Posted 01 November 2003 - 03:53 AM
Hey all,
I've read THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX and I agree with Jen's premature comments and everything she quoted from the Amazon review. The fact is, HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE really packed a lot in: there was a mystery; there were many characters to introduce; there was an ancient conflict of good versus evil; there were genuine extremes of suspense and pathos sure to turn pages and draw the occasional tear; and naturally there was an entire world not entirely unlike our own but nevertheless unfamiliar enough to need all manner of description. This Rowling pulled off in a few hundred pages.
HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHEONIX, at more than twice the length of the original, is completely lacking in story. It's nothing but a series of false starts and innuendoes; every time Rowling bothers to offer up a mystery, she resolves it a few pages later, not always tidily but every time with a minimum of interest or surprise. The one thing she ever does hold back from us is the meaning of Harry's dreams, and when the meaning is revealed it's completely without ceremony or drama. Suddenly Harry is off and running, there's a big fight, and someone dies and we're supposed to care. That this character only dies because Harry forgot to open a mysterious package given to him at the beginning of the novel (frankly, this is so impossible to accept I just may not read the next novel) is more a testament to Rowling's "I'm a millionaire now" sloppiness than anything else.
The last two HARRY POTTER novels have been weakly edited, with narrative difficulties that would have troubled me as a child. The thing is, I didn't mind so much with THE GOBLET OF FIRE, since Rowling saw fit to develop Harry as a character as well, enticing us with his earliest forays into adolescent romance. She even chose to develop Ron and Hermione, and the kids seemed pretty interesting all of a sudden, and no longer simple plot vectors and stereotypes. And all of this stuff was such fun that I didn't mind her somewhat ridiculous plotting. In ORDER OF THE PHEONIX, Rowling has inexplicably managed to spend 700 pages on developing these characters, and yet simultaneously has managed to move them forward in no chartable way. Harry's entire school year is spent failing to develop a romance with one fellow student, and every upset he suffers is based on the two failing to communicate their feelings. I felt as though I was reading the screenplay to a Richard Linklater film, except that of course, for all its sterility, such a thing would have oozed wit and charm and occasionally surprising insight.
While plowin through the novel, I couldn't help but think of the film series. THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS is loads of fun, and it came in just under three hours because the filmmakers didn't know what to cut. PRISONER OF AZKABAN will have similar troubles, while GOBLET OF FIRE may be completely unfilmable as a single entity. ORDER OF THE PHONIX, however, is the STAR TREK 3 of the HARRY POTTER series. Whoever makes that one could easily trim it down to 88 minutes and noone would even notice the missing scenes.
Mike M.
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).
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Posted 30 October 2003 - 08:05 PM
