This gives me the opportunity to get a wee something off my chest... a prequel to my
modest deconstruction of Book Six's plot:
Harry Potter Year 4 1/2: The Summer it All goes to Crap
Dumbledore (to everyone): Unfortunately, Voldemort is back. He killed Cedric.
Harry (clearing throat): Right, well, you heard the Headmaster. So, let's all buckle up, buckle down...
Fudge: Er, just a moment.
Harry: Yes?
Fudge: I don't believe you.
Harry: Ha?
Fudge: I don't believe Voldemort's back.
Harry: That's crazy. I saw him.
Fudge: Rita Skeeter says you might have been hallucinating.
Harry: You trust
anything that bimbo writes? How stupid are you?
Fudge: Maybe you had a nightmare.
Harry: But Cedric's
actually dead.
Fudge: He could have been killed in the Triwizard maze.
Harry: By something that doesn't leave any marks? Look, this is asinine. Give me veritaserum and a pensieve, and you can all see what happened.
Fudge: But if you were hallucinating, you'd think you
were being truthful.
Harry: Okay, look. Wormtail removed a bone from one of Riddle's ancestor's graves. I can show you which one, and you can examine the incomplete skeleton.
Fudge: Doesn't prove anything.
You could have done it during Spring Break or something. Or maybe Dumbledore did it.
Harry: Why the
fuck would Professor Dumbledore do something like that?
Fudge: To deprive me of my position, of course.
Harry: Okay, so veritaserum
him, and you'll see -
Fudge: Dumbledore is a very resourceful wizard, and -
Harry: Oh, shut up. I want to speak with the opposition leader: maybe
he won't be brain-dead, and we can hold a public debate, vote on holding an inquiry...
Fudge: Speak with the who?
Harry: The
opposition leader. You know, as in a parliamentary rival? From another party? Someone who might believe Dumbledore and I, and challenge you on the facts of the situation?
Fudge: A "parliament", like those backward Muggles have? I'm not sure if we have one.
Harry: ...
Fudge: ...
Harry: What do you mean, you're "not sure if we have one"?!
Fudge: Rowling never mentions one. Nor does she ever indicate how Ministers of Magic actually get the job.
Harry: You can't be serious. She once spent a whole chapter describing Quidditch. She wrote a bleeding
spin-off book describing Quidditch teams from around the world. You're saying she couldn't be arsed to even
mention whether or not there's a Wizard legislature?
Fudge: Politics is boring; sports is fun. Everyone knows that.
Harry: If it's so boring, then why do I meet the Minister of Magic several times, and in dramatic circumstances?
Fudge: Well, that's different. JK likes to capitalize on the glamor of having her boy hero meet politicians without so much as referring to such basic societal constructs as a parliament.
Harry:
Wow, that's cynical. Could she get any more craven?
Fudge: Sure. Did you know that my refusal to believe that Voldemort is back is a direct, publicly acknowledged reference to Neville Chamberlain's failure to confront Hitler?
Harry: You're not serious.
Fudge: I totally am.
Harry: Sweet Gandalf, that's a preposterous analogy. Though it's true that the British government concealed the extent to which Germany was re-arming, no one had thought that the country's capacity for warfare had just
vanished, Voldemort style. I mean, do you know what what Chamberlain's principal error was?
Fudge: No.
Harry:
*sigh*, of course not. Well, his principal error was to try and appease Hitler, to buy a British peace by selling out helpless allies. Are
you trying to
appease Voldemort?
Fudge: Of course not; I just don't think that he's back. Because we couldn't have
meaningful parallels to appeasement without somewhere mentioning the structure of government, now could we?
Harry: Exactly. That's what makes the analogy so infantile.
Fudge: Well, what's your point?
Harry: My
point is that it's lousy and lazy storytelling to detail a whole wizarding world with countess of arcane tidbits, and repeatedly trade on the glamor of meeting heads of state, but never once mention whether or not this particular society is in any way democratic. My
point is that when JK has her smartest young witch try to launch a political campaign, but then tacitly belittles that character's effort while going into minute details of sporting matches, she sides against her own (alleged) values in order to sell the maximum possible books to the lowest common denominator. My
point is that the whole conceit of the fifth book is crap, that the internationalism promised in the fourth book goes exactly nowhere, and that the genuinely colorful and inventive saga teased by the first four volumes devolves into a lumpen ordeal of pointless camping trips, a dull-as-rocks final battle and an imagination-screwing epilogue whose character pairings could not possibly have been any more trite.
Fudge: Oh.
Harry: Yeah.
Fudge
(after a pause): You're still resenting losing Hermione to Ron, aren't you?
Harry: Have you frigging
seen her lately?!
END OF BOOK 4 1/2
If you've read this far, you may not be surprised to hear I won't be seeing either
DH in the cinemas
at least...