Scribblings from the Mitchy Side

Wow.

I've just finished the book. Talk about not being able to put a book down, I even kept reading it during the football! And you know what I'm like with the football, right? (Oh, England won, by the way. And so we should, considering they were a) not very good and b) they had 10 men for about a third of the match).

I don't know how much my prior knowledge of who died affected my reading, but I suspect I would have been a lot more upset had I not known. Having said that, it would have been totally ridiculous if everyone had got out of that book unscathed.

And I guess I'd better put the rest of this review behind a cut.

So it's the fifth year of Harry's adventures and I can see what people have meant when they say he's angry all the time. Boy is he ever angry. And yet, you know, it's a dead on portrayal of your average teenager. What, was he supposed to be perfect? Oh, my mistake. Bah! I found the squabbling amongst the three leads to be perfectly in character, and no worse than in the previous four books. They're growing up, it's a painful process and good lord, I wouldn't want to be 15/16 again. Just the chapters on the exams and the revision had me breaking out in sympathetic shuddering.

I'll come back to characterisations later, but let's move on to the story. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Yes, it's a big book. Could it have been cut down? Hell yeh, the whole centaurs/Hagrid's brother storyline was a big, fat waste of time. Unless, obviously, she brings it up in a future book and it suddenly all becomes relevant but I doubt it. It took a hellish long time to get Harry to Hogwarts this time around and I thought a lot of that could have been cut down. The whole issue of keeping Harry in the dark was.....overplayed. Good gravy, I can understand Dumbledore having a blind spot, but you'd have thought the Weasleys, with six teenage boys in the clan, would have known a bit better. Some of the pre-Hogwarts angsting could have been cut out and the story would have got off to a cracking start.

I adore the whole concept of the Order of the Phoenix. And the trip to the Ministery of Magic, while long, was an absolute delight in that I LOVE seeing behind the scenes stuff and getting to see a bit of how the Ministry worked was wonderful. Rowling's great gift is for description and she can really put you in a place and get you to see it. The OotP HQ House, the Ministry, both are described with the sort of love and care I, for one, have come to expect from her.

The whole "Harry is an outcast" thing at Hogwarts was predictable and getting a bit tiresome but I could forgive that because it lead to "Dumbledore's Army", the illicit Defence of the Dark Arts classes taught by Harry. And at least it meant that this time, Harry had more allies than just Ron and Hermione. I also enjoyed Neville learning something and being a bit better at it than he usually is. Harry is obviously a good teacher - heh, I can see the sequels now: "Harry Potter: Headmaster of Hogwarts Term 1". I do hope though that in the next book Rowling doesn't set Harry up as the "one lone voice in the crowd" because it's been done, more than once, and I think enough has to be enough. Though I suspect the next two books might be focussed on other things anyway.

The Ministry's interference in Hogwarts had to happen, it's been threatened before, but goodness I did expect it to be a bit more subtle than that. It was a cross between the Nazi Youth League and Joe McCarthy's Witch (sorry, 'scuse pun) Hunt. Visible things are easy to fight and Professor Umbridge was ridiculously visible. Now, if she'd been working behind the scenes and her long arm wasn't detected for a long time, that would have been more of a puzzle. As it was, it was a bit like being blugeoned with badness. She did give JKR a good reason to not have to detail 3 full Quidditch matches though, which we should be thankful for on one level. They're fun but they can slow a book down when they're not the whole story.

I cheered at Fred and George's rebellion but then I've always liked the twins. The sub-sub-sub plot of the development of the Skiving Snackboxes provided a few good chortles, as did the twins pranks and "diversions". Loony Luna, well, plot-wise I'm thinking "Wtf?" frankly but she was a lot less annoying than Dobby or Colin Cheevy or Professor Lockhart, all of whom made mercifully brief cameos in this book.

Which brings me to characterisations. I've touched on Harry's anger and angst and in many ways, he's a lot less loveable in this book than in others. There are times when I really wanted to kick him hard but then I remembered: he's 15 and a moody teen. In fact, it's said out loud in the book in some similar form and I cheered inwardly. Frankly, given the kind of pressure he's under, I'd have been more disgruntled if HP had been a happy, cheerful angst-free boy.

His obsession with finding out his father might not have been perfect wasn't necesary here and now, I thought. Again with the piling on of things to be moody about. I can understand it though and in another book or even in a different place in the story, it would have been interesting, particularly given how he learned about it.

I can understand it on one level; things that affect us strongly tend to stay with us and we cling to them harder the more important they are. This is particularly true of those things that we learn or are told as a child. The solemn word of an adult can make a deep impression and it can be hard to come to believe/disbelieve these things, even in the face of all evidence or the perspective adulthood can bring. Harry hasn't got the adult perspective yet, you have to make allowances but that said, the denseness of his behaviour was borderline "Oh come ON!!" in places, particularly the scene in Dumbledore's study. He's a lot of things, HP, but he's never been stupid and this was pushing it pretty darn close. Hormonal he might be and angry he might be but he should be smart enough to think and listen to those he respects.

I am hoping against hope that in the next book we see him learn from this. If we don't, I'm going to be rather peeved with JKR because she will have let her leading character down very badly.

I refuse to even discuss the dimness he displayed with Cho although as I don't like her much, I didn't really care if that relationship got off the ground or not. But hey, congrats to the boy, he got snogged for the first time. Hurrah :)

As for the others, Ron being made Prefect was wonderful but I honestly wonder if he really was the right person for Prefect. Nothing in the previous books suggests he has the temperament that would make him appeal to the professors as a good person for the position but what the heck, it was a nice touch if nothing else. His failure and subsequent success on the Quidditch pitch was predictable as all hell but it was good to see him succeed at something and something that Harry is also good at. JKR seems to be pushing him out of Harry and Hermione's shadow and that could be interesting if it's developed in the future.

Hermione is growing just fine but, talking of denseness, will someone please convince her the House Elves think her ideas suck? How could she not notice Dobby had acquired all the clothes she knitted? And what did she think Hogwarts would do when there was no-one to cook, clean and do the thousand other tasks that keep the castle running? But that aside, she's as smart and cool as ever and I still like her character.

Professor Umbridge - clumsiest name yet (take umbrage, anyone?) - was also the clunkiest character by far. I really do dislike characters that have no depth and are just there to be the cardboard villain. Yes, yes, we know she's horrible, her physical description told us that much, not so much with the subtlety again, eh, JKR? Was the whole "writing lines in your own blood" thing really necessary? Wonderfully creepy idea, but for goodness sake, a bit OTT. Snape at least has depths and for all his evil, so does Voldemort. But Umbridge just was, well, deeply unpleasant. She was shuffled off out of the scene rather unsatisfactorily though I did laugh a bit at the idea of Peeves chasing her off the grounds wielding a walking stick.

Dumbledore rocks and the scene at Harry's hearing at the Ministry was totally priceless. The scene with Harry at the end broke my heart for him, he's doing his best and he's admitted it could have been better. For all that, Harry couldn't have a better man in his corner and the dignity with which he conducts himself was never better demonstrated than in this book.

Neville got some fairly meaty scenes this time around and the bit at the hospital was a genuinely moving scene. Did anyone else yell "Shut UP, Ron!" at their books or was that just me? Ah, just me, then. OK :P He's another character JKR is shoving forward a bit and again, I'll be interested to see where it goes.

Hagrid - someone give this man a clue :) But he's still great and I missed him, as Harry did, during the early part of the book. He really deserved better than this half-assed storyline about his brother, so I hope he gets his dues next time around.

Professor McGonagall kicks arse and I want to be her when I grow up. This will clash slightly with my aim of being C.J.Cregg when I grow up but then I figure I can combine the characters and end up being the Queen of Snark and able to turn into a cat, to boot. I see no bad here. :)

I did like the glimpse we had into the character of Mrs Weasley - that scene in the study with the Boggart was heartbreaking and beautifully done. And as I don't like Percy, I can only hope he has a nasty fall awaiting him somewhere down the line. Git.

I cheered at seeing Lupin again, I really do love that character. All the other Phoenix wizards were cool, too, it was amusing to read about them.

And now we come to the meaty stuff. Sirius and his death was, for me, expected, which no doubt took the edge of it. Was it necessary? Well, that's hard to say. It would be nice if no death was necessary at all but JKR does seem to be determined that there's a distinct thread of dark reality in her books as well as a fair amount of pain and loss for Harry. The first part I can understand, the second part does seem rather gratuitous. And for that alone, I think killing Sirius was a mistake. Harry is a miserable enough teen in this book, why make it worse? And to do so by making Sirius such an awkward, miserable and unloveable git in this book (did she think that would make his death "easier" on the readers??), was a serious mis-step on her part in my opinion. There were other characters she could have sacrificed if she was so desperate to show that in war there must be casualties, and she introduced enough secondary characters in this book she could have used half a dozen as red shirts without a problem. Or maybe that was her point. Maybe she was trying to show that the stakes were really high. Fine, she could have done that and not made Sirius such a hot-headed and bitter idiot at times. Let him be the man he's been and then kill him off later - now THAT would have packed an almighty wallop and no mistake.

Did Sirius's death make me want to cast the book into the fire and disown it? No. There was still enough darn good stuff here that I'm slightly sorry I waited so long to read it. It was still a book I couldn't put down, it's still a book I will re-read. Many have spoken of their disappointment in the characterisations in OotP, the death of Sirius incensed many. But most of those I'm thinking of (I'm not thinking of the press or media here), if not all of those, are people who are heavily involved in fandom and, more importantly, fan fiction. They had what, two/three years? in which they wrote and created and plotted and imagined without interruption and contradiction. And then this opus came sweeping down the plains and blew it all away. This was a devestating book for relationshippers and a devasting book for fans of Sirius. I sympathise deeply. There is a least one book featuring characters I love that I refuse to read because the author kills them off. It's childish, I know, I'm told it's a great story and done well but I don't care. All the while I don't read it, those characters are alive and I can write, create, plot and imagine to my heart's content. So I can empathise with those disappointed with this book and its developments, I really can. But at the same time, it's a living series, there's more stories to come, everyone knows that. To expect that nothing is going to change is, at best, naive.

That's not to say all criticism of this book is unwarranted. I've read many reviews of those in the literary trade or not connected with the fandom prior to this and I can agree with some of their points. The book needed stronger editing. Some of the characterisations were clumsy at best and annoyingly heavy handed at worst. I suspect I will be able to nit pick the plot far more on a second reading (reading a book that size in a day does rather mean details tend to blur after a while which is why I'm writing this now, so I can get first impressions down.). But for all that, it's still a darn decent addition the HP canon, it still gripped me from start to finish and JKR has still created a world that I'd love to live in and be part of. And that, to me, is what matters.

Roll on Book Six!