But the world she created was present in books one through three–book three is complexly plotted, really, so why wouldn’t someone keep reading the books, in order to re-enter that world?
I don’t see Harry as a trope (except for the obvious Hero one, and if those who are puzzled by the success of these books want to abolish that, we have parted ways considerably). So Harry isn’t as tortured as some modern anti-hero. Big deal. he is conflicted enough for a pre-teen and teen, plus he has his difficult home life and the burden of unwanted celebrity to contend with. If he is shown mostly reacting to that, so be it–to me, that is very realistic indeed. What are you all looking for–lengthy exposition about his feelings? Deeply symbolic actions of some kind? Someone said he never failed at anything–that is patently not true. But the series is about what he is (or what he represents to others) more than it is about his journey to maturity. I doubt Rowling started out with that in mind, but she was clever enough to figure it out early on.
I don’t see them as cardboard characters at all. The only ones who come across that was are the Dursleys and that is a huge weakness, granted.
I also confess I am completely at a loss to understand the swipe at the Redwall series upthread. They are lovely books and well written, as well as popular with kids. It comes down to tastes are inexplicable, no matter how one would like to think their own are based on solid reasoning and evidence.
As for the rather ridiculous argument that there are more “worthy” authors out there–of course there are! That has been true of every age, every where. Such is the nature of the publishing business.
I would say this is the biggest deus ex machina point in the series, but it’s not nearly as bad as it could have been. Fawkes was introduced much earlier in the book, and the healing property of his tears (and IIRC his dislike of snakes) were mentioned at that time. Although Harry could not have defeated the basilisk or even survived the fight without the sudden appearance of Fawkes, Harry was the one who actually killed the monster. He also figured out how to deal with ghost of Tom Riddle on his own. So it’s not like Fawkes swooped in and completely saved the day, Harry’s action was essential to the resolution of the crisis.
The entire plot of Goblet of Fire is essentially “Harry has a problem, mopes about it for fifty pages, and then someone shows up at the last minute to hand him a solution.”
Except the ending when the solution just hands itself to him.
For most of Goblet of Fire people were handing solutions to Harry because he was being set up. It’s not a deus ex machina for the bad guys to lay a trap for the hero. Near the end of the book the main villain even complains about how Harry missed his subtler hints, forcing the villain to go to extra trouble to make sure Harry would win.
I suppose I should add that this is what I was talking about in my earlier post. Rowling piles on the details that some readers latch onto. So here we have “It was really all a scheme!” dropped as an excuse for the bad writing that fills the book and people who don’t think about the plotting or structure nod their heads and accept it. When you pull it apart, however, that scheme doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Why go through the elaborate deception under the nose of people who really should know better using innocent pawns who if they just said, “Oh, Harry, this guy asked me to help you!” it would fall apart when the whole thing would have been better served by snatching him once he got off the train. Rig a baggage cart to do the same thing as the cup and you’ve got the same result with one-tenth the effort or risk.
The real answer, of course, is that Rowling isn’t a good writer and so she put deus ex machina after deus ex machina in Goblet of Fire to resolve situations and tried to justify it at the end before dropping another pair of deus ex machinas to resolve the story.
I’ll only find it depressing if all the non-reading kids who became huge fans stop reading now that there are no more HP books (supposedly) coming out. Other than that, if HP leads aome of them on to a life-long love of literature, I for one am willing to forgive the series for being dull and unengaging to me.
JKR’s writing irritated me and by the end of the third book, I had no desire to pick up book four, but it’s not the first book or series I’ve put down for those reasons. I just figure it’s like everyone going ga-ga over a celebrity I don’t find interesting or attractive.
Uh, yes, it does. Maybe you don’t know what the term deus ex machina means. It isn’t any plot point that you find contrived or unlikely. An elaborate scheme intended to lead to the hero’s death is pretty much the opposite of a deus ex machina.
Come on. You’re seriously claiming that Rowling wrote almost the entire book, realized it was bad, and then made up the final plot twist at the last minute to cover up the story’s weaknesses? That’s ridiculous.
*I don’t think you remember the book very well. “Moody” didn’t outright ask people to help Harry, he did things like mention gillyweed where Dobby would overhear him. Even if Moody had directly been asking people to help Harry, why would this have made Harry suspicious? Harry might have been concerned about proper sportsmanship, but he respected and trusted Moody. He would have believed that Moody honestly meant to help him.
*I think there have been whole threads devoted to discussion of this particular issue, so I’m not going to get into it here. I will, however, point out that Voldemort is the supervillain of the HP universe, and supervillains rarely go for the simplest and most straightforward method of disposing of the hero. Dr. No could have just shot James Bond in the face, but that wouldn’t have been much of a movie.
*There are plenty of criticisms that could fairly be made about Goblet of Fire (like the seemingly endless Quidditch Cup sequence), but this is just silly. I’d agree that the business about the wands at the end was rather deus ex machina-y, but the help Harry got in winning the tournament was not. It was a trap! Rowling intended all along for it to be a trap, one that would fool both Harry and the reader. I guess it fooled you a little too well, but it’s absurd to suggest that she didn’t know what the plot of her own book was all along.
This would be just a little more convincing if you knew the author’s name.
I have never heard anyone seriously defend the Harry Potter series as anything more than children’s literature. It isn’t serious, intense fantasy and isn’t meant to be. I can’t beleive people are complaining that the characters are simple. Well, of course they are. The books are for children. They’re not going to read like Tolstoy or Irving. What the heck were you expecting?
And, come on, does anyone seriously think dreck like “Wheel of Time” is any better?
Hmm… perhaps you should look it up. It means resolving a conflict by having an outside element enter without establishing that element beforehand. You know, like every conflict in Goblet of Fire.
It doesn’t matter if after 600 pages that she says, “Ha! It was all a scheme!” It’s about narrative structure. A good writer could have still said, “Ha! It was all a scheme!” at the end and resolved the conflicts without resorting to deus ex machina to resolve the middle plot points. Just having a character notice that it’s awfully convenient that solutions keep getting dropped on Harry’s head would have been a good start albeit nearly as blunt of plotting as Rowling does.
I was going to go point by point here but I know it doesn’t matter since you made all of my points for me with the strawmen, even more convoluted descriptions of what I was keeping simple, and missing the point in general.
And yes there’s a lot more wrong with the basic structure in Goblet of Fire (the fact that Harry as a protagonist is completely ineffective is a good start) but we’re talking about Rowling’s constant use of one particular bad writing device.
I was somewhat excited and interested when I heard about the first HP book. I like fantasy, and in particular I like YA fantasy. So I got the first book, and was thoroughly underwhelmed. My daughter borrowed most of the sequels from the bookstores where she worked. I’d paid retail paperback price for the first book. I read the second and subsequent books for free. I would not have paid ANY money to read them, though I might have borrowed them from the library to see if the writing had improved if Lisa hadn’t been able to borrow them.
I don’t remember which HP book was the last one I read. It could have been three, or four, or five. But I do remember Lisa offering me the next book in the series, and I told her that I simply didn’t get enough enjoyment for the time I spent reading the books.
I have a system of how I’ll buy books. I will buy the books of a very few authors in new hardback. There are more authors that I’ll buy in trade or mass market paperback. I will buy new copies of books by these authors because I want to “vote” with my dollars, to contribute to royalties and sales for these authors. Then there are the majority of the authors, who I don’t feel have put in enough of an effort to really deserve my support. Maybe I’ll buy their books new, but usually I will buy used copies of their books.
Then, there are the authors that I will only read if they’re on the clearance shelf of the used book store, or the thrift shop. I won’t pay more than a buck for their books. And there are the authors that write books that I won’t pay even a quarter for. Rowling is such an author. If I have the opportunity to read one of her books without paying for it, I might read it. On the other hand, I might read one of the various women’s magazines instead. Rowling does not engage me. I will expend no effort to seek out her books and read them. And remember, I like children’s fantasy, I just have my standards, that’s all.
I’m a librarian, I always look things up. Maybe you should look it up, because you’re not going to find any definition of the term that includes a plot device that makes things WORSE for the hero. All this “help” Harry is getting is only taking him out of the frying pan and into the fire. He’d have been better off if he’d lost the tournament.
Instead, by the end of the book the situation is much worse for Harry and the entire wizard world than it was at the beginning. Even the business about the brother wands only succeeds in preventing Harry from being killed. Voldemort’s plan was largely successful. He has a new body, he’s broken the spell that kept him from harming Harry, and he’s regrouping with his old followers. What briefly seemed like a victory for Harry left Voldemort stronger than he’d been in the series to date.
Even setting aside the fact that it’s all a trap, it isn’t a deus ex machina for the hero’s known allies to exercise long-established abilities to assist him. It was established well beforehand that Hagrid had an interest in dragons, that Neville was good at herbology, and that Dobby overhears a lot through his work and would use this information to protect Harry. Cedric tells Harry how to open the egg to repay Harry for telling him about the dragons, he doesn’t just offer assistance out of the blue.
*It wouldn’t have been much of a scheme if the bad guys had just left it to chance whether Harry won the tournament. Maybe you missed this, but the fact that Harry is outclassed by his competition is a fairly important part of the book. Rowling makes it clear that Harry doesn’t have the knowledge or skill to win the tournament on his own. Harry needed help, and the help he received was consistent with the characters that offered it to him. The only way for Harry to win all by himself would be if he suddenly became the best and brightest student out of the three competing schools. To her credit, Rowling never went that far into Mary Sue territory.
*Sounds like someone is upset he didn’t guess the final twist himself. Sorry Rowling didn’t hold your hand a bit more, but from quite early in the book we know that someone is setting a trap for Harry involving his participation in the tournament. The Goblet of Fire was rigged so Harry’s name would be selected. Many characters in the book suspect Harry of cheating, but the reader knows that this wasn’t the case. Someone working behind the scenes was determined to have Harry in the tournament, and it surely wasn’t out of the goodness of their hearts. Even Dumbledore is concerned about what’s going on.
Moody suggests that the scheme may be to get Harry killed in the competition, but how would he know? He’s at best just guessing, and as it turns out he’s actually lying. Gosh, who would have suspected that the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher wasn’t what he seemed? Only someone who’s read any of the previous three books, because that’s what happened in every single one of them. An observant reader would also notice that Moody was directly or (seemingly) indirectly involved in a lot of the help that Harry received. He encouraged Hagrid to talk to Harry about the dragons, he told Harry to use his flying skills in the dragon event, and he gave Neville the herboloy book. Harry trusted Moody and accepted all this help at face value, but Harry trusting an untrustworthy person was also nothing new for the series.
I guess Rowling could have dropped some even bigger clues, but in order to have a twist ending it’s kind of important not to make it blatantly obvious to everyone well in advance. There was nothing preventing you from noticing on your own that it was awfully convenient that Harry kept getting help at the last minute. If you noticed this and concluded that it was just because Rowling was a lousy writer who wanted her hero to be a big champion but couldn’t come up with a better way for him to solve a puzzle, that was your personal bias keeping you from realizing what kind of book you were actually reading.
*If you call misstating what actually happened in the book “keeping it simple” then yes, you were keeping it simple. If you get to just make things up about the book, Rowling’s writing process, and even me, then I guess you can prove any point you like. It doesn’t really count if you do it that way, though.
Goblet of Fire is far from my favorite entry in the series, so it’s no surprise to me that someone would dislike it. There are plenty of valid criticisms to be made about this book. But if you dislike it because you didn’t get it then that’s your problem.
This is very telling. Putting aside the question how accurate this is as a description of what happens in the book, what’s telling is that you find “ineffective protagonist” to be a sign of bad storytelling, and not, rather, a sign of some sophistication in the storytelling.
“Ineffective protagonist” signals either nothing, or sophistication. I can not imagine how it could be construed as signalling bad storytelling. There can be a bad story in which the protagonist is inneffective, but that inneffectiveness is not a sign of that bad storytelling. A protagonist’s effectiveness or lack thereof is a plot characteristic that has significance for the quality of the plot whatsoever. It could go either way.
Sigh. The problem with Goblet of Fire is that it’s boring and chases its tail and goes on about six times too long. In other words, it’s a pretty typical mid-series doldrums sort of book that showcases what’s worst about the series. You don’t need to argue whether a “inferno ex machina” is a real thing to just say “it was a boring book”, do you?
FWIW, I largely agree. I’d have liked Goblet of Fire a lot better if Rowling had cut a couple hundred pages of not especially interesting material. There was enjoyable material there as well and I think the central mystery was pretty good, but given how much time was devoted to the Tri-Wizard Tournament I don’t think the reader was given much reason to care who won. If we know the twist then it’s obvious that Harry would do better NOT to win, but even taking the competition at face value there’s no particular reason to be rooting for Harry other than that he’s the protagonist of the book. If Harry had really needed the prize money to help a friend or something then we’d have had reason to want him to beat out the others, but as things were the outcome of the competition didn’t seem to matter.
I REALLY did not care about the Quidditch World Cup and would have liked to get that over with a lot more quickly. It’s not until the end of Chapter 11 that Harry even arrives at Hogwarts and the main plot really gets going.
Beginning with Goblet of Fire, I think the series became to an extent the victim of its own success. Had the series been more modestly successful then Rowling would very likely have been pressured to keep the books shorter. Rowling does not come across to me as a prima donna who would refuse editorial suggestions, but few authors enjoy cutting large sections from their work and the publishers were probably wary of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. They also likely wanted to get the later books in press ASAP. The later books were as close to the publishing industry gets to a sure thing, and the publisher’s would have wanted to delay getting those big bucks. Dragging out the editing process when the later books were already taking years to write also ran the risk of having Pottermania lose steam before the series was finished. But in terms of the actual quality of the books rather than financial profit, I think the later entries in the series would have benefited from more extensive editing.
Sorry, I mangled this while trying to edit it and then ran out of time. The bolded portion should read “the publishers would not have wanted to delay getting those big bucks”.
I’ve read the HP books, I enjoyed them thoroughly, none would make my Top 20 list.
However, seeing lines around a store and out the door an hour before midnight of people of all ages awaiting a 759 page book- whatever it may owe to a combination of marketing, word of mouth, catchy theme music at the movies, and Danie Radcliffe growing up sexy and gallivanting naked on the net- it’s the “one great hope” that the Readers will prevail against Twitter and the TLDR-eaters.
OTOH & AISMT (as I’ve said many times), I can’t get into Tolkien at all. Many people I like, love, respect, etc., swear by him- I can’t even make it out of the Shire when I read the first books. The second movie (*LOTR2: Gollem Gets Barmitzvahed *or whatever the hell it was called) is one of the few movies I’ve ever fallen asleep during. But… to each his own. I love Confederacy of Dunces and most anything by Capote and David Sedaris, I’ve friends who dislike all of those. I love Gone With the Wind and am totally indifferent to *Casablanca which many consider the incomparably superior movie. The peurile profanity laden comedy songs of Stephen Lynch - NSFW crack me up and this VERY NSFW song by John Butler John R. Butler damned near made me call for oxygen the first time I heard it while many others find them somewhere between completely unfunny and ridiculously offensive, and I find Andy Kaufman and the insanely popular Sasha Baron Cohen roughly as funny as a documentary on TMJ.
As the Latino sage once said, De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum livin’ la vida loca.
Lamia, since you are so wrapped up in defending the book to actually see my points let me take this to another book.
At the end of Return of the King Tolkien has the problem of Frodo and Sam stuck on an exploding volcano in enemy territory. To resolve this problem he has eagles swoop in and rescue them. This is a deus ex machina. It is no less of a deus ex machina because it is explained ten pages later that Gandalf sent them.
Problem: Sam and Frodo about to die/Harry can’t get what he wants
Solution: Eagles swoop in to rescue them/Someone walks up and hands Harry the answer
An external factor enters the narrative to provide a solution for the protagonist. Problem/solution. That’s the definition. A reason given later doesn’t change the pattern.
In this case it’s bad storytelling because Rowling is writing a heroic fantasy instead of an existential examination of humanity. And by “ineffective” I mean that Harry could have been replaced with an inanimate carbon rod in Goblet of Fire and the story would have been the same. Things happen to Harry; he doesn’t do anything to move the plot forward.
Well, I disagree. And one reason I disagree is that there can’t be what you’re calling an “inneffective protagonist” in a (central case of a) work of heroic fantasy, while “inneffective protagonist” is a fairly typical means by which authors use their characters to examine the human situation. (Existentially or otherwise.)
It’s examination-lite, written for kids. But examination it is. The story isn’t about how Harry saves the day. (To my recollection, he never really does, not even by the end of the series. You’re right–things generally happen to him. By the way, this is true of Frodo in LotR for the most part, as well.) Rather, the story is about what Harry discovers, how he learns that humans (him or others) can be. He is constantly discovering how his preconceptions about himself and others are wrong. Indeed, that process of revelation seemed to me to be the driving force in the book. The mystery plots and save the world stuff seemed like a mere excuse to get this more important and interesting quasi-philosophical stuff accomplished. (Keep in mind, I’m in philosophy, so I do have a tendency to see philosophy being done where others might not have spotted it, or agreed it was really there… )
Like I said, it’s examination lite, written for kids. I don’t mean to say it’s incredibly deep or merits a lot of study or anything. The work does use heroic fantasy tropes. But precisely because of the characteristics you’re adducing as criticisms of the work, (they aren’t criticisms, really, though you intend them that way–they only manage to be characterizations), we can see that those tropes really are just being used in the service of a more important project. And that project is exactly what you claim the book is not–an examination of humanity.
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