of all the deaths in Deathly Hallows (an apt title, now that I think about it), I think hers was the only one that really stunned me.  I know we have a long, long way to go before that happens, but it still colors my re-introduction to her.  I wonder if I’ll have the same reaction to Fred and George, or even Dumbledore.

• I like Hagrid’s simple, eloquent explanation for the series’ version of The Masquerade: if Muggles knew about magic, they’d just want to use it for easy solutions to their problems.  The implication is that it would only lead to further problems, and it’s pretty hard to argue with that.

• When Harry and Hagrid leave the island in the beginning of the chapter, they take the Dursleys’ rowboat – so what happens to the Dursleys?  How do they get off the island?  I’ll bet there’s a funny short story to be written on that subject.

We’re almost to Hogwarts – tune in next time for platform nine and three quarters.

The Keeper of the Keys

Hagrid bashes down the door to the shack and presents Harry with a birthday cake, along with the letter that’s been trying so hard to get to him.  The letter is an official acceptance to [...]]]> I’m re-reading the Harry Potter series from start to finish in the name of over-analysis. Spoilers ahoy.

The Keeper of the Keys

Hagrid bashes down the door to the shack and presents Harry with a birthday cake, along with the letter that’s been trying so hard to get to him.  The letter is an official acceptance to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.  Hagrid explains Harry’s true magical origins, and gives a little more information about Voldemort and his reign of terror.  The Dursleys protest but Hagrid repeatedly shouts them down.  When Uncle Vernon insults Dumbledore, Hagrid finally snaps and tries to turn Dudley into a pig. With the Dursleys cowering in the other room, Hagrid loans Harry his coat to sleep under.

Thoughts

Hagrid’s appearance here reads like a first introduction to him, which is a little odd, since he’s immediately recognizable from the first chapter (hairy giants with thick accents have a way of sticking with you).  He seems a bit menacing at first – his eyes are compared to shiny black beetles, which isn’t very flattering – until Harry realizes that he’s smiling, so I suppose that just reflects the fact that the book is now told from Harry’s point of view.

Hagrid’s one of my favorite characters in the series; he’s easy to like, coming as he does from the archetype of the gentle giant.  He’s good-natured, kind, and not very smart, but all the more lovable for it.  And he’ll fiercely protect the people he cares about, so you really want him on your side.  Case in point: Dudley’s pig-tail.  Frankly, this seems like letting the Dursleys off a bit easy (especially when Uncle Vernon just blurted out that Harry’s parents deserved to get murdered), but we have six books to go, and there’s plenty more comeuppance awaiting them.

A lot of this chapter is given over to explanations of things we already learned back in the beginning of the book, which makes me wonder if that first chapter was even necessary.  I guess it’s good to start the kids off with some magic so they won’t get bored, but Rowling usually gives her readers more credit than that. Starting the story with ten-year-old Harry waking up in his cupboard might have been more effective.  It would have added some nice tension to this scene, since we wouldn’t know if Hagrid was actually dangerous or not. Once again, Rowling is still finding her footing here.  I’m pleased at least that the intrusive narrator is gone; I don’t think, from this point forward, that schoolteacher voice ever comes back, and I won’t miss it.

Also here is the first explanation of what Muggles are.  This is an aspect of the story that didn’t always sit well with me when I first read it.  The idea that magic is a hereditary skill, completely unavailable to people who aren’t born with it, seemed to carry some unpleasant racial undertones.  Of course, Rowling later addresses this directly with the “Mudblood” slur and Voldemort’s obsession with blood purity, which put my discomfort to rest.  Her system of selective magic isn’t really fair, but it reflects real-life disparities, and how the characters deal with it speaks volumes about them.  It’s not a particularly deep commentary on racism; still, it shows that Rowling was going for something more grounded than the escapist fantasy Harry Potter could have been.  She may have set the books in her own invented world, but the people and the problems within it are straight out of our own, just like in all good fantasy writing.

A few throwaway lines in this scene hint at long-term plot developments.  Hagrid speculates on what happened to Voldemort after he tried to kill Harry:

“Some say he died.  Codswallop, in my opinion.  Dunno if he had enough human left in him to die.”

Choice words, given what we’ll learn about Horcruxes much later.  Hagrid also dodges Harry’s question about why he was expelled from Hogwarts, which is the entire basis for the plot of Chamber of Secrets. Rowling starts the foreshadowing good and early, but she doesn’t beat us over the head with it, which I appreciate.

So Harry finally has his letter and the Dursleys have been dispatched with, more or less.  Now the magical world awaits. Tune in next time for Diagon Alley.

The Letters From No One

Harry receives a mysterious letter in the mail, but before he can read it, the Dursleys confiscate and burn it.  More letters follow.  Uncle Vernon nails up the mail slot, but the letters find their [...]]]> I’m re-reading the Harry Potter series from start to finish in the name of over-analysis. Spoilers ahoy.

The Letters From No One

Harry receives a mysterious letter in the mail, but before he can read it, the Dursleys confiscate and burn it.  More letters follow.  Uncle Vernon nails up the mail slot, but the letters find their way through the cracks in the doors and even shoot down the chimney at high speed.  An increasingly crazed Uncle Vernon takes the family on an impromptu road trip to escape the letters, which chase them across the country all the way to the coast.  Uncle Vernon rents a shack on a tiny island, convinced that with the approaching storm, no one will be able to find them.  Harry lies awake on the shack floor, counting down the minutes until his eleventh birthday, when suddenly he hears a loud knock on the door.

Thoughts

I still really enjoy this chapter.  We’ve had a lot of buildup in a short span of pages, but the Dursleys are finally getting what’s coming to them, and it’s hard not to get caught up in the gleeful anticipation.

This is the first point in the book where we really get the sense of the character of magic: mischievous, but still polite and proper in a very British way.  Much like Dumbledore, in fact; I was reminded of the floating glasses of mead Dumbledore serves the Dursleys much later in Half-Blood Prince, which clunk themselves against their recipients’ heads when no one drinks them.  Magic is the perfect foil for the Dursleys: like one of those inflatable punching dummies, the harder they try to knock it down, the faster it’ll spring back up, smiling implacably and refusing to get ruffled by anything they do.

This chapter is also where Rowling really starts to hit her stride as a writer. Compared to the first two chapters, there’s not much summary, and the narrator almost never comments on the action.  We’re simply invited to observe as the characters interact with each other.  Scenes like this reinforce the characters without having to blatantly reiterate any of their traits:

They heard the click of the mail slot and flop of letters on the doormat.

“Get the mail, Dudley,” said Uncle Vernon from behind his paper.

“Make Harry get it.”

“Get the mail, Harry.”

“Make Dudley get it.”

“Poke him with your Smelting stick, Dudley.”

There are some other nice, economical moments throughout.  I liked this one, which describes Uncle Vernon as he nails boards around the edges of all the doors and windows in the house:

He hummed “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” as he worked, and jumped at small noises.

There’s a real patience to this chapter, and a confidence in the writing that wasn’t quite there in the first two.  The only thing missing is description.  The family spends two whole days driving across England, but we get no specifics about their surroundings for any of the trip.  There are mentions of “a plowed field,” “a suspension bridge,” and “the outskirts of a big city,” and that’s about it.  We get a little more detail once the family reaches the coast and heads out to the shack on the rock, but not much:

It was freezing in the boat.  Icy sea spray and rain crept down their necks and a chilly wind whipped their faces.  After what seemed like hours they reached the rock, where Uncle Vernon, slipping and sliding, led the way to the broken-down house.

The inside was horrible; it smelled strongly of seaweed, the wind whistled through the gaps in the wooden walls, and the fireplace was damp and empty.  There were only two rooms.

Rowling’s best-known strength as a writer, arguably, is the care with which she builds her imagined world, but we’ll have to wait until Diagon Alley before that really kicks in.  At this point she seems to be most interested in moving the story along and getting to the good bits, which again feels like a concession to young readers.  We’re left to fill in a lot of the scene’s details on our own: how choppy and bumpy the water is, how much of a strain all that rowing is for an overweight man like Uncle Vernon, how big and steep the island is, etc.

Still, this is a solid chapter.  The misery of Harry’s existence is well-established at this point, so it’s fun to watch this last gasp from the Dursleys before Hagrid sweeps in and changes everything.  We’ll get to that in Chapter 4.

The Vanishing Glass

Ten years have passed since the first chapter.  Harry is still living with the Dursleys, who make him sleep in a spider-infested cupboard and generally treat him like crap. Harry’s tendency to subconsciously make use of his [...]]]> I’m re-reading the Harry Potter series from start to finish in the name of over-analysis. Spoilers ahoy.

The Vanishing Glass

Ten years have passed since the first chapter.  Harry is still living with the Dursleys, who make him sleep in a spider-infested cupboard and generally treat him like crap. Harry’s tendency to subconsciously make use of his latent magical abilities doesn’t help matters. It’s Dudley’s birthday, and thanks to unusual circumstances, the Dursleys begrudgingly allow Harry to come to the zoo with them.  Harry manages to have a good time until he accidentally frees a boa constrictor from its cage, which earns him yet another harsh punishment.  Locked up in his cupboard, he speculates as to why strange things keep happening around him, and why he regularly meets oddly-dressed people who treat him with reverence before abruptly disappearing.

Thoughts

The Dursleys are at their most monstrous and most cartoonish in this chapter, save perhaps the next few chapters to come.  We’re in very familiar territory here: the appallingly cruel family and the orphan who doesn’t know how special he is are tropes straight out of Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre, and that whole Victorian tradition of subjecting literary children to major abuse.

More than anything, though, the Dursleys really remind me of the Wormwoods from Roald Dahl’s Matilda. They’re nasty, they play favorites with one kid while openly despising the other, and they indulge constantly in the worst that their culture has to offer while shunning anyone who tries to better themselves.  In fact, Matilda shares a lot in common with the Harry Potter story: a very special, very talented, but most importantly good-hearted child has to put up with a poisonous home life and at least one evil authority figure at school before using magical powers to save the day.  I was going to declare Matilda a major influence on Rowling until I looked at the copyright and discovered it was published in 1988.  This came as a surprise.  I had always assumed that Matilda, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, was published back in the ’60s, but no. Rowling says that she started writing Philospher’s Stone in 1990.  She may well have read, and taken inspiration from, Matilda before that point; however, not enough time had passed for Dahl’s book to become a classic, so I can’t assume she was familiar with it.

Still, the parallels are striking, particularly the indictment of consumerism and materialism. This is how both Dahl and Rowling update the classic Victorian story for the modern age.  The Wormwoods watch terrible television and are annoyed that Matilda reads so much.  The Dursleys have spoiled Dudley so thoroughly that he only cares about the quantity of presents he receives; he’ll never ride the fancy bicycle they bought him, but he got it, which is all that matters.  The selfishness, cruelty, and blindness to the true value of things is the same as it was in the 1800s, but it’s taken a new shape in the product-driven society of today.  Yes, it’s a little ironic given how much Harry Potter merchandise would later flood the market, but I’m not going to take Rowling to task for that.

Anyway, back to the story.  When I first read this book I thought it was pretty, well, cartoonish (a word I’m starting to abuse) that the Dursleys reacted the way they did to Harry’s displays of magic.  Sure, it’s not uncommon for cruel people to blame everything on their favorite targets, but you’d think they’d be at least a little perplexed when Harry does something like grow all his hair out in one night, instead of just being angry.  On this re-read, though, it makes more sense, because they know – or at least Mrs. Dursley knows – that Harry is using magic, and it is his fault, sort of.

Petunia’s own issues with magic won’t be fully explained until the last book, and they don’t excuse her awfulness, but they do cast her in a more human light.  I’m not really seeing that here, though. Rowling wants us to relate to Harry and see his life as utterly atrocious.  That will make his later transition to the magical world an unabashedly joyous one, with no doubts about leaving his old world among the Muggles behind.  I don’t think Rowling considered it important to portray the Dursleys as flawed and human at this point in the series.  Again, a big example of the books growing up with the readers.  Moral ambiguity won’t come into play for a while.

Besides establishing Harry’s life as a ten-year-old and his burgeoning magical skills, this chapter has one more important factor to note: the snake.  Specifically, Harry’s ability to talk to it.  We’ll find out in the second book that Harry speaks Parseltongue, probably because of the little bit of Voldemort’s soul that he contains thanks to the flubbed Death Curse, and it’s all part of his uneasy connection to his worst enemy.  I’ll  comment on that more as we come to it.  Right now, it just seems like another of his natural magical leanings, and not particularly ominous.

One more note: Harry gets to go along to the zoo because Mrs. Figg, the weird cat lady he usually spends Dudley’s birthday with, broke her leg.  This is interesting becuase Mrs. Figg is actually a witch, as we find out later (in Order of the Phoenix, I think, although I’m not sure).  This poses some questions.  If she really broke her leg, can’t she just use magic to fix it?  Unless she’s pretty inept, I would think a witch as old and presumably experienced as she is wouldn’t have much trouble with a simple non-magical injury.  Perhaps something magical came up and she used the story as an excuse.  I also wonder why Mrs. Figg never revealed herself, even implicitly, as a witch to Harry when he was younger; perhaps she explains this in the later book, but it seems a little odd that she’d be so restrained, given how famous he is and how odiously the Muggle world treats him.

And of course it’s also possible that Rowling didn’t originally intend for Mrs. Figg to be a witch, and just inserted that later on, but I’m going to try to avoid that kind of speculation.  A good critique always assumes everything is intentional; otherwise it would be easy to get bogged down with go-nowhere conjecture.  I’ll do my best to stick with that rule.

EDIT: Okay, I looked it up and she’s a Squib, with no magical abilities.  Mystery solved!

Lots of letters await us in Chapter 3, next post.

The Boy Who Lived (cont’d)

Mr. Dursley has drifted off to sleep and the action shifts to Privet Drive outside.  Albus Dumbledore arrives and magically turns off the streetlights before meeting up with Minerva McGonagall, who’s spent the day disguised [...]]]> I’m re-reading the Harry Potter series from start to finish in the name of over-analysis. Spoilers ahoy.

The Boy Who Lived (cont’d)

Mr. Dursley has drifted off to sleep and the action shifts to Privet Drive outside.  Albus Dumbledore arrives and magically turns off the streetlights before meeting up with Minerva McGonagall, who’s spent the day disguised as a cat waiting for him to show up.  He confirms the rumors she has heard that Voldemort killed James and Lily Potter, but was somehow defeated when he tried to kill their son Harry.  The half-giant Rubeus Hagrid arrives on a flying motorcycle with Harry, who is to be left in the care of his only living relatives, the Dursleys.  The three take a moment to mourn the Potters before leaving Harry on the Dursleys’ doorstep.  Harry sleeps peacefully, unaware that after this night, his life and the world will never be the same.

Thoughts

I wondered in my last post how long it would take for the narrator’s kid-friendly winking tone to phase out, and it looks like it’s already started.  Here, Rowling tends to heavily underline the characters’ motivations through what amount to stage directions – “She threw a sharp, sideways glance at Dumbledore here, as though hoping he was going to tell her something, but he didn’t, so she went on” – but once the wizards start talking, the narration begins to settle back and let them carry the story without too much intrusion.

This passage introduces us to four major characters, including the one from the title, and has to explain the major plot catalyst for the whole series besides, so it’s a little unwieldy.  To Rowling’s credit, she keeps things fairly tight, and leaves room for us to get a sense of the characters’ personalities without flat descriptions.  Dumbledore takes a moment to eat some lemon drops, to McGonagall’s exasperation, and we start to see a bit of his quasi-aloofness, his affection for Muggles, and his relentless calmness.  He does come across as a little cold to the deaths of the Potters here (especially compared to the openly weeping Hagrid), but as we know from the rest of the books, he has a lot on his mind.

Meanwhile, McGonagall is something of an uptight scold, as she always is, but she’s allowed to cry for the Potters and to be somewhat lost and confused about the circumstances of Voldemort’s fall, so we actually get a good view of her human, vulnerable qualities.  Hagrid, of course, is as unambiguous as ever, crying and stammering and making no attempt to hide his feelings.  Aside from a few lines here and there that try to oversell the characters a bit (“I haven’t blushed so much since Madam Pomfrey told me she liked my new earmuffs”), these pages are very consistent with the way these characters develop over the rest of the books.

There are a lot of little references and hints dropped into this section, too, and Rowling just lets them hang there for the time being, which shows a lot of foresight.  Some that I noticed:

• The first mention of Voldemort, and the unwillingness of most wizards to say his name aloud.  That tells us a lot about just how scary he is to people, while keeping him nice and mysterious for the time being.  It’ll also be a plot point way down the line in Deathly Hallows.
• Dumbledore mentions Dedalus Diggle, a member of the Order of the Phoenix who will play a small role later on.
• Hagrid borrowed the flying motorcycle from Sirius Black, who at this point in the story has still not been framed for Peter Pettigrew’s death.  We won’t hear any more about him, of course, until book three.  I wonder if he takes the motorcycle when he’s hunting the traitor down.
• Dumbledore’s Put-Outer, which he uses to extinguish the streetlights.  I seem to recall this coming back later as well, maybe not until Deathly Hallows, although I forget the significance.  It seems a little weird that he doesn’t just use a spell on the lights; perhaps that makes sense later, or maybe Rowling originally intended magic to be a little more gadget-centric and just kind of abandoned the idea as she went along (the Time-Turner notwithstanding).

Another thing that caught my eye: McGonagall saying, “…how in the name of heaven did Harry survive?”  I think the word “heaven” in there is about as close as the books ever get to openly acknowledging religion, specifically Christianity.  Rowling identifies as a Christian, and it isn’t too hard to dig up some Christian themes in the series – in spite of the book-burning furor the books have stirred up in some of the more easily-provoked Christians out there – but there’s never any direct mention of God or Jesus in the books that I can remember.  Naturally, if there were, the text would have to confront the issue of how exactly miracles relate to magic (turning water into wine would be a pretty elementary trick in this universe, and hardly proof of divinity), and how an all-powerful diety fits into a magic-using world, and pretty soon the theological questions would really get in the way of the story.  If the text didn’t address these questions, they’d just form a big churchy elephant in the room.  Rowling’s choice to just leave religion out of the picture was probably a smart one.

(I’m probably thinking about this because I just read Diana Wynne Jones’ first two Chrestomanci books, the series being a sort of Harry Potter forerunner.  The first book has characters going to church, but also using magic and travelling between parallel worlds.  The second book features characters in a parallel world worshiping a goddess named Asheth – who is shown pretty explicitly to have magical powers – and calling Christians “heathens.”  But both books shy away from any open discussion of theology, which felt like a bit of a cheat to me.)

Anyway, the story is now set up and we’re ready to watch Harry suffer the abuse of the Muggle Moron patrol.  Tune in next time for Chapter 2.

The Boy Who Lived

In the first half of Chapter 1, we’re introduced to the Dursleys, a prudish and judgmental couple who spoil their son Dudley rotten.  They have an embarrassing secret in the form of Mrs. Dursley’s estranged sister, [...]]]> I’m re-reading the Harry Potter series from start to finish in the name of over-analysis.  Spoilers ahoy.

The Boy Who Lived

In the first half of Chapter 1, we’re introduced to the Dursleys, a prudish and judgmental couple who spoil their son Dudley rotten.  They have an embarrassing secret in the form of Mrs. Dursley’s estranged sister, Mrs. Potter, and they are careful never to speak of her or her husband and son.  But then Mr. Dursley has a very strange day in which he witnesses flocks of owls, a suspicious cat, and overhears odd people in colorful cloaks talking about “the Potters”  in hushed tones.  He speculates uncomfortably that these Potters are his in-laws, but after a terse conversation with his wife, decides to ignore these omens and assume it has nothing to do with him.

I’m going to stop there, because there’s a lot to comment on even before Dumbledore shows up.

Thoughts

The first thing that struck me was an element of these books I’d nearly forgotten – the little Mary GrandPre illustrations at the head of each chapter (again, American editions).  Chapter One features a picture of baby Harry, sleeping in a bundle, with stars glittering overhead and a tiny lightning-bolt scar on his forehead.  Like all of GrandPre’s illustrations, it’s a really nice little whimsical drawing, but seems a little oddly out of place now that I no longer think of these as children’s books.  Which leads to the next thing that struck me on this re-read: the tone.  Here’s the first paragraph:

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.  They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.

That’s a classic children’s book kind of opening.  It has the distinct sound of a teacher reading to a group of young students (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Rowling was a teacher herself): simple declarative sentences with just a hint of pursed-lipped sternness, the better to set up all the mischievous magic that’s in store.  Even a very young reader knows full well that the Dursleys are asking for it.  They’re going to be involved in something strange and mysterious before too long.

The Potter books have long been characterized as having grown up along with their readers, and nowhere is it plainer than in this first chapter.  Interestingly, Rowling has contested this somewhat, as in her 2005 interview with MuggleNet and The Leaky Cauldron:

…I’m surprised when sometimes people say to me, “Oh, you know, the books are getting so dark.” I’m thinking, “Well, which part of Philosopher’s Stone did you think was light and fluffy?” You know, there is an innocence about it, Harry is very young when he goes to the school, but the book opens with a double murder.

Only it doesn’t, really.  The book opens with the reaction to a double murder, as seen by a guy who would rather not even know about it.  Rowling could have started the book with Voldemort showing up at the Potters’ hideaway and killing Harry’s parents, but she didn’t (although that would have been pretty cool, honestly).  Instead she brings readers into her invented world more gently, by giving us the perspective of a outsider.  A rather cartoonish outsider who “didn’t approve of imagination,” but nonetheless a character children can grasp pretty easily, and whose initial ignorance of wizarding ways mirrors the reader’s own.

This is a device Rowling will return to multiple times, all the way up to the last book: an initial chapter that gives us a bit of exposition and foreshadowing before she takes us to Harry’s point-of-view and stays there.  It’s an interesting approach, giving us a little bit of perspective on Harry’s place in a larger world, and it’s one of the rare occasions when Rowling lets the reader know more than Harry does.  This initial chapter sets itself apart, though, by giving us a completely omniscient narrator who regularly comments on the action.

“None of them noticed a large, tawny owl flutter past the window.”  That’s the first hint of magic we get in the book, and it explicitly pulls us away from the Dursleys’ POV.  Later, when Mr. Dursley falls asleep thinking that he can’t possibly be directly affected by the weirdness of his day, the narrator tells us with barely restrained glee: “How very wrong he was.”

I’ll be interested to see how and when this winking-at-the-reader tone disappears from the text, because I sure don’t remember it popping up in the later books.  Between the tell-don’t-show summarizing and the over-the-top characterizations, there’s no question this is aimed at kids.  I’m not judging the writing here; it’s a pretty effective way to draw in a young reader, or a reader who’s willing to play young for a while. But man, this is a far cry from the opening of the fourth book, which gives us an actual on-page murder from the victim’s perspective.  Getting from here to there is quite a trip, and I look forward to tracing that path.

Other random thoughts: there’s a lot of talk of brightly colored cloaks on the wizards Mr. Dursley sees.  Maybe this is the effect of the movies, but I hadn’t pictured wizard wear as being very colorful for some time.  Or maybe these are celebratory cloaks?  After all, the wizards are being awfully indiscreet to begin with, hugging Muggles in the street, and you can hardly blame them for being happy the Dark Lord has finally (so they think) been defeated.

In the next post, I’ll cover the second half of Chapter One, which introduces us to Dumbledore, McGonagall, Hagrid, and of course, the Boy Who Lived himself.