To me, it seemed as if Rowling had lost focus and she'd lost focus because she'd lost interest.
She didn't seem to care anymore what happened to Harry in the end, so she stuck with what was happening to him in the immediate present, which turned out to be nothing but a lot of adolescent angst.
A worse sign was the way she threw away the death of one of her secondary heroes.
The big battle sequence is as confusing and cluttered and as seemingly pointless---in that neither side appears to have a strategy---as the battle between the Ewoks and the stormtroopers on Endor in Return of the Jedi, and the way Rowling handled the death of his hero was as if George Lucas had decided to kill off Han Solo but did it in a cutaway shot between the scene of Luke on the Death Star and Lando in the Millennium Falcon.
She got things back on track with the Half-Blood Prince, but that's what that book seemed to be about---regaining control and setting the stage for the final installment. There's a perfunctory quality to it, which isn't just disappointing, it's strange, considering which main character she kills off in it.
Rowling may have been saving it all up for the end, but the impression I've had for the last three books is that she's been losing more and more of her steam. And now I suspect that the final book is going to be a big letdown.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Horrible hunch for last Harry Potter
I do hope Lance Mannion is wrong:
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2 comments:
I find Lance's conclusions highly improbable, and I didn't read in the last two volumes any indication that Rowling is out of control of the plot line. It just goes to show that people can construe the same work in vastly different ways. I don't know if the finale will be disappointing, but somehow I doubt it.
Lilian Jackson Braun, lord love her... now there's someone who has lost control of her series, dispensing with important characters and other fixtures of her little universe right and left in her latest... to no benefit at all to the ongoing story. Sigh... I guess age eventually catches up with all of us.
I've seen it happen to a lot of authors who produce some best sellers and then start working on a book a year quota.
I understand the need for conflict, but I wanted to kill Dobby and lighten some of the angst and shunning going on. Her humor is delicious and the last novel seemed to bring back that mix that was so lacking in the middle novels.
That said, I'm looking forward to buying the last one. We have them as books on cds, and we have both the British versions and the American versions, so you can tell I'm a fan.
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