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sisyphusshruggedJohn Leonard on Harry Potter:
We first met the Weasley whereabouts grandfather clock in Book Four of Potter's Progress. Its nine golden hands, rather than pointing at numerals, stopped instead to suggest a location where each of Ron Weasley's family members might be found: '' 'Home,' 'school' and 'work' were there, but there was also 'lost,' 'hospital,' 'prison' and, in the position where the number 12 would be on a normal clock, 'mortal peril.' '' Mortal peril! By the time this wonderful clock reappears in Book Five, the witching hour will have arrived for almost everybody we care about.
Yes, someone important to Harry dies. No, it's not who you think. Anyway, I wouldn't tell you. Still, ''Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix'' is an angry book, a lamentation and a thanatopsis, a ''Song of Roland'' and an ''Epic of Gilgamesh,'' with the usual chorus of doxies, puffskins, bowtruckles, spattergroits and thestrals, not to mention a crumple-horned snorkack...
As Harry gets older, Rowling gets better. Even the modifiers she uses so promiscuously, in sudden bursts like cluster bombs, to cue us in on the emotions of her speakers -- the ''he said'' and ''she said'' gently, politely, faintly, earnestly, reverently, tonelessly, angrily, stupidly, gloomily, grimly, pompously, frantically, suspiciously or dismissively, when, like characters in Judith Krantz, he and she haven't already sniffed, flinched, roared, wailed, choked, hissed, gasped, squeaked, muttered, howled, barked, spat, snorted, bellowed, yawned or snarled -- disappear for hundreds of pages at a time. Meanwhile, as always, she has looted the shelves of literature and mythology, fairy tales and folklore, anthropology and comparative religion, firing up a pop-culture crockpot and adding pratfalls, wordplay and dread...
We first met the Weasley whereabouts grandfather clock in Book Four of Potter's Progress. Its nine golden hands, rather than pointing at numerals, stopped instead to suggest a location where each of Ron Weasley's family members might be found: '' 'Home,' 'school' and 'work' were there, but there was also 'lost,' 'hospital,' 'prison' and, in the position where the number 12 would be on a normal clock, 'mortal peril.' '' Mortal peril! By the time this wonderful clock reappears in Book Five, the witching hour will have arrived for almost everybody we care about.
Yes, someone important to Harry dies. No, it's not who you think. Anyway, I wouldn't tell you. Still, ''Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix'' is an angry book, a lamentation and a thanatopsis, a ''Song of Roland'' and an ''Epic of Gilgamesh,'' with the usual chorus of doxies, puffskins, bowtruckles, spattergroits and thestrals, not to mention a crumple-horned snorkack...
As Harry gets older, Rowling gets better. Even the modifiers she uses so promiscuously, in sudden bursts like cluster bombs, to cue us in on the emotions of her speakers -- the ''he said'' and ''she said'' gently, politely, faintly, earnestly, reverently, tonelessly, angrily, stupidly, gloomily, grimly, pompously, frantically, suspiciously or dismissively, when, like characters in Judith Krantz, he and she haven't already sniffed, flinched, roared, wailed, choked, hissed, gasped, squeaked, muttered, howled, barked, spat, snorted, bellowed, yawned or snarled -- disappear for hundreds of pages at a time. Meanwhile, as always, she has looted the shelves of literature and mythology, fairy tales and folklore, anthropology and comparative religion, firing up a pop-culture crockpot and adding pratfalls, wordplay and dread...
