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<< Romantic Love, Nature and Culture | Front Page | What Good Can Masterpieces Do? >>
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Potter, Harry
Posted by Adam Roberts on 12/13/09 at 03:10 PM
Below the fold, brief thoughts on each of the seven Harry Potter novels in turn. As I was typing this out, the theme to Rawhide kept trundling through my head: ‘keep Rowling, Rowling, Rowling ...’
Magical Molesworth (orthographically corrected).
The school cellar is out of bounds.
Nicholas Nickleby’s Dementheboys Hall.
Hot cup.
The Order of the Four-Times-As-Long-As-It-Needs-To-Be.
Tom Brown’s Crueldays by Thomas Horcruxhes; Maloryfoy Towers; The Chal-die School Stories; Goodbye Mr Snapes; Billy Buntledore of Grayliars School. Look, I’ve got loads of these. Honestly, I could go on all day.
Hallows. You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
So, so, you read through all this stuff (and there’s a lot of this stuff) assuming that the salient syllable in ‘Voldemorte’s name is the deathly morte one. But to finish the final vol. is to realise that that’s not it. The crucial portion of his name is the old part. That’s the unforgiveable sin in the Potterverse: aging. This book, despite its barely-there epilogue, equates aging with either evil or expiration, which is, deep-down, a pretty mendacious thing.
A PS: over at my punkdid blog, where this squib was first posted, you’ll find a comment by Rich P., proving that rumours of his internet-death have been much exaggerated. Alive!
Also: muggles, while we should respect them, do not deserve to know anything about our secret world. We must hide our elite knowledge from them, and continue to silently rule over them...for their own good, of course!
Add a comment:
Magical Molesworth (orthographically corrected).
The school cellar is out of bounds.
Nicholas Nickleby’s Dementheboys Hall.
Hot cup.
The Order of the Four-Times-As-Long-As-It-Needs-To-Be.