Explanation of the impossibility of reviewing Harry Potter and a gripe Dec 20 '07     Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Books Pablo Neruda - Veinte Poemas De Amor Y U From $42 Randall I. Charles, Dinah Chancellor, Ju From $67 The Bottom Line This ties in with the review I wrote for the film version of The Order of the Phoenix I want to review Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the film). I started the review with a preamble. This grew too large and would have been a distraction. Instead, I will write this and link it to the review. After I finished Deathly Hallows, I wrote a thank you thank you rather than a real review. It wasn’t a real review because I didn’t want to give anything away (it took me a full week to finish it, so about 80% of the planet probably knew the ending at least a day before I got there); it wasn’t a real review because how do you take on something like Harry Potter to review? If you review each one as a masterpiece, then you have cheapened not only that word, but the work itself. Make a mistake in a summary and get bombarded with posts explaining just how wrong you are. Call anything bad (see below) and you might get blocked by dozens or get blasted again with posts explaining why you are wrong. This is because we cannot, especially since the series is complete, take each piece separately. Not only that, but we each have an idea in our heads of what the characters look like, how they affect us and so on—even after watching all of the films, I still read the books with the people I created before the first film was released. As I said in the thank you above, Harry, Hermione, the Weasleys, Voldemort, Snape, and on and on are part of our families. Say you don’t like one and you have attacked a family. Decide you like a black-sheep and get banned from all future family functions. Pick the book where you realized that the characters on the page had become family. I doubt many would choose any after the first 4, for me it was Azkaban. This is why it is impossible at this date to review at least the books. They are not books qua books, they are a cultural wonder. Ignore the marketing crap and look only at the books. Do you see them as books or do they look different on your book shelf? Have they become something more like a wordy scrapbook than books for young adults (well, sort of, if you were 11 when you started, you would be 26 when it ended)? I could be way off base and only expressing my own obsession (I have all 7 in American release, 1 British, 4 French, 4 Czech, 1 Bengali, and 1 Chinese—these last two came from work friends for whom I am grateful). I have every intention of getting as many of the books in native languages of every country I visit. I could get them from the web but that would be meaningless. These books have entered the lives of so many cultures and languages and my collection would just be a personal celebration of that—I am a sucker for language, and books in Hungarian would be more meaningful than any other item I could bring back. I mention my particular history with Mr. Potter in the link above. Now I want to cover my particulars on The Order of the Phoenix--the book at this point. I preordered it about 5 minutes after it was posted on amazon.com. I was going to make a trip to Europe a week after it was to come out, so I could have it nicely within my head before the flight from Dulles to Schiphol (Amsterdam). Well, we had to move the dates and I would be in Amsterdam the day the book was released. This was the first novel that I would be getting at the same time as the other fans. Luckily, with little effort I found a bookstore blocks from the hotel that would be selling the book the next day. I bought it at 9am, literally running in case they would sell out, that day and by the time I went to lunch with my travelmate, about a third of the population of Central was either reading it or carrying it around. I began it in Europe but finished it back home in Alabama. It is the only book of the 7 that I refuse to reread. I have reread Azkaban three times the same with Goblet These are the books that have the principles maturing most starkly but still have reread the first two twice and am just about ready to do Half-Blood and the finale again. I am one who almost never rereads. Phoenix still has the maturation, but it contains the one enormous problem. Every artist has done something that falls flat (or that she or he regrets); that is the nature of creation. For Ms. Rowling, this mistake was Dolores Umbrage. In an interview in the interminable time between Goblet and Phoenix she explained that she has to create a history for every character so she can see them fully and write about them in a way that makes them more believable (who wouldn’t crawl through broken glass to get their hands on that?). Ok, then why did Umbrage turn out the way she did? The name shows no attempt at all of masking a meaning of a word, so Umbrage is someone whose name is a quasi-verb in that she causes everyone around her to feel umbraged. She is also the central dynamo of this novel. The sin here isn’t that Umbrage is awful—all of the novels had someone horrible in them . . . um . . . that’s kind of what the series is about (as the books progressed, they had more than one horrible person in them), but all were rounded in such a way that even the evil were multi-dimensional. Umbrage escapes this artistic kiln. She is entirely flat. There isn’t a single thing about her that allows a reader to grasp—think of any of the other awful people (large roles or small), notice there is a back-story to them. It won’t always color them as having had a good side at one point, but there will always be something else that acts as a handle if you will so you can pick them up and examine them. With Umbrage, there isn’t. The character is supposed to sicken and enrage everyone who reads the book; I get that. But why make her, in at least one respect, more evil than Voldemort, but not give her anything to expand her personality to show this? At least Voldemort has something he wants; there is a goal. He has a back-story and iss omnipresent. For about 80% of the novel, Umbrage is omnipresent. She is a special kind of evil. Umbrage is a Gauleiter; you can say kiss äss if you want. Either way, her evil comes not from wanting to advance herself (though you can argue this) she is there as the myrmidon of the Ministry hell bent on ignoring the obvious. Umbrage brooks no compromise; she would not reconsider any action as beyond the pale (all manner of things are allowed when no one is really watching). Her evil is “I was only following orders.” Voldemort fights for control, Umbrage doesn’t fight; she just declares then uses what she calls discipline. Fight and there is a target; enlisting others to do the dirtier work is just what myrmidons do because the counter-attack would hit the underlings long before anyone got anywhere close to the Nazi in charge. Let’s face it, that’s what she is, but just a cardboard one. This just shows a grasp of history it just doesn’t give any more dimension to this horribly constructed character. Honestly, there were times when I was just going to skip to the last couple of chapters and just be done with it. I had waited 2 years, others twice that, for this book. And, as I said, it is the only one I will not reread. Why? The important thing is that Harry proves he is powerful and teaches others well. Great, got that. Other than that, the prophesy, and the final admission by the Ministry that Voldemort is back, what good is the book? All the rest of it is just the icky filling in the chocolates that you just really hope isn’t lemon cream or some junk. I’m not saying it should have been shorter. I’m saying that the author had 4 or more years to write this and couldn’t come up with something better than Dolores Umbrage. Now I think I can take on the film. If you have made it this far, thank you for entertaining my rant.

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