Deathly Hallows uberwank: Chapter 31, The Battle of Hogwarts
LANDO CALRISSIAN: [Seeing the Death Star is operational] Home One, this is Gold Leader.
ADMIRAL ACKBAR: We saw it. All craft, prepare to retreat.
LANDO CALRISSIAN: We won't get another chance at this, Admiral.
ADMIRAL ACKBAR: We have no choice, General Calrissian! Our cruisers can't repel firepower of that magnitude!
LANDO CALRISSIAN: Han will have that shield down. We've got to give him more time!
- Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
As the chapter begins, the camera is panning around McGonagall, who is delivering an empassioned... well, set of instructions. It goes: the prefects and the support staff (I can't believe I just said "support staff" - you'd never guess I work in a college) will oversee students to the evacuation point, which I guess means the room of requirement. Later, that Aberforth guy will show up all annoyed that there have been hundreds of students coming through his pub. So, I guess the students are being evacuated via Hogsmeade. Only... how are they getting out of Hogsmeade itself? Most of them are underage and therefore unable to disapparate, and there's that screaming curse thing that goes off if you are out in the streets after curfew. Is there a bus being laid on or something? Or will the survivors of the battle head down to the village tomorrow lunchtime to find the bodies of hundreds of children littering the streets?
McGonagall continues to speak, first answering Ernie "The Dawg" Macmillan's question concerning whether those old enough can stay and fight (they can), then explaining that everyone just needs to go and there is no time to get their stuff, and finally making a formal announcement that Snape has gone ("he has, to use the common phrase, GTFOed"). Everyone who isn't a Slytherin cheers at this announcement, while all the Slytherins sit there looking ugly and mean, with their crooked teeth and mad, staring eyes. Thing is, what about the Slytherin first-years? They've only ever known Slughorn as their head of house - as far as they are concerned, Snape is the headteacher. They only have the word of the older students that Snape is a good thing. Well, I suppose those of them with death eater parents (or older siblings) might be biased towards him, but surely it's not a given that all Slytherins = death eaters? Because if that were the case, you could just abolish Slytherin house, or automatically expel all Slytherin students as soon as they were sorted. Which would be unethical, but would make sense.
McGonagall is about to move on to the next agenda item (health and safety) when she is interrupted by Voldemort on some kind of PA system. He sings "Baby one more time" announces that if they hand Harry over, the rest of them will go free and unharmed. He even makes a thinly-veiled attempt to flirt with McGonagall, saying that he has "great respect" for the Hogwarts staff, except for Hagrid. OK, he doesn't actually say that about Hagrid, but he doesn't need to. We're all thinking it. Anyway, he's wasting his time with McGonagall, who as any fule kno has been making sweet love to Madam Hooch for many years. Um. Voldemort then switches off the charm, gives the assembled troops until midnight to give him Harry, and signs off. His broadcast is way better than that Potterwatch shit we had to endure back in chapter 22.
In the light of the ultimatum concerning Harry, some girl called Pansy Parkinson (who, if I recall correctly, is Draco Malfoy's fag-hag) points at Harry and makes screechy noises about how there he is, let's just hand him over and be done with it. The Houses That Are Not Slytherin all stand up and face Slytherin off, pulling out their wands in a menacing way and being generally united against Slytherin and their cowardice and standing up on the side of good and against evil and a bunch of shit like that.
It is so cheesy and Hollywoodesque I almost vomit.
The reaction from the school is to make the Slytherins get out first. Not a single one stays, because that could potentially be interesting and/or complex. (You know, considering that Malfoy and his heavies do stay, couldn't we have seen them wait behind? We would have been all excited and surprised when they stayed, and, OK, so that would have been pissed all over when they turn out to be evil in a couple of pages' time, but at least it would have provided H/D writers with another moment of subtext to play with. Heh.)
Once the evacuation is dealt with (which includes various annoying plucky young students like that twat Colin Creevey - hi, Colin! - trying to stay and fight), the next phase of the plan is outlined. The heads of houses are going to head up to the tops of the towers so they can act as snipers, while some of the other fighters will wait down here, fighting at closer range on the ground. (Why they don't all stay up high, pouring boiling oil and so on over the attacking death eaters, which would surely be sensible, is never really explored.) On top of this, Fred and George will be, for once, doing something that is actually useful, guarding the secret passageways into the school. So I guess the however-many years they spent hiding in those passageways, syringes filled with highly infectious bacteria in hand, waiting to spring a hilarious disease on some unsuspecting child were all for the good. The greater good. Harry happily watches all this go down until McGonagall reminds him that all this has kicked off because he's meant to be looking for that bloody mother fucking horcrux and shouldn't he actually be doing that?
He then wanders about for a couple of pages not having a clue what to do and wishing he knew where Ron and Hermione were. Look, Harry, they are having sex right now. Once all this is over and they get, like, married or something, you will need to give them alone time. You're in the middle of a massive battle, buck up and stop wangsting for once.
For some reason, the wangsting leads Harry to realise that he must speak with the Grey Lady, who is the ghost of Ravenclaw Tower. He finds her and they shoot the breeze for a while and it turns out her mother was Ravenclaw, the Ravenclaw, and her boyfriend was the Bloody Baron, and also he stabbed her. She's like a really third-rate Mary Sue! Anyway, she took the diadem and put it in a tree in Albania, for some reason, and then centuries later, I guess, Tom Riddle flirted with her enough for her to tell him where it was and he went and found it. It wasn't, you know, rusty or damaged or anything. Nor had anyone nicked it. I wonder if, by "tree in Albania", she means something like "bank in Switzerland".
So, yeah, Voldemort got the tiara and wore it with a feather boa and eyeliner and tight jeans. Sorry - no - he turned it into a horcrux. And then he hid it somewhere that nobody else could ever find it, which, of course, we soon discover is the room of plot requirement. I love how Voldemort's arrogance so often manifests itself as plain, all-out stupidity. He thought that nobody else could ever find the room of requirement, even though it is full of centuries' worth of accumulated crap?
And here's a thing - if nobody had found the diadem in all those hundreds of years of it being hidden in an Albanian tree, why didn't he put it back there once he'd made it into a horcrux? It's clearly a good place to hide things.
Anyway, so Harry wanders off again, still clueless. Next to show up and piss me off is Hagrid, who arrives in typically stupid style by rolling in through a window with a resounding crash. He is accompanied by that tedious fucktard, Grawp (who was responsible for Hagrid's dramatic entrance; he threw him).
I hate Grawp so much. He's like a pound shop rip-off of Hagrid; a cheaper, less interesting and more pointless version that nobody is fooled by - and I already disliked Hagrid a fair bit. (I didn't always hate Hagrid, for what it's worth. Back in the first book, I thought he came across as perhaps a little clumsy and rough around the edges, but ultimately good-natured, well-meaning and hardworking, with more than enough school-of-life experience to make up for what he lacked in book smarts. Shame he got so badly Flanderized later on.)
But Grawp... he's just another pointless subplot we could have done without, in my view. I fail to see the point of him at all; the only purpose he serves that I can remember is to chase off the centaurs in book... five? And that could easily have been achieved another way. The only thing Grawp really does is to make Hagrid even less likeable (why did Hagrid bother bringing him back from the mountains, anyway?). Even his name aggravates me; it is close enough to unpronounceable and I have to concentrate really hard to type it correctly, because it isn't a word. OK, so "Hagrid" isn't really a word either but at least it makes sense... phonetically, I suppose. "Grawp" might as well be called "Jyhfnywgmmn" for all that the word is in any way intuitive to read or spell.
Grawp survives the battle, by the way. How he manages this, when he is nothing more than an enormous, slow-moving target, is beyond me - especially given that, for example, Tonks is killed (I mean, I don't like her much either but she's meant to be a ministry-trained auror).
Stupid Grawp.
Hagrid now joins Harry in running about the place pointlessly, while outside, bright flashes of light indicate the silent disco flashmob battle has started. This acts as a sort of mental hotwire to Harry, who suddenly realises that the diadem is in the room of requirement, the version of it that is full of broken crap, but we've done this bit. He legs it in the appropriate direction, on the way passing Neville and Professor Sprout, who are about to kick off a mandrake attack; Sir Cadogan, who I wish would fuck off; Fred and his troops, who I want to say are wiring themselves up with explosives but I fear this would cross a line, so let's pretend I'm not saying this; and finally Aberforth, who complains that the evacuated kids are thundering through his pub, drinking the beer and throwing parties they advertised on Myspace or something. Right after this, the whereabouts of Ron and Hermione are revealed when they, well, show up. Where have they been? Why, the chamber of secrets, of course!
AAARRGRAAGAAGRGRGHHHHHH. I think I'll split the multitude of issues I have with this into two broad points:
1. We hear that they got in when Ron managed to imitate Harry speaking Parseltongue well enough to open the entrance. But the way that Parseltongue has been described and set up in previous books, it seems like not so much a language that can be learned by anyone as an innate ability which very few people have. Harry didn't go to night classes to learn Parseltongue; he gained the ability from Voldemort, and the first time he used it (the conversation with the snake in book 1, I guess) he didn't even seem to know it existed, let alone that he was doing it. In other words, it isn't like being in a bakery in France with very limited knowledge of French, but being able to go, "Uh, pardon, s'il vous plait, um, un baguette, pardon, merci, je suis English, cheers," with a lot of self-deprecating grinning and waving of hands and pointing at the bread and smiling some more, and the shopkeeper understands you well enough to give you the baguette and take a couple of euros off you. It seems more like giving the correct password online. If it's even a little bit wrong, no dice. Or maybe a better comparison is something like Mandarin Chinese, where the tone of what you say can drastically change the meaning, but unless you're a native speaker or very fluent by other means, the difference between tones can be so subtle it's very difficult to make yourself understood.
I just don't buy that Ron could imitate it well enough to make the entrance open, when he's heard Harry say it twice, only once in the last five years, and on that occasion Ron was under extreme stress and, crucially, didn't know he would be tested on Parseltongue later.
2. A repeat visit to the chamber of secrets could have been a really exciting sequence (OK, not crazy-exciting given that they'd have been paying a visit to an empty room, but - well, the visit to the Ministry, the parts where that works work really well. Same thing could have worked here - avoiding the Carrows, avoiding Snape, utilising the cloak and the map, etc). We spent chapters and chapters hanging around camping, and they were dull, so I don't believe for a second that this was left out for lack of time. It seems bizarre that we spend so long with absolutely nothing happening, and then don't get to see this potentially very exciting sequence. Why couldn't Harry, Ron and Hermione come to Hogwarts earlier, say? Neville and others seem to have been hiding out in the room of requirement for a while, so they could have done exactly the same, and used Hogwarts as their base camp instead of that tent. Moreover, this might have allowed for significantly more Neville in the book, more Ginny (if she'd stayed) and therefore better development of Harry and Ginny's romantic relationship. I don't get it.
Anyway, they move on. Oh, also, Ron and Hermione went to the chamber of secrets to get some basilisk fangs to destroy horcruxes with or something, I think that bit is important. Back at the room, our intrepid trio are delighted to discover Ginny, Tonks (hi, Tonks!), and Neville's gran waiting for them. Now, there is possibly some commentary to be had here about the maiden/mother/crone idea that shows up in some versions of witch lore, except that here we have the Fangirl, the N00bie and the Badass, so it doesn't really work. They all get out of the room so that it can turn into the room with all the stuff in it; Gran goes off to find Neville and add her power to his, Tonks goes off to find Remus and, I don't know, guilt-trip him into something, and Ginny runs after Tonks, presumably to get some work experience in the area of being a giant Sue. By the way, Tonks says "Have you seen Remus" twice in the space of two pages, which I would excuse if she didn't already come across as kind of clingy.
This dealt with, Ron says something about house-elves and how they should be evacuated too. Hermione, naturally, treats this as the most romantic and/or erotic thing she's ever heard and starts dry-humping Ron right there. I would say it reminds me of this bit in Return of the Jedi, during the battle of Endor...
Except that it really doesn't. Plus in the bit from Star Wars, there's a fucking funny bit where Harrison Ford blatantly grabs Carrie Fisher's boob and you can just see her starting to crease up before it cuts away, and, well, that's the sort of place where the Harry Potter books don't dare to go.
Here is that bit, for reference.
Yeesh, this chapter is long. Uh, yeah, so Ron and Hermione get it on, and then Harry bollocks them because they should be fighting and Ron makes the (fair) point that if you can't do it when you're young, etc. Right after this, they re-enter the room of requirement, which is now the Furniture Warehouse. They start looking for the diadem, but jut as Harry sees it and goes to grab it, Draco Malfoy shows up with his henchmen, Rocksteady and Bebop, in tow, mainly because this is a Saturday morning cartoon (probably this one, specifically) and there must always be an annoying antagonist as well as an actually evil one.
The extreme hoyay starts here, which is quite nice. Draco remarks that that's Harry's dick in his ass Harry is holding Draco's wand, and they flirt for a while. An argument breaks out between the bad guys, again because this is a Saturday morning cartoon, but inevitably the two factions begin to duel. They throw pisspoor and/or deadly spells at each other until Crabbe (hi, Crabbe!) goes totally batshit and takes his traveller's cheques to a competing resort sets fire to everything. As they run away from the flames, JK Rowling lays it on thick that Harry would never kill anyone and never wanted anyone to die and stuff like that. In case you failed to get the point in theory, Harry spots Malfoy and Goyle, and goes back to rescue them, aided by his homies.
While Ron and Hermione drag the unconscious Goyle away, Harry grabs Malfoy and manages to get him onto his broom (oh, yeah, I guess at some point they went from being on foot to being on brooms, but I seem to have missed when that happened). Malfoy's hands find their way around Harry's waist. Together, the boys swerve to avoid a jet of flame and Malfoy almost falls off the broom, and Harry manages to catch him and pulls him closer, sitting halfway-sideways, holding on and steering with one hand while the other arm is awkwardly around Malfoy's waist and balled up in Malfoy's robes. Another swerve and they are clinging closer still, their ankles twisted around each other's feet. And in his ear, Harry hears, "Enjoying yourself, Potter?" murmured close and breathy, and he feels a surge of what seems to be anger only turned another way around, and as he twists his head to utter some kind of retort their lips meet. In that split second Harry has no idea what to think, but that's more because people are dying and they need to destroy the horcrux and he doesn't know where Ron and Hermione are and... why the hell not, he thinks, and leans in enough to deepen the kiss. Somewhere under all the heat and confusion and rage and desperate worry and adrenaline and the fact that he hasn't slept since they left Shell Cottage, this makes perfect, imperfect sense in a way that nothing else does. They break apart almost immediately, share a glance that goes on for a milisecond and touches each of them profoundly, and steer the broom out of the door, collapsing on the floor outside the room where Ron and Hermione wait.
Needless to say, none of that bit actually happens, but they do cling awfully close ("Malfoy was screaming and holding Harry so tightly it hurt", which to my mind sounds weird without the word "cock" anywhere near it, but anyway). Outside the room, which has burned down, we learn that Crabbe died back there.
Bothans don't seem to apply, but otherwise I got nothin'. Will this do?
Harry gets a quick look at the diadem before it falls apart in his hands. It has the Ravenclaw motto written on it: "Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure". I think it was nice of Rowena Ravenclaw to inscribe her famous diadem in contemporary modern English, as opposed to the middle English she presumably spoke (if, indeed, Hogwarts was founded in the middle ages). Seriously, shouldn't the diadem say something like "Seynd bacoun, and somtyme an ey or tweye"? Well, maybe not that - apparently that means "Grilled bacon and sometimes an egg or two", I found it in an online translation of the Canterbury Tales - but you see what I'm getting at.
Yeah, I know, I know, it's magic. Or something.
Uh... OK, so then Hermione explains, for the benefit of the reader, that Crabbe must have cast a spell called Fiendfyre, which can destroy horcruxes. She goes on about how it's so dangerous and stuff that she would never have used it, which I guess is there to explain why she never mentioned this spell that can destroy horcruxes when they were camping in the woods getting totally hung up on the sword of fucking Gryffindor. She is just starting to point out that there is only the snake left to destroy now when Percy and Fred arrive on the scene. They are fighting some bad dudes, and doing fine until the wall of the castle is blasted away and everyone is injured, except Fred who dies. Against my best judgement I'm sad about Fred dying - not because I like him, but because for various reasons killing one of the twins is particularly harsh.
(It's odd, though - back in the day, right before the release of Goblet of Fire, I was chatting with the head of the children's book section in the bookshop where I had a Saturday job. We'd both read or seen an interview with JKR where she announced that a character would die, and we were discussing who it could be. Neither of us got it right - hardly surprising, as Cedric isn't a major character prior to GoF - but my guesses were either Dumbledore or a Weasley twin, since Dumbledore "was Yoda" and killing a Weasley twin would be really harsh and show how random deaths could be in war. I like that I was right, just several books too early. I also find it vaguely amusing that prior to this book, loads of fans had those icons that said "rocks fall, everyone dies" and they were right too.)
Anyway, tricky one to call, but considering that there is a battle going on I'm going to be generous and award Fred a Porkins death.
This still doesn't mean I like Fred, though.
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ADMIRAL ACKBAR: We saw it. All craft, prepare to retreat.
LANDO CALRISSIAN: We won't get another chance at this, Admiral.
ADMIRAL ACKBAR: We have no choice, General Calrissian! Our cruisers can't repel firepower of that magnitude!
LANDO CALRISSIAN: Han will have that shield down. We've got to give him more time!
- Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
As the chapter begins, the camera is panning around McGonagall, who is delivering an empassioned... well, set of instructions. It goes: the prefects and the support staff (I can't believe I just said "support staff" - you'd never guess I work in a college) will oversee students to the evacuation point, which I guess means the room of requirement. Later, that Aberforth guy will show up all annoyed that there have been hundreds of students coming through his pub. So, I guess the students are being evacuated via Hogsmeade. Only... how are they getting out of Hogsmeade itself? Most of them are underage and therefore unable to disapparate, and there's that screaming curse thing that goes off if you are out in the streets after curfew. Is there a bus being laid on or something? Or will the survivors of the battle head down to the village tomorrow lunchtime to find the bodies of hundreds of children littering the streets?
McGonagall continues to speak, first answering Ernie "The Dawg" Macmillan's question concerning whether those old enough can stay and fight (they can), then explaining that everyone just needs to go and there is no time to get their stuff, and finally making a formal announcement that Snape has gone ("he has, to use the common phrase, GTFOed"). Everyone who isn't a Slytherin cheers at this announcement, while all the Slytherins sit there looking ugly and mean, with their crooked teeth and mad, staring eyes. Thing is, what about the Slytherin first-years? They've only ever known Slughorn as their head of house - as far as they are concerned, Snape is the headteacher. They only have the word of the older students that Snape is a good thing. Well, I suppose those of them with death eater parents (or older siblings) might be biased towards him, but surely it's not a given that all Slytherins = death eaters? Because if that were the case, you could just abolish Slytherin house, or automatically expel all Slytherin students as soon as they were sorted. Which would be unethical, but would make sense.
McGonagall is about to move on to the next agenda item (health and safety) when she is interrupted by Voldemort on some kind of PA system. He sings "Baby one more time" announces that if they hand Harry over, the rest of them will go free and unharmed. He even makes a thinly-veiled attempt to flirt with McGonagall, saying that he has "great respect" for the Hogwarts staff, except for Hagrid. OK, he doesn't actually say that about Hagrid, but he doesn't need to. We're all thinking it. Anyway, he's wasting his time with McGonagall, who as any fule kno has been making sweet love to Madam Hooch for many years. Um. Voldemort then switches off the charm, gives the assembled troops until midnight to give him Harry, and signs off. His broadcast is way better than that Potterwatch shit we had to endure back in chapter 22.
In the light of the ultimatum concerning Harry, some girl called Pansy Parkinson (who, if I recall correctly, is Draco Malfoy's fag-hag) points at Harry and makes screechy noises about how there he is, let's just hand him over and be done with it. The Houses That Are Not Slytherin all stand up and face Slytherin off, pulling out their wands in a menacing way and being generally united against Slytherin and their cowardice and standing up on the side of good and against evil and a bunch of shit like that.
It is so cheesy and Hollywoodesque I almost vomit.
The reaction from the school is to make the Slytherins get out first. Not a single one stays, because that could potentially be interesting and/or complex. (You know, considering that Malfoy and his heavies do stay, couldn't we have seen them wait behind? We would have been all excited and surprised when they stayed, and, OK, so that would have been pissed all over when they turn out to be evil in a couple of pages' time, but at least it would have provided H/D writers with another moment of subtext to play with. Heh.)
Once the evacuation is dealt with (which includes various annoying plucky young students like that twat Colin Creevey - hi, Colin! - trying to stay and fight), the next phase of the plan is outlined. The heads of houses are going to head up to the tops of the towers so they can act as snipers, while some of the other fighters will wait down here, fighting at closer range on the ground. (Why they don't all stay up high, pouring boiling oil and so on over the attacking death eaters, which would surely be sensible, is never really explored.) On top of this, Fred and George will be, for once, doing something that is actually useful, guarding the secret passageways into the school. So I guess the however-many years they spent hiding in those passageways, syringes filled with highly infectious bacteria in hand, waiting to spring a hilarious disease on some unsuspecting child were all for the good. The greater good. Harry happily watches all this go down until McGonagall reminds him that all this has kicked off because he's meant to be looking for that bloody mother fucking horcrux and shouldn't he actually be doing that?
He then wanders about for a couple of pages not having a clue what to do and wishing he knew where Ron and Hermione were. Look, Harry, they are having sex right now. Once all this is over and they get, like, married or something, you will need to give them alone time. You're in the middle of a massive battle, buck up and stop wangsting for once.
For some reason, the wangsting leads Harry to realise that he must speak with the Grey Lady, who is the ghost of Ravenclaw Tower. He finds her and they shoot the breeze for a while and it turns out her mother was Ravenclaw, the Ravenclaw, and her boyfriend was the Bloody Baron, and also he stabbed her. She's like a really third-rate Mary Sue! Anyway, she took the diadem and put it in a tree in Albania, for some reason, and then centuries later, I guess, Tom Riddle flirted with her enough for her to tell him where it was and he went and found it. It wasn't, you know, rusty or damaged or anything. Nor had anyone nicked it. I wonder if, by "tree in Albania", she means something like "bank in Switzerland".
So, yeah, Voldemort got the tiara and wore it with a feather boa and eyeliner and tight jeans. Sorry - no - he turned it into a horcrux. And then he hid it somewhere that nobody else could ever find it, which, of course, we soon discover is the room of plot requirement. I love how Voldemort's arrogance so often manifests itself as plain, all-out stupidity. He thought that nobody else could ever find the room of requirement, even though it is full of centuries' worth of accumulated crap?
And here's a thing - if nobody had found the diadem in all those hundreds of years of it being hidden in an Albanian tree, why didn't he put it back there once he'd made it into a horcrux? It's clearly a good place to hide things.
Anyway, so Harry wanders off again, still clueless. Next to show up and piss me off is Hagrid, who arrives in typically stupid style by rolling in through a window with a resounding crash. He is accompanied by that tedious fucktard, Grawp (who was responsible for Hagrid's dramatic entrance; he threw him).
I hate Grawp so much. He's like a pound shop rip-off of Hagrid; a cheaper, less interesting and more pointless version that nobody is fooled by - and I already disliked Hagrid a fair bit. (I didn't always hate Hagrid, for what it's worth. Back in the first book, I thought he came across as perhaps a little clumsy and rough around the edges, but ultimately good-natured, well-meaning and hardworking, with more than enough school-of-life experience to make up for what he lacked in book smarts. Shame he got so badly Flanderized later on.)
But Grawp... he's just another pointless subplot we could have done without, in my view. I fail to see the point of him at all; the only purpose he serves that I can remember is to chase off the centaurs in book... five? And that could easily have been achieved another way. The only thing Grawp really does is to make Hagrid even less likeable (why did Hagrid bother bringing him back from the mountains, anyway?). Even his name aggravates me; it is close enough to unpronounceable and I have to concentrate really hard to type it correctly, because it isn't a word. OK, so "Hagrid" isn't really a word either but at least it makes sense... phonetically, I suppose. "Grawp" might as well be called "Jyhfnywgmmn" for all that the word is in any way intuitive to read or spell.
Grawp survives the battle, by the way. How he manages this, when he is nothing more than an enormous, slow-moving target, is beyond me - especially given that, for example, Tonks is killed (I mean, I don't like her much either but she's meant to be a ministry-trained auror).
Stupid Grawp.
Hagrid now joins Harry in running about the place pointlessly, while outside, bright flashes of light indicate the silent disco flashmob battle has started. This acts as a sort of mental hotwire to Harry, who suddenly realises that the diadem is in the room of requirement, the version of it that is full of broken crap, but we've done this bit. He legs it in the appropriate direction, on the way passing Neville and Professor Sprout, who are about to kick off a mandrake attack; Sir Cadogan, who I wish would fuck off; Fred and his troops, who I want to say are wiring themselves up with explosives but I fear this would cross a line, so let's pretend I'm not saying this; and finally Aberforth, who complains that the evacuated kids are thundering through his pub, drinking the beer and throwing parties they advertised on Myspace or something. Right after this, the whereabouts of Ron and Hermione are revealed when they, well, show up. Where have they been? Why, the chamber of secrets, of course!
AAARRGRAAGAAGRGRGHHHHHH. I think I'll split the multitude of issues I have with this into two broad points:
1. We hear that they got in when Ron managed to imitate Harry speaking Parseltongue well enough to open the entrance. But the way that Parseltongue has been described and set up in previous books, it seems like not so much a language that can be learned by anyone as an innate ability which very few people have. Harry didn't go to night classes to learn Parseltongue; he gained the ability from Voldemort, and the first time he used it (the conversation with the snake in book 1, I guess) he didn't even seem to know it existed, let alone that he was doing it. In other words, it isn't like being in a bakery in France with very limited knowledge of French, but being able to go, "Uh, pardon, s'il vous plait, um, un baguette, pardon, merci, je suis English, cheers," with a lot of self-deprecating grinning and waving of hands and pointing at the bread and smiling some more, and the shopkeeper understands you well enough to give you the baguette and take a couple of euros off you. It seems more like giving the correct password online. If it's even a little bit wrong, no dice. Or maybe a better comparison is something like Mandarin Chinese, where the tone of what you say can drastically change the meaning, but unless you're a native speaker or very fluent by other means, the difference between tones can be so subtle it's very difficult to make yourself understood.
I just don't buy that Ron could imitate it well enough to make the entrance open, when he's heard Harry say it twice, only once in the last five years, and on that occasion Ron was under extreme stress and, crucially, didn't know he would be tested on Parseltongue later.
2. A repeat visit to the chamber of secrets could have been a really exciting sequence (OK, not crazy-exciting given that they'd have been paying a visit to an empty room, but - well, the visit to the Ministry, the parts where that works work really well. Same thing could have worked here - avoiding the Carrows, avoiding Snape, utilising the cloak and the map, etc). We spent chapters and chapters hanging around camping, and they were dull, so I don't believe for a second that this was left out for lack of time. It seems bizarre that we spend so long with absolutely nothing happening, and then don't get to see this potentially very exciting sequence. Why couldn't Harry, Ron and Hermione come to Hogwarts earlier, say? Neville and others seem to have been hiding out in the room of requirement for a while, so they could have done exactly the same, and used Hogwarts as their base camp instead of that tent. Moreover, this might have allowed for significantly more Neville in the book, more Ginny (if she'd stayed) and therefore better development of Harry and Ginny's romantic relationship. I don't get it.
Anyway, they move on. Oh, also, Ron and Hermione went to the chamber of secrets to get some basilisk fangs to destroy horcruxes with or something, I think that bit is important. Back at the room, our intrepid trio are delighted to discover Ginny, Tonks (hi, Tonks!), and Neville's gran waiting for them. Now, there is possibly some commentary to be had here about the maiden/mother/crone idea that shows up in some versions of witch lore, except that here we have the Fangirl, the N00bie and the Badass, so it doesn't really work. They all get out of the room so that it can turn into the room with all the stuff in it; Gran goes off to find Neville and add her power to his, Tonks goes off to find Remus and, I don't know, guilt-trip him into something, and Ginny runs after Tonks, presumably to get some work experience in the area of being a giant Sue. By the way, Tonks says "Have you seen Remus" twice in the space of two pages, which I would excuse if she didn't already come across as kind of clingy.
This dealt with, Ron says something about house-elves and how they should be evacuated too. Hermione, naturally, treats this as the most romantic and/or erotic thing she's ever heard and starts dry-humping Ron right there. I would say it reminds me of this bit in Return of the Jedi, during the battle of Endor...
Click to viewExcept that it really doesn't. Plus in the bit from Star Wars, there's a fucking funny bit where Harrison Ford blatantly grabs Carrie Fisher's boob and you can just see her starting to crease up before it cuts away, and, well, that's the sort of place where the Harry Potter books don't dare to go.
Here is that bit, for reference.
Yeesh, this chapter is long. Uh, yeah, so Ron and Hermione get it on, and then Harry bollocks them because they should be fighting and Ron makes the (fair) point that if you can't do it when you're young, etc. Right after this, they re-enter the room of requirement, which is now the Furniture Warehouse. They start looking for the diadem, but jut as Harry sees it and goes to grab it, Draco Malfoy shows up with his henchmen, Rocksteady and Bebop, in tow, mainly because this is a Saturday morning cartoon (probably this one, specifically) and there must always be an annoying antagonist as well as an actually evil one.
The extreme hoyay starts here, which is quite nice. Draco remarks that that's Harry's dick in his ass Harry is holding Draco's wand, and they flirt for a while. An argument breaks out between the bad guys, again because this is a Saturday morning cartoon, but inevitably the two factions begin to duel. They throw pisspoor and/or deadly spells at each other until Crabbe (hi, Crabbe!) goes totally batshit and takes his traveller's cheques to a competing resort sets fire to everything. As they run away from the flames, JK Rowling lays it on thick that Harry would never kill anyone and never wanted anyone to die and stuff like that. In case you failed to get the point in theory, Harry spots Malfoy and Goyle, and goes back to rescue them, aided by his homies.
While Ron and Hermione drag the unconscious Goyle away, Harry grabs Malfoy and manages to get him onto his broom (oh, yeah, I guess at some point they went from being on foot to being on brooms, but I seem to have missed when that happened). Malfoy's hands find their way around Harry's waist. Together, the boys swerve to avoid a jet of flame and Malfoy almost falls off the broom, and Harry manages to catch him and pulls him closer, sitting halfway-sideways, holding on and steering with one hand while the other arm is awkwardly around Malfoy's waist and balled up in Malfoy's robes. Another swerve and they are clinging closer still, their ankles twisted around each other's feet. And in his ear, Harry hears, "Enjoying yourself, Potter?" murmured close and breathy, and he feels a surge of what seems to be anger only turned another way around, and as he twists his head to utter some kind of retort their lips meet. In that split second Harry has no idea what to think, but that's more because people are dying and they need to destroy the horcrux and he doesn't know where Ron and Hermione are and... why the hell not, he thinks, and leans in enough to deepen the kiss. Somewhere under all the heat and confusion and rage and desperate worry and adrenaline and the fact that he hasn't slept since they left Shell Cottage, this makes perfect, imperfect sense in a way that nothing else does. They break apart almost immediately, share a glance that goes on for a milisecond and touches each of them profoundly, and steer the broom out of the door, collapsing on the floor outside the room where Ron and Hermione wait.
Needless to say, none of that bit actually happens, but they do cling awfully close ("Malfoy was screaming and holding Harry so tightly it hurt", which to my mind sounds weird without the word "cock" anywhere near it, but anyway). Outside the room, which has burned down, we learn that Crabbe died back there.
Bothans don't seem to apply, but otherwise I got nothin'. Will this do?
Harry gets a quick look at the diadem before it falls apart in his hands. It has the Ravenclaw motto written on it: "Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure". I think it was nice of Rowena Ravenclaw to inscribe her famous diadem in contemporary modern English, as opposed to the middle English she presumably spoke (if, indeed, Hogwarts was founded in the middle ages). Seriously, shouldn't the diadem say something like "Seynd bacoun, and somtyme an ey or tweye"? Well, maybe not that - apparently that means "Grilled bacon and sometimes an egg or two", I found it in an online translation of the Canterbury Tales - but you see what I'm getting at.
Yeah, I know, I know, it's magic. Or something.
Uh... OK, so then Hermione explains, for the benefit of the reader, that Crabbe must have cast a spell called Fiendfyre, which can destroy horcruxes. She goes on about how it's so dangerous and stuff that she would never have used it, which I guess is there to explain why she never mentioned this spell that can destroy horcruxes when they were camping in the woods getting totally hung up on the sword of fucking Gryffindor. She is just starting to point out that there is only the snake left to destroy now when Percy and Fred arrive on the scene. They are fighting some bad dudes, and doing fine until the wall of the castle is blasted away and everyone is injured, except Fred who dies. Against my best judgement I'm sad about Fred dying - not because I like him, but because for various reasons killing one of the twins is particularly harsh.
(It's odd, though - back in the day, right before the release of Goblet of Fire, I was chatting with the head of the children's book section in the bookshop where I had a Saturday job. We'd both read or seen an interview with JKR where she announced that a character would die, and we were discussing who it could be. Neither of us got it right - hardly surprising, as Cedric isn't a major character prior to GoF - but my guesses were either Dumbledore or a Weasley twin, since Dumbledore "was Yoda" and killing a Weasley twin would be really harsh and show how random deaths could be in war. I like that I was right, just several books too early. I also find it vaguely amusing that prior to this book, loads of fans had those icons that said "rocks fall, everyone dies" and they were right too.)
Anyway, tricky one to call, but considering that there is a battle going on I'm going to be generous and award Fred a Porkins death.
This still doesn't mean I like Fred, though.
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