HPCOS: The Tally
Another book finished, another tally up of points. Drum roll please!
Amount of supposed red flags Ginny rose: 5
Times Ron was seriously injured: 2
Anti-intellectual score: 8
Harry’s superb gymnastic score: 3
Times our Protagonist should have died: 18
Times good guys broke rules/law: 66
Amount of fruit baskets Freud send Rowling: 28
Olympic score in Leaps of Logic: 135
Times secret society/plot should have been uncovered: 11
Spell Count: Arthur:1, Draco:3, Harry:4, Hermione:2, Minerva:2, Ron’s wand:2, Severus:3, Tom:1.
Score for the series so far:
Times Ron was seriously injured: 4
Anti-intellectual score: 13
Harry’s superb gymnastic score: 6
Protagonist’s deaths: 48
Crime sprees: 123
Perverted comments score: 38
Jumping to conclusion score: 180
Uncovered score: 24
Spell Count scores: Albus:2, Arthur:1 Draco:4, Hagrid:1, Harry:4, Hermione:9, Minerva: 3, Neville: 1, Quirrellmort:2, Ron:1, Ron’s wand:2, Severus:3, Tom:1
For more visually inclined readers here is a graph:
Now that we have scores out of the way, let’s ramble about the book itself.
I already talked a lot about our protagonist, his friends and themes in the series in the previous tally post, but I wanted to revisit Pacing part before we move onto other things I wanted to discuss.
Pacing in this book was both better and worse compared to PS. Jo finally learned how to use cliff-hangers, but there were many places where I was bored due to (supposedly) necessary filler. Quite often it felt like there is not enough meat to the plot to sustain it for a whole school year.
IMHO if we took the suggestion I had during PS commentary (shortening PS plot to one term) and applied it to both PS and CoS we would end up with two much better books
The Adversary
In literature heroes are measured by their adversaries. They are supposed to cross heroes’ path due to pursuing the same thing and create obstacles for the heroes.
In GOOD literature Hero beats enemy via their own merit. Adversary is too powerful? Well, the hero better find a way to outsmart them!
Back when I was reading this series for the first time I expected Harry to slowly over span of the series grow as character and eventually beat Voldemort on his own with some smart solution. Perhaps using muggle technology since knowledge of modern technology is his main advantage over purebloods. At worst case he would use Power Of Friendship.
What we’ve got instead? Bunch of McGuffins and Deus Ex Machinas.
And this book is kind of foreshadowing of DH.
So if Harry cannot beat Voldemort without authorial intervention and he is constantly pushed by his surrounding to cross path with his enemy... Who is Harry’s adversary?
The most obvious answer would be Draco, right? Well, no. Most of the time Draco is more of annoyance than adversary.
Then it has to be Snape, right? I think we are getting closer, but that is not quite the right answer.
You see, I asked the wrong question. It’s not ‘who’, but ‘what’ is the adversary. Because Harry’s adversary isn’t material being. It’s system or rather “authority figures”. Be it adults, teachers, politicians, reporters, prefects... If it has some kind of power over our protagonist, he will fight it. The only exception to this is Dumbledore, and I suspect that is because Albus is Jo’s stand in for God.
The Mystery
A lot of people praise JKR for mystery component of this book and if I had to be honest, it is probably the best part of this book. That being said the amount of time that passes during plot of this book works against the mystery element. To make matters even worse adults are even more incompetent here than in majority of mystery books for kids.
But let’s be fair towards this book. Let’s compare it to another story where kids with special powers spend whole school year to solve supernatural crime. What is that story? Well it’s Persona 4. Sure it’s not a book, but the story has similar pacing and story beats to CoS.
So a short summary for everyone who didn’t play Persona 4:
Our protagonist arrives to small town to live next year with his detective uncle and preteen cousin. Within first week since his arrival there are two bizarre murders; bodies are found hanging on TV antennas. Cause of death? Unknown.
The second victim is a girl on whom main character’s classmate has a crush. This kickstarts an investigation by protagonist and other teenagers whom he befriends during the game.
Quickly kids realise that a) there is something supernatural going on and b) due to certain plot point they can predict who will be the next victim and attempt to save them. Slowly over school year kids figure out whys and hows of the kidnappings.
As you can imagine I’m going to say that P4 handled things much better than CoS, but let’s take a closer look on why it did much better:
-Story of P4 takes place in small town with underfunded police in world very similar to our own; in other words supernatural activity isn’t a norm. Even if kids decided to talk with main character’s uncle about what they know, he wouldn’t believe them.
-On the other hand we have Hogwarts ‘ staff, magical government AND magical police; a whole bunch of grown up adults who are trained for this kind of situations. The only way to make them look less like a bunch of bumbling idiots is to completely isolate Hogwarts from outside world and neutralise the staff. In fact the whole situation raises a lot of questions about Albus’ motives and competence.
-As you can imagine, in P4 there is a lot of lulls in investigation. The thing is P4 fills those lulls with character development. Granted a lot of this depends on player’s decisions, but all of this filler doesn’t feel pointless like in CoS.
Conclusion
The way I see it, Jo read one of Agatha Christie’s books and was inspired to write a mystery/crime book. Sadly she didn’t think things through and we ended up with underwhelming entry in the series. Yeah it’s better than DH or HBP, but it’s not a good murder mystery. :(
Edit:18.08.19 didn't notice that part of my post wasn't copy-pasted properly from the text file.