Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, by J K Rowling, 1999

I had the huge pleasure of reading Prisoner to my sons a few years back, and it was that experience which finally persuaded me to take J K Rowling seriously as an author.

Philosopher’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets had been fun, with dark moments but plenty of silliness as well, and it seemed the level of peril Harry was going to face was never going to be that serious. He certainly didn’t seem to need the help of adults to face down Voldemort once a year. His plot armour was unbreakable and extended to all his companions. While there is also a strong case to be made for Goblet of Fire being the turning point in the series, where there are key character deaths and the novels begin to grow much longer, I think Prisoner is equally a significant milestone in the series.

First, Prisoner is a much darker novel than its predecessors. Sirius Black has been built up through out the novel as a psychotic and dangerously powerful killer, the only wizard to ever escape from Azkaban (even though his attempts to break into the castle and the Gryffindor common room and bedrooms have not seen anyone killed or even hurt). Having been told relentlessly that he is an extremely dangerous character, we have no reason to believe he is not the novel’s principal villain. After all, who else could it be? In the novel’s climax n the Shrieking Shack the trio are ‘captured’ by Black, Ron is seriously injured, and the only possible help, Professor Lupin, seems to be a traitor. It’s hard to see a way back for them at that point.

The darkness of the novel is underlined by introduction of dementors, a disturbing new element to the narrative. While much of the landscape of Hogwarts is familiar, drawn from traditional stories – ghosts, goblins, giants, unicorns and centaurs – dementors are something new and very scary.

“Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them… Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself… soulless and evil. You will be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life.“

What’s worse in many ways is that the dementors are ostensibly on the ‘good’ side – the Ministry employs them to run Azkaban where psychological torture is the state-sanctioned fate of all, to act as security guards around Hogwarts once the threat to Harry from Sirius becomes understood and to execute prisoners without benefit of trial or sentence in the most appallingly cruel fashion, using the Dementor’s Kiss. They are the stuff of nightmares:

Where there should have been eyes, there was only thin, grey, scabbed skin, stretched blankly over empty sockets. But there was a mouth … a gaping, shapeless hole, sucking the air with the sound of a death-rattle.

Fluffy falls asleep when you sing to him, Aragog is Hagrid’s friend, and the basilisk is pecked out of action by Fawkes – but the dementors will eat your soul.

Second, the climax of the novel following Buckbeak’s ‘execution’ is a sustained, extraordinarily breathless series of reveals, twists, and surprises. Reading these chapters (from seventeen to the end of the novel) I found it virtually impossible to find a natural place to find somewhere to pause for the night – each one ends with a cliff-hanger that demands you read on. It’s brilliantly constructed. Prisoner is still an adventure novel for children and young adults, but the shift in tone and quality from the earlier novels is apparent.

Third, complexity. In the course of this novel that Rowling is able to sustain dramatic tension and build a world of depth and complexity, demanding that we look again at the first two novels, re-evaluating references, incidents, and even casual apparently throwaway lines for new importance. You can start to see her cash in some of the investment made in earlier novels. Scabbers, for example, introduced on that first ride on the Hogwarts Express as Ron’s rather pathetic hand-me-down pet, suddenly becomes a much more important character. Equally, the passing reference to Sirius in the opening chapter of Philosopher’s becomes strikingly poignant when it is revealed he is Harry’s godfather. (Incidentally it is surprising that suspicion did not fall on Sirius immediately following the attack at Godric’s Hollow. Dumbledore knew James and Lily were hiding under the protection of a secret-keeper and believed that person to be Sirius – hence his willingness to let Sirius rot in Azkaban for 12 years. But when he hears that Sirius lent Hagrid his motorbike to convey Harry to Privet Drive – no reaction!)

The case against Prisoner revolves mainly around the use of the time-turner as a plot device. It’s a classic deus ex machina, and invites the question why the Ministry allowed a school-girl to casually use such a powerful magical device for relatively trivial purposes. Within the context of the novel however these questions usually don’t occur to the reader, and the time-travel resolution of the plot seems neatly done. Again, if we can suspend our disbelief to allow the existence of magic, magical creatures, and the whole wizarding world, why can’t we allow for time travel as well, and just skate on past any awkward paradoxes?

These elements build into a powerful combination, using the characters, locations and structures that Rowling established in the first two novels, but beginning to explore the wider wizarding world. These are still school-children, struggling with homework, exams, and the awkwardness of teenage friendships (Ron spends a long time sulking when he thinks Crookshanks has eaten Scabbers). Prisoner begins the transition to the darker, more mature themes that dominate the rest of the series.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, by J K Rowling, 1998

Again, not a review, which would be redundant, but some observations:

1. The comfort of familiarity. Re-reading Chamber of Secrets I was struck by how similar the story is to Philosopher’s Stone. I am not going to list all the points of comparison here, but (to mention a few) both stories involve:

• a search for something hidden “miles” beneath the castle
• a dangerous trip into the Forbidden Forest
• Hagrid providing clues to the ‘secret’
• the climax of both novels featuring Harry travelling under the school with his friends, only to be separated from them and having to face You-Know-Who on his own.

The stories are not just similar in terms of their plots. Rowling developed a structure for these novels that was to serve her well and provide a comforting familiarity to her readers. (To be honest it came as a shock when she abandoned that formula in Deathly Hallows). Apart from that one outlier, all the novels start in Privet Drive, feature the journey to Hogwarts, the welcome feast, the three school terms, and culminate conveniently at the end of the summer. Harry’s birthday, lessons, feasts, Quidditch, Halloween, Christmas, Easter and exams are all fixed points of reference in each novel. (It is rare for Rowling to introduce new milestones – so far as I can remember, for example, neither Ron nor Hermione’s birthdays are mentioned or celebrated). This is not an objection, (and I suppose it’s not much of an observation either), but it does mean that each novel was constructed within tightly prescribed parameters, with only limited variations at each outing.

2. Still not sure. Rowling was careful not to assume that readers of Chamber had read Philosopher’s, so provides a detailed if rapid explanation in the opening chapter – Harry is a wizard, he goes to a magic school, he is an orphan, etc. Even the rules of Quidditch get a recap. In later novels Rowling is confident enough to assume that her readers are not joining the series mid-way and dispenses with these summaries, which I suspect were something her editors suggested.

3. Believability. When I first read Chamber I was mildly irritated by some of the plot inconsistencies and absurdities. Would Hagrid really have been carted off to Azkaban just on suspicion of involvement in the opening of the Chamber? Could a massive basilisk have moved freely around the pipes of the school’s medieval plumbing? And why didn’t it eat any of its victims, given how hungry it insists it feels? I could probably explain away these and the many other problematic issues that readers have identified over the years, but I am fairly sure that would be missing the point. This is not a realistic adventure story, and it is wrong to treat it as one. There are ghosts, trolls, centaurs and unicorns for goodness sake, not to mention the giant squid living in the lake! It is a children’s story where suspension of disbelief is required. As the series turns darker a more careful analytical reading can be justified, but for now this is still a bit of a lark.

4. A detective story? One of the pleasures of a re-read of any mystery is spotting the clues one missed the first time round, the misdirection and red herrings. Should I have been able to work out the ending and the plot twists? Most readers assume that the heir of Slytherin is unlikely to be either Malfoy or Harry, following the convention that it is never the more obvious characters ‘whodunnit’. But should I have been able to guess that Ginny was the one opening the Chamber and controlling the basilisk? On a reread the clues are there in plain sight, but the added complication of the diary being haunted by the spirit of Tom Riddle (who mysteriously still has his award for services to the school on display in the trophy room, despite the later difficulty with ahem trying to take over the world) clearly wasn’t guessable, in the same way that Quirrell being the host for You-Know-Who’s disembodied spirit wasn’t work-out-able either. The technique works surprisingly well – Rowling makes us think we should have been able to see the solution while at the same time making it obscurely improbable.

5. Easter Eggs. The other main pleasure of Chamber is seeing some of the skeleton of Half Blood Prince in the bones of the plot. References and objects pop up in passing – the Hand of Glory and the opal necklace from Borgin and Burke’s in Knockturn Alley (one of the many things I still really enjoy from the series are silly little jokes like that), the vanishing cabinet and of course Riddle’s diary.

Chamber isn’t the strongest novel in the series, but there’s still so much to enjoy. The story is told with the wonderful economy that was such a feature of the early novels. The central characters are beginning to come alive and be fully rounded, with the supporting cast also assuming much more depth. New characters such as Dobby are introduced, and the portrait of Lockhart is a wonderfully spiteful sketch. Despite the ghosts and the magic there is a grounded believability about Harry and his friends. They struggle with schoolwork, bullies, unpopularity and peer-pressure – the only thing that no-one seems to suffer from is acne. It’s been a real pleasure to return to Hogwarts, and while I doubt I am going to work my way through the whole series again, I might!

How to Stop Time, by Matt Haig, 2017

Time travel is an obvious source of plot material for authors, but it is also inherently problematic – making it plausible is always the challenge. Over the years authors have adopted a range of different approaches to making it believable. None have ever really cracked the central practical problems associated with the idea, but Matt Haig comes close in this novel, mainly by redefining what we mean by time travel. His central character, Tom Hazard, has a rare genetic condition which causes him to age extremely slowly.

I am old. That is the first thing to tell you. The thing you are least likely to believe. If you saw me you would probably think I was about forty, but you would be very wrong.

For every ten to fifteen years of his life his body ages approximately one year of everyone else’s. And this is his story. At the time we are introduced to him he is around 400 years old. Much of the novel is spent revisiting Tom’s memories of his earlier lives, from medieval England to 1920’s Paris. The gift of long-life has not been without its problems. His mother is drowned as a witch because of his eternal youthfulness, and he has to separate from his Elizabethan wife and daughter to prevent something similar happening to them. He is forced to change identity every eight years, can never put down roots, learn a profession, build a family, or settle down. And of course the things he can’t have become the things he wants.

In the present Tom works as a teacher, teaching history from first-hand experience. He becomes attracted to a colleague who comes close to working out his secret, but Tom knows that if he allows that to happen he would be putting her in danger. Because Tom has reluctantly joined a group of ‘albas’ – albatrosses, people with the same long-life gene as Tom – determined to protect their secret from big-tech or anyone who would want to analyse their genes for the secret of near eternal life. This group takes a unequivocal approach to secrecy – anyone who finds out about the albas is murdered.

The central concept of this novel is original and interesting. But the novel never really grabbed me. The main character, Tom, doesn’t realise what an amazing gift he has, and to be honest spends a lot of time complaining. His focus is relentlessly on how difficult long-life is amongst normal people, rather than “Wow, I met Shakespeare!”. The resolution of the plot in which he has to choose between enforcing the secrecy code of the albas or embracing the possibility of love is sentimental and unconvincing.

Sorry – I hate reviewing books that I feel underwhelmed by. I’d rather review a book I full-on hate rather than something that is not that bad. But this was just OK. The author can clearly write, and come up with great ideas, so I genuinely hope he finds the right combination one day.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, by J K Rowlng, 1997

I normally flag these posts as book reviews, but this won’t really be a review as such – every word Rowling wrote has been analysed in such microscopic detail that any attempts at a summary would be redundant. But ‘I read it so I write about it’ is the rule here, so here are a few things I noticed on this reading of Philospoher’s:

Compression. At around 220 pages the Philosopher’s Stone is a masterpiece of compression. After a relatively leisurely start the last few chapters fly past. Let’s look at what Rowling squeezes in to the novel’s final three chapters:

Having been caught smuggling Norbert out of Hogwarts, the trio are taken to Professor McGonagall’s office where she deducts 150 points from Gryffindor. Harry becomes a pariah and considers resigning from the Quidditch team. Harry, Hermione, Neville and Malfoy report to Hagrid for their detention in the Forbidden Forest. While in the forest Harry sees a cloaked figure drinking unicorn blood, then is rescued by the centaurs, who reveal who is behind the mysterious goings on at the castle. After the year-end examinations, Harry learns Hagrid has revealed the secret of getting past Fluffy. Dumbledore has been lured away from the castle and Professor McGonagall refuses to take them seriously, so the trio set out to stop ‘Snape’ from taking the stone themselves, immobilising Neville on the way. They get past Fluffy, Devil’s Snare, the room of flying keys, and the giant wizards’ chess game, losing Ron at that point. Hermione works out the potions puzzle and then goes back to help Ron while Harry pushes on to find Quirrell looking into the Mirror of Erised. There are a few pages left for Harry to defeat You-Know-Who, rescue the stone, recover in hospital with the benefit of a visit from Dumbledore, attend the end of term feast, win the House cup, and catch the train back to Kings Cross.

This is breathless, extraordinarily compressed stuff – in the film version almost a third of the 160 minutes running time is occupied with these three final chapters, beginning with the Forbidden Forest detention. There’s not a word wasted. The speed with which events flash past make the book hard to put down – where would one pause? – and don’t allow the reader time to consider the extraordinary recklessness with which the trio proceed – for example what were they planning to do when they caught up with ‘Snape’? The later books in the series unfortunately lose this economy, and while the world-building is mainly fascinating and well done, they become more self-indulgent and much slower.

Frivolity. For a story which starts with the attempted murder of a baby and the actual murder of his parents, and which ends with the death of a teacher, this is a surprisingly light-hearted book. The sense of peril is limited – the bad guys are easily foiled, and the trio deals with them without help from friends, teachers or any adults. This sense of comfort – we know things are going to end with the good guys winning – is emphasised by a strong sense of playfulness running throughout the book. Dumbledore consistently messes about, whether in his opening comments to the school – “Before we begin our banquet, I would like to say a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak! Thank you.” – or in his comments about his scar being in the shape of a map of the London Underground (I wonder how they translated that joke in foreign language editions?) Even at the end, when announcing the imminent death of Nicholas Flamel and his wife, he still has time to joke around with Bertie Botts every-flavour beans.

Age-appropriate content. Possibly Rowling’s cleverest idea in terms of the structure of the series is the way the books age with the reader. School stories usually have two ways of handling this issue. One choice – the Simpsons model as I think of it – is for the characters never to age. That way the Secret Seven can enjoy perpetual summer holidays staying with relatives in a variety of unremarkable locations each of which have hidden secrets. The alternative approach, for the characters to proceed through the school years in each episode of the series, can be problematic. The number of stories the author can write using these characters is fixed to the seven secondary school years (none of these stories are ever set anywhere other than in secondary schools). Second, as the children age hormones kick in, more adult themes are introduced, and the author runs the risk of losing younger readers.

Rowling’s chose the latter approach – her characters start school aged eleven, and each story spans one school year. But she was able to write sufficiently quickly – seven books in eleven years (1997-2007) – that the pre-teen readers she captured with this first book aged with her characters, cementing their identification with Harry, Ron, or Hermione. Talk of ‘growing up’ is common among Potter fans (and even her critics), and going through that collective experience, together with all the ceremony that became associated with the later books, made Harry Potter an important part of many people’s adolescence.

Nostalgia. I may have written about this elsewhere in this blog, but I once spoke to a group of primary school children about my experience of going to school in the UK in the sixties and seventies. They all had just the one question – ‘Were the teachers really allowed to hit you?!!’ Rowling is a near contemporary (she was born in 1965) and attended school in Gloucestershire, so would have had a very similar educational experience – and in particular one in which teachers, and adults more generally, were allowed to hit children. (Bear in mind corporal punishment was made illegal in schools in the UK in the1980’s.) Harry’s experience of being hit by his teachers (including the excruciating scenes with Professor Umbridge) are really a reflection of Rowling’s own experience, and something that would alien to children of the late nineties or later. Which point underlies the profoundly nostalgic flavour of the books – they are in the tradition of the boarding school stories of Enid Blyton, Anthony Buckeridge, Angela Brazil and Frank Richards (to name a few). The Potter books are suffused with the atmosphere, themes, values and language of these earlier stories – Malory Towers, Secret Seven, Famous Five, Jennings and Billy Bunter – which I am sure Rowling would have grown up with, but would have been largely unfamiliar to her younger readers. All the cultural references throughout the stories, from lemon drops to the excitement of travelling by steam train, are rooted in Rowling’s childhood.

This is surely part of the incredibly successful formula of Harry Potter – the boarding school story has deeply, rigidly established patterns and structures (crushes, pranks, midnight feasts, inter-house rivalry, letters home, the crusty old janitor, and so on) which will have been well known to adult readers, but felt quaintly historic to most of her millennial audience.

So those were my impressions of this reread of Philosopher’s Stone. It’s aged well, and while you can never recapture the impact of the first read, with all the well-timed surprises and reveals, there are sufficient Easter eggs and signs of how cleverly plotted the whole series was (for example I had forgotten that Hagrid borrows the flying motor-bike he delivers Harry to Privet Drive on from Sirius) to justify one more return to Hogwarts.

Making Money (Discworld 36) by Sir Terry Pratchett, 2007

Making Money is the sequel to the transcendent Going Postal. It is the story of the further adventures of Moist von Lipwig as he takes on his next challenge – reforming the Ankh-Morpork banking system. For a choice of topic Pratchett couldn’t have been more prescient, coming as it did just a few months before the international banking crisis which precipitated a decade of economic misery.

Anyone who has read this blog before will know that I rate Pratchett as one of our finest writers, so it pains me to concede that Making Money doesn’t quite meet his usual high standards. Just to be completely clear I don’t think for one second this had anything to do with his diagnosis in the same year – his illness was a form of dementia that left him lucid to the end – this article he wrote about his condition explains it far better than I could. Perhaps it is more a case that Going Postal set such a high watermark that any attempt at a sequel would always struggle to compare.

Banks in Ankh-Morpork are failing, and who better to give them a shot in the arm than an admitted thief and smooth-talking showman? “The city bleeds, Mr Lipwig,” says Vetinari, “and you are the clot.” (It has taken me a very long to realise this, but there is a strong case for Vetinari being Pratchett’s greatest creation.) Lipwig is bored running the Post Office, which no longer needs his buccaneering approach to management. So he takes over the running of the city bank and mint. As you would expect there is a cast of comic characters involved. The bank’s chairman is a fussy little dog, the chief clerk, a mathematical savant, obviously harbours a dark secret, which sadly disappoints when it is finally revealed, and a sinister opponent has ambitions to replace Vetenari. In the basement of the bank (is it a bank, or a mint, or both – I was never really clear, so the powerful sense of place which dominates Going Postal, that extraordinarily evoked abandoned Post Office, stuffed to the rafters with undelivered post, is not recaptured) someone has built the Glooper, a model of the city’s economy that develops a life of its own.

There’s not enough of chain-smoking Adora Belle Dearheart in this novel. She is away finding more buried golems, who eventually appear in large numbers only to walk back off stage almost immediately, consenting to be buried in a most improbable fashion. Would Adora, who has dedicated her life to liberating golems, really be happy with this resolution of the ‘what to do with the golden golems conundrum?

Money is an elusive concept, so I am aware of the irony when I say that Pratchett never quite pins it down. It’s not intrinsically good or bad, so the novel is deprived of a cause (compared to say, its predecessor in which privatisation and modernisation are firmly skewered). Pratchett asks the right questions – of course – such as why we trust banks or what the “tacit understanding that we will honour our promise to exchange a dollar for a dollar’s worth of gold provided we are not, in point of fact, asked to” actually means, but never really gets to grips with the topic, skirting around it before moving on to other more tangible, plot-related issues.

My other disappointment with this novel, however slight, centres on Pratchett’s prose. usually his ability to craft a sentence is unparalleled, but here many of the lines fall flat.

“I wouldn’t trust you with a bucket of water if my knickers were on fire!”

“The only really sane person in there is Igor, and possibly the turnip. And I’m not sure about the turnip.”

“I’m an Igor, thur. We don’t athk quethtionth.”
“Really? Why not?”
“I don’t know, thur. I didn’t athk.”

That’s not always the case of course – I loved this image:

“It seemed to Igor that trouble hit Mr. Lipwig like a big wave hitting a flotilla of ducks. Afterward, there was no wave but there was still a lot of duck.”

Making Money is a fun story featuring many of the Discworld characters that by this stage in the series need to do little more than walk on, say their lines, and move on. Moist and Adora really deserved more than a light retread of Going Postal, but that’s essentially what they got.