Monday, July 23, 2007

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling

You know those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books that were really popular in the 80s? You'd pick one course over another, and ostensibly learn that choices have consequences (even though you could easily ditch a bad result and take a do-over). Anyway, thanks to the capricious nature of book publishing, here's what I think JK Rowling's Adventure would have looked like:

"You've written three modestly successful books about wizards. If you want to see what happens when you take your chances on globalization, please go to page 65. If you want to try modest British methods instead, go to page 89.

Page 65: Congratulations! Book publicity works! Please take your seat among George Lucas and the X-Files people, and revel in your overblown mythology for four more books.

Page 89: Uh, congrats. You get to deliver new manuscripts, structured exactly like the first three, just as your last advance runs out. Ad infinitum. Welcome to the midlist, Ms. Rowling!"

It's only due to the former chance that any of us are here, consuming an 800-ish page book in a single weekend just because it's Harry Potter, and because it's the last. But here we are, at the supposed end of the most remarkable publishing fad of the time. Honestly, I'm a little relieved. I've loved the books since sophomore year of college, when the burgeoning trend and a friend's obsession with the books prompted me to pick up Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone over Christmas. But the publishing schedule and the hype became so tedious. Everything I despise about the Star Wars phenomenon was showing up around these books, and loyalty and curiosity will only go so far. I don't think any of us would have the energy to maintain this cycle for six, twelve, twenty more years.

So it is, indeed, over. And the end was fine. It was certainly what Ms. Rowling promised her readers. It tied up most loose ends, anchored a lot of free-floating characters, and kept Steve Perry out of the equation (unlike certain other pop culture shapers, David Chase).

The novel is extremely dark. One of the best aspects of the previous six books was the mixing of levity with the darkness--that even though there was always a constant hum of evil in the background, people found bright spots in their everyday lives. That was all but gone, sacrificed here to the need to get everything in and resolve the unwieldy mythology surrounding Harry. As a result, the book spends most of its time in small, dark places. There's none of the expansiveness of Hogwarts, or the airiness of the outer wizard world. Everything feels claustrophobic. This is fine in smaller doses, as it's a good way to establish the strangling nature of Harry's destiny. But when it's so pervasive (the main trio spend at least half of the book in a tent in the woods), the gloom is thicker than Fleur's accent.

The unrelenting fear and death didn't sit well with me. I woke up, screaming, the night after I finished reading. Granted, this is more of a debit to my adulthood than to the book, but is this really the best outcome for a book marketed to kids? I don't think children should have things whitewashed, but a bloodbath is something else. She gets points for the vividness, I guess. Whatever her deficiencies as a writer, she always gets the sensory details in there.

Plotwise, there aren't many huge surprises. The "is Snape good or not?" resolution isn't anything that wasn't hinted before. The horcruxes discussed at the end of Book 6 should have been enough of a quest narrative, but then she might not have been able to squeeze an extra hundred pages. So we have the Deathly Hallows (a trio of items that make a person the "master of death" when brought together). I didn't really have a problem with that, or with the left-field plotline about Dumbledore's sordid past. In fact, I was hopeful that these'd combine to create a new kind of ending--without the Dumbledore ex machina that ends just about all the other books. No such luck. Even dead, the guy finds a way to get his standard three pages of exposition.

Perhaps in atonement for all the death and negativity, there's a much lighter epilogue. It's sweet, but kinda blah...all it really does is throw a bone to the fanfic writers who obsess over whether Hermione needs to be with Ron or Harry. The book would have been much better ended with the last official chapter. But hey--why finish with an already neat ending when you can add twenty minutes? That's the Spielberg special.

This all seems pretty grim, but there were parts I liked. For instance, there are no extended quidditch scenes. I like the game as much as the next reader, but those bits were getting tedious by Book 6. Also, the romance doesn't feel as forced this time, mostly because there was very little. Plus, we get thisclose to finding out what premarital wizard sex is like. Slightly creepy to consider, yes, but it's one of the few areas of wizard life that Rowling hadn't laid out (no pun intended).

I also like that Rowling kept Harry pretty close to the course she hewed out in the beginning. It got so unwieldy as the story swelled to accommodate everything Rowling wanted to accomplish, but it did come down to the basic ideas she put forth before. I'd quote something here from my senior thesis, but I don't even remember what I wrote about destiny narratives. Clearly one of my better scholarly exercises.

But no matter what the issues may be with the narrative at this point, they're moot now. Rowling will go and live in her castle, and write something suspiciously Harry-like in a few years. The kids will move on to something else, and the non-readers will go back to ignoring books. Everybody wins. Except Snape. He pretty much got screwed from one end to the other.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

premature evaluation

Everyone knows that kids read the Books section of the New York Times. Sure, their crayon-written letters to the editor get bumped in favor of whiny screeds from unhappy authors and nitpicky professors, but they still read the reviews over their morning orange juice and Apple Jacks. Right?

'Cause that's the only way the flap over Michiko Kakutani's early review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows makes any sense. The review showed up last night, ahead of the much-vaunted midnight release of the book tomorrow night. How odd--a book reviewer did her job by not only reviewing a book before its release, but also taking the initiative to go out and get a copy somehow. She broke the story like a Times reporter is supposed to do--and in this particular case, the review is indeed a story.

But JK Rowling is NOT happy. Neither are Scholastic and Bloomsbury. In fact, a rep for the latter compared this act to the Boston Tea Party. The Boston Tea Party! Is that how current British people think of the Revolutionary War? As a minor act of cultural betrayal? Methinks the residents of Tony Blair's England got a crash course in Bush-style accusatory logic.

As widely read as the Times is, a book review in the weekday Arts section is hardly front-page spoilage. Anyone who reads the article is someone seeking information about the book. The "literally millions of readers, particularly children" that Rowling speaks of can easily avoid the review...and most probably wouldn't have known anything about it until she complained. So her response is a) hysterical or b) an unnecessary way to draw more attention to the book before Saturday. Either way, good job. There obviously wasn't enough panic and kerfuffle surrounding the book already.

Call me when someone publishes a review with the headline, "Harry dies!"

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Saturday by Ian McEwan

At 59, Ian McEwan isn't quite an Endangered Author (tm)...but he's working on it. In his 2005 novel Saturday, he dips his toe into the post-midlife mortality pool. And while there's less morbid self-interest than, say, the last couple of Philip Roth books, there's a good deal of naval-gazing for the older white male. It's almost as though the narcissism and arrogance that get us through adolescence and the 20s (I can't vouch for any other decades, sorry) starts ripening into extra neurosis with age. This may not hold up, though--otherwise, how would Woody Allen not have imploded by now?

McEwan's protagonist here is Henry Perowne, a fancy-schmancy brain surgeon in London. He wakes up early one morning--quick, guess which one!--and the book follows him throughout his day. Simple premise, and McEwan doesn't deviate much from the promise of the title. At first, it looks like McEwan may be making the bold choice of just following some dude around on a boring day. Henry sees a plane on fire, and gets excited thinking it might be terrorism. After that proves to be anticlimactic, he kinda hangs out with his jazz musician son, putters around, wakes up his wife for a little nookie, dozes, showers, etc. Nothing too exciting. Things pick up when he ventures out to his weekly squash game and has to deal with a quick mashup (literally) of his comfy lifestyle, history (Londoners are gathering downtown to protest the incipient Iraq invasion), and the dark underbelly ('cause there's always a dark underbelly) of the city he loves. After this he becomes fairly unhinged, despite attempting to go about the rest of the day normally; and his worries about his life, his family, and the outer world dominate the rest of his day.

The violence in the climax is largely literal, but it might as well be metaphorical. It's almost a fantasy of what could happen after a random encounter. There's a strange, physical neatness to the ending--a surprising bloodlessness, despite an emergency surgery. If it were a TV show, we'd all be bellyaching about how nobody's guts got sprayed all over, say, a diner.

McEwan manages to get his power across in other ways. For example, none of the characters is quite what one would expect from the setup. Henry is anxious about his son's future, and whenever they cross paths, you almost expect one of those teary, "You don't understand my art!" screamfests that make for good novel tension. Same deal with the daughter, although she brings them a little closer to drama. But the relationships ebb and flow like real ones, with the unspoken dotage and concerns between actual parents and kids. And with the wife--not only does she not have a poolboy on the side somewhere, they get it on (twice!) and seem to like one another. Crazy. Once you realize that McEwan is trying for something honest, that's pretty potent.

Also, the language is remarkable. McEwan is so good at describing place, along with everyday thoughts and processes, that it's easy to overlook the built-in tedium of setting several hundred pages in a single day. This helps things feel balanced between the less dramatic early parts with the plot-heavier latter half. There are other threads too (the whole post-9/11 world thing, Henry's passion for his career, etc.) that unify the whole story, but nothing binds better than a consistent authorial voice. For the length of the novel, he keeps up the conflict between the solidity of everyday life with the fragility of the human brain. Much of that is done with the thrust of the inner dialogue; a lesser writer would have hit the reader over the head with that point early, and never let up. It's much more pleasant and organically done here.

Accordingly, I had a lot of favorite bits. Believe it or not, this is a reduced list from my earlier notes. This is a book that needs to be read aloud--with company or without should depend on how good one's British accent is.

"Standing here, as immune to the cold as a marble statue, gazing towards Charlotte Street, towards a foreshortened jumble of facades, scaffolding and pitched roofs, Henry thinks the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece—millions teeming around the accumulated and layered achievements of the centuries, as though around a coral reef, sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part, nearly everyone wanting it to work."

[On Theo's music] "He moves on up the fret and the diffidence begins to carry a hint of danger. A little syncopated stab on the turnaround, the sudden chop of an augmented chord, a note held against the tide of the harmony, a judiciously flattened fifth, a seventh bent in sensuous microtones. Then a passing soulful dissonance. He has the rhythmic gift of upending expectation, a way of playing off triplets against two- or four-note clusters. His runs have the tilt and accent of bebop. It's a form of hypnosis, of effortless seduction."

[On the wife, Rosalind] "Solitude and work were less threatening to her inner world than kisses."

[On waking up next to his wife] "This commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover, with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting faces together in a ritual of affection, briefly settled in the eternal necessities of warmth, comfort, safety, crossing limbs to draw nearer—a simple daily consolation almost too obvious, easy to forget by daylight. Has a poet ever written it up?"

[on losing at squash] "The game becomes an extended metaphor of character defect. Every error he makes is so profoundly, so irritatingly typical of himself, instantly familiar, like a signature, like a tissue scar or some deformation in a private place. As intimate and self-evident as the feel of his tongue in his mouth. Only he can go wrong in quite this way, and only he deserves to lose in just this manner. As the points fall he draws his remaining energy from a darkening pool of fury."