Half-Blood Prince Uberwank: Chapter 4, Horace Slughorn
Limited face paint and dyed black quiff
Overweight and out of date...
It's so fucking funny, it's absurd
- Manic Street Preachers, "Elvis Impersonator Blackpool Pier"
As we begin that flighty temptress, chapter 4, Harry and Dumbledore are roughly where we left them: on the pavement outside Casa Dursley. Harry is immediately struck with awkwardness - this is the first time he has been alone with Dumbledore since he smashed up his office at the end of book 5 - but luckily Dumbledore breaks the ice by offering Harry a Werther's Original, giving him permission to use violence if he needs to, making a smug comment about how nobody will attack Harry on his watch, and apparating them both to the irritatingly whimsically-named village of Budleigh Babberton. For fuck's sake.
Incidentally, Harry hates apparating, we discover. So I guess it's lucky for him that despite this being the year they take apparition lessons in school, it never really figures in the plot.
So, yeah, they're in some stupid village with a stupid name. They land in the village square and start walking; in a couple of pages' time they'll reach their destination. When that happens, Harry will ask why they didn't just apparate right there, and Dumbledore will handwave this away with some nonsense about it being rude to apparate right into someone's house, conveniently ignoring the real point, which is that they could surely have apparated to directly outside the house. Luckily for Dumbledore, Harry is incredibly stupid and doesn't question this explanation.
That's not yet, though; first, they must spend a couple of pages walking across town. While they travel, Dumbledore will explain to Harry that Voldemort has, for some reason, decided not to use the speshul magical connection to plant stuff in Harry's head any more. Apparently he's decided it's not worth doing, because Harry can see his thoughts in return. Some issues:
Once this has been dealt with (i.e. not dealt with at all really), Harry thinks to ask where they are and what they're doing. And Dumbledore explains that they are going to "persuade an old colleague of mine to come out of retirement and return to Hogwarts".
So - as lefaym pointed out - when Dumbledore talked about pursuing that flighty temptress, adventure, what he really meant was they were going to recruit a teacher. HARRY POTTER, THE BOY WHO WANDERED ABOUT ASSISTING WITH MID-LEVEL HUMAN RESOURCES TASKS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT.
... Ugh. Look, I'm gonna be honest here: this is a real struggle to write. Virtually fuck all happens in this stupid book, and getting up the motivation to nitpick over a bunch of little details concerning Katie Bell's shoes or McLaggen's... teeth, or something, is difficult. I keep having to remind myself that in, like, three chapters' time I'll get to go completely faghag over Draco, and then about fourteen chapters after that I get to do it again, and then maybe a few chapters after that, Dumbledore dies and we can all have a bit of a celebration because he's such a giant twunt in this book that he totally deserves it. But for the moment...
Meanwhile, Harry and Dumbledore are discussing the appointment of a new minister for magic, a man called Scrimgeo... hang on, haven't we done this already? In, like, every chapter so far? Why are we going over this again? I DIDN'T CARE THE FIRST TIME. Then Harry asks about Dumbledore's messed-up hand, and Dumbledore has the audacity to claim the story of what happened to it is too exciting to be told now, and that he will save it for another time. In the next book in the series, we'll discover he injured his hand by... putting on some jewellery. But we're not supposed to know this yet, so for the time being, let's assume he sustained this injury via his new hobby: drunken falconry.
Then they move on to discussing the Duck and Cover leaflet from the last chapter. They conclude that it wasn't particularly useful; Dumbledore gently mocks Harry for not taking its advice and asking for his favourite flavour of jam. (It's raspberry. For future reference, mine swings between strawberry and apricot.) Exactly why this would have helped when Harry didn't know Dumbledore's favourite sort of jam in the first place is left unexplored.
Actually, while we're on the subject, the security questions we see in canon are - for the most part - crappy anyway. Even if Harry was being vigilant and asking Dumbledore to confirm his favourite flavour of jam, that's the sort of thing he could have found out on Wikipedia or something. OK, maybe not Wikipedia, but certainly a chocolate frog card or somewhere. The wizard equivalent of Wikipedia, anyway. Compare Remus's drunken blathering over his wife's name in DH. If it's common knowledge, it's a rubbish security question. (Arthur and Molly's ones in the next chapter are marginally better, but I'll come back to those.)
Then Harry and Dumbledore move on to the topic of inferi. Dumbledore takes an entire paragraph to confirm that, yes, inferi are zombies. They're zombies! They're corpses that walk around, and they're awesome. There's not much else to add. Although he does also calmly reassure Harry that last time this happened, Voldemort killed enough people to make an army of zombies. Then he smoothly changes the subject. Lucky for him, Thicky Potter over there merely drools in response, rather than saying, perhaps, "WTF, Voldemort's potentially got access to an army of zombies and nobody thought to mention this before now?" or similar.
Anyway, they reach their destination: a small house "set in its own garden". I sort of get what she's going for there - a little garden all the way around the house? Picket fence? - but that phrasing is really clumsy, because why wouldn't the house be in its own garden? It's hardly going to be in someone else's garden. Ugh. Silly. Anyway, they take a look at the house, which looks as if a bomb's hit it. They go in anyway, because they are pursuing that flighty temptress, adventure. Or else they are just hugely dumb. I suppose wizards, not being muggles and all, never had to sit through those terrifying public information films about not playing on building sites. I couldn't find the specific one I was thinking of, so have one about strangers, which is oddly pertinent in the context of this chapter.
Inside the house it's just as bad: broken furniture everywhere and even blood on the walls. (In a minute we'll find out it's meant to be unicorn blood. It's red. I'm fairly certain unicorn blood used to be silver in canon, but maybe it goes silver when it oxidizes or something. Or maybe, maybe,, JKR is really rich.) My bad! It's dragon blood in the book, not unicorn. Epic fail on my part. Thanks to esmestrella for pointing that out. :)
But where is that flighty temptress, a retired teacher? He is nowhere to be found - until Dumbledore, apparently, sexually assaults him:
without warning, Dumbledore swooped, plunging the tip of his wand into the seat of the overstuffed armchair, which yelled "Ouch!"
- p65, UK edition
I mean, Jesus, is there really any need for that?
Anyway, the armchair - which is really Horace Slughorn, the retired teacher, just disguised as a chair, wait I see what he did there - straightens up and complains that Dumbledore wasn't gentle enough. Slughorn, incidentally, is pretty fat. You might want to make a note of this fact, because it will only come up again, say, a BILLION TIMES over the next 26 chapters, so you could easily forget.
"GTFO of my house, you liberal druid," Slughorn bellows at Dumbledore. OK, no, he doesn't say that - instead, he and Dumbledore (which, incidentally, I keep typing as "Dumbledire") exchange some mild banter and magically clear up. Crazy stuff! That flighty temptress, adventure, rears its head again.
At some point, Slughorn notices Harry and tells Dumbledore that even Harry's presence won't persuade him to come back to Hogwarts. Dumbledore doesn't deny that this is why Harry is with him, and in fact positions Harry near a lamp, so that Slughorn can see him better. God, this whole scene is just so skeevy. Dumbledore is like some sort of kindly, grandfatherly pimp, trying to sell his prize boy to a particularly rich trick. It makes my skin crawl.
For what it's worth, the first time I read this book the whole idea of Slughorn being kind of a paedophile - which I know there was disagreement over - went over my head entirely. I suspect this is to do with having read the first half of the book the night it came out, very fast, and then having finished it, being so disgusted with the R/T "plot" that Slughorn ceased to matter. This time, though, I can completely see where this idea comes from. I guess I'll point out specific examples when they arise, but... yeah. OK, so he comes across like a benign, likes-boys-with-pretty-faces, oh-dear-I've-dropped-my-handkerchief-won't-someone-pick-it-up kind of kiddy fiddler, rather than the rapist kind, but...
Anyway, you know something? Even if he isn't a paedophile at all, even if his interest in young people really is entirely benign and all about the social networking and whatever, even if his general interest in children is because he wants to eat them rather than molest them, it doesn't matter, because he's incredibly creepy regardless. (I wonder, is he supposed to show us what a Slytherin who isn't evil is like? Because if ambition can only manifest itself as a) evil or b) creepy, then that totally sucks!)
Anyway - where were we? Uh, OK, so then Slughorn and Dumbledore do some catching up. We learn that this isn't actually Slughorn's house (he broke in); he doesn't want to come back to Hogwarts; he doesn't like Umbridge (which I guess is included so that we know he isn't all bad, but that's a bit ad hominem in my view). At one point, while talking, Dumbledore spreads his hands out wide, the only purpose of which seems to be so that Harry (and we) can notice the blingy gold ring, set with a cracked black stone, that he wears. Of course, in course of the remainder of the series we'll discover that this is a) a horcrux and b) one of the famous deathly hallows (so famous, in fact, that we've never heard of them). He's wearing it on his uninjured hand, as well. I'm not sure what to make of this - except that the fact that he's randomly wearing the ring, having already sustained the injury to his other hand, lends weight to my general suspicion that the entire hallows subplot (including the Ariana storyline and - loath though I am to say so - Albus/Gellert) was inserted at a very late stage, and not until after this was written.
Then Dumbledore fucks off to the toilet, leaving Harry, his favourite whore, with the drooling creep on the other side of the room. Said drooling creep stares at Harry for a while, then comments that he looks like his father but has his mother's eyes. Harry finds this "a bit wearing"; by an extraordinary coincidence, so do I. Then he spends some time blathering about Lily and how awesome she was, and how the house you're in normally runs in families but not always: almost the entire Black family was in Slytherin, but not Sirius (obviously). He talks about how he'd have "liked the set", which is one of the bits that tips the scale a little in favour of "icky paedo", I guess because it's a bit objectifying, and, yeah, creepy.
Uh, what else. OK, then he talks about how he assumed that Lily was pure-blood because she was so clever and talented; Harry defends muggle-borns, pointing to the example of Hermione. (His exact words are, "One of my best friends is muggle-born and she's the best in our year". I get what he - and JKR - are going for, but that way of putting it really annoys me, for reasons that are too boring and finickity to bother going into here.) Moving on, Slughorn does a bunch of name-dropping, including mentioning that he knows one "Gwenog Jones". (Isn't she a bit-character in Torchwood? If she isn't, she probably will be at some point.) Except none of these people are relevant any more; he's been out of touch with them while on the run, or possibly hiding, moving from place to place. He talks to himself for like a page about how much it sucks that he doesn't get sent hampers of ham any more and how he's scared and how he supposes he might be safer back at the school after all. (Really, of course, he's remembered that schools are, generally speaking, full of children. Ew.)
Eventually, Dumbledore returns from the toilet; Slughorn asks if he has an upset stomach. And, ew, there's a mental image I didn't want. Ugh. You know one of the reasons the Star Wars franchise is so successful? Never once do we have to deal with the issue of Obi-Wan Kenobi taking care of business, much less the details of it. Anyway, he announces they're leaving, which is what pushes Slughorn's decision, and he agrees to come back to teach at Hogwarts. I'm skipping over the details because I meant to post this like two weeks ago and it's taken me so much effort to get this far and god this is boring.
OK, so in case we'd failed to get the measure of Slughorn in that last section, Dumbledore now spells it out for us: he likes the company of powerful and influential people and the dividends that their company allows him to reap, which may well be a box of "his favourite crystallised pineapple", a foodstuff to which he, apparently, maintains an addiction. Now, I went looking for this crystallised pineapple stuff in doing my research for this chapter, and couldn't find it anywhere, even in the local world-foods-and-crap-for-vegans emporium, which has an entire aisle of crystallised things and nuts that I don't even know what they are. (It also sells something called " Corn lupin bread", which I was quite excited about when I saw it there, but I can't figure out what the hell it is.) In any case, let's be honest, you don't get that fat off pineapple, not unless it's the kind that comes with ham, tomatoes and mozzarella atop a fresh-dough base. So from now on whenever there's a mention of it in the book I'm going to assume that we are actually talking about a Domino's Meateor ("Five delicious meat toppings: Pepperoni, Sausage, Meatballs, Ground Beef and Smoky Bacon, together with our tangy BBQ Sauce and Mozzarella Cheese. Health insurance not included").
Anyway, Dumbledore explains that he's telling Harry all this so that Harry can be on his guard - because Slughorn will almost certainly attempt to "collect" him. Well, yes, as we'll see, he will - and the fact that Dumbledore brought Harry right to him and paraded him about like a carrot on a stick in front of a donkey pulling a cart, I'd imagine, will have had something to do with that.
They apparate again, and find themselves approaching Casa Weasley, aka the Burrow. Harry begins to drool, thinking of all the stodgy food he will be force-fed over the coming weeks, but before he can get in there and start shovelling it in, Dumbledore drags him off for a private word in an "outhouse" where brooms are kept. An outhouse is an outdoor toilet, isn't it? Man, the wizarding world really is different from the muggle one, isn't it - because I don't know of any schools where it's considered acceptable for the headteacher to be alone with a student in a toilet in the middle of the night. But, you know, ~*wizards*~.
Uh, yeah, so Dumbledore wants to give Harry some more Werther's Originals and then remind him that his godfather is dead, in case he's forgotten (I can't decide here whether to be snarky at Dumbledore for being such a bastard, or at Harry for being so stupid). Harry reassures Dumbledore in turn that although it's hard to know Sirius is gone...
"While I was at the Dursleys' [...] I realised I can't shut myself away or - or crack up. Sirius wouldn't have wanted that, would he? And anyway, life's too short..." (continues)
- p77, UK edition
Uh. Harry? You know it's your fault he's dead, right?
OK. Perhaps that's a little unfair. A number of people are responsible for Sirius's death, not least Bellatrix, who was the one who actually killed him. And some of the blame must lie with Dumbledore for keeping him locked up all year while simultaneously keeping Harry in the dark. But Harry has to take some credit; I find re-reading the closing chapters of OotP quite difficult, because he fucks up at every stage. If he'd opened the package with the mirror in it, if he'd contacted Snape right away, if he'd listened to Hermione's advice, if he'd bothered with occlumency, and so on.
My point is, it seems pretty cold of Harry to be so prepared to move on at such an early stage when - well, I would expect the Harry I know from earlier books to be overwhelmed not only by grief but by a major case of survivor's guilt. (Actually, Harry comes off as a real jerkass in this book. We don't really see him grieve over Sirius; after the sectumsempra incident his main worry is that he gets detention and has to miss quidditch; he laughs at the misfortune of others on a variety of occasions; and the emotions he is most often shown to experience are, I would argue, lust and jealousy. But I'll come back to all of these points in the coming weeks and months.) Two pages after this, Harry and Dumbledore will share a hearty chortle over Harry's epic failure to master occlumency, which is a bit of a piss-take, given that this failure - as I said above - is a major factor in luring Harry to the ministry and, ultimately, in getting Sirius killed.
Or course, what's really going on here is that JKR didn't want to have to write Harry's grief into the book as well as all the other exposition and (supposed) character development, so she handwaved it away under the guise of Harry becoming a man or some such shit. What comes across, though, is the impression of someone doing his level best to repress every unpleasant feeling he experiences, and, I guess, hardening his heart.
Anyway - the upshot of all this is that Harry's doing his best to be over that Sirius guy, except as an excuse to kill as many death eaters as he can. No, seriously, he explicitly says that. Then Dumbledore spends like a page telling him that he should confide in Ron and Hermione a bit more, like about the prophecy and things like that. When Harry says that he doesn't want to worry or upset them, Dumbledore plays what I will be referring to as the Sirius card, so that he STFUs and does what he's told.
Uh, what else? I'm skipping again, because I don't want to leave anything out but at the same time, this is BORING and STUPID and I just want to PUNCH EVERYONE. OK, so Dumbledore says that he'll be giving Harry private lessons this year, but he won't say what in (which - if it were me - would set off my internal Skeeve Alarm, especially given the recent visit with Slughorn - but then, Harry is remarkably stupid). Then they share a hearty chuckle over Harry's tendency to cause the deaths of people he likes, as discussed above. Finally, Dumbledore provides two more pieces of advice: keep the cloaking device with you at all times, and don't take the piss out of the Weasleys' hospitality by sticking your fingers in any sockets or anything while you're here. And that's it, that's the chapter. It's over, and you have no idea of the sense of relief I feel. I hated writing this. Oh well - I get to bitch about - well, about women being bitchy to other women, actually, and there's an irony in there somewhere - in the next one, so that should be fun. And in the meantime, and to make up for how late and crap this chapter is, here's a picture of a shark. AWESOME!
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Overweight and out of date...
It's so fucking funny, it's absurd
- Manic Street Preachers, "Elvis Impersonator Blackpool Pier"
As we begin that flighty temptress, chapter 4, Harry and Dumbledore are roughly where we left them: on the pavement outside Casa Dursley. Harry is immediately struck with awkwardness - this is the first time he has been alone with Dumbledore since he smashed up his office at the end of book 5 - but luckily Dumbledore breaks the ice by offering Harry a Werther's Original, giving him permission to use violence if he needs to, making a smug comment about how nobody will attack Harry on his watch, and apparating them both to the irritatingly whimsically-named village of Budleigh Babberton. For fuck's sake.
Incidentally, Harry hates apparating, we discover. So I guess it's lucky for him that despite this being the year they take apparition lessons in school, it never really figures in the plot.
So, yeah, they're in some stupid village with a stupid name. They land in the village square and start walking; in a couple of pages' time they'll reach their destination. When that happens, Harry will ask why they didn't just apparate right there, and Dumbledore will handwave this away with some nonsense about it being rude to apparate right into someone's house, conveniently ignoring the real point, which is that they could surely have apparated to directly outside the house. Luckily for Dumbledore, Harry is incredibly stupid and doesn't question this explanation.
That's not yet, though; first, they must spend a couple of pages walking across town. While they travel, Dumbledore will explain to Harry that Voldemort has, for some reason, decided not to use the speshul magical connection to plant stuff in Harry's head any more. Apparently he's decided it's not worth doing, because Harry can see his thoughts in return. Some issues:
- How the fuck does Dumbledore know this? Not only is he making an assumption about why Voldemort is now using occlumency against Harry, he's assuming that it's happening at all; Harry has only just told him his scar isn't troubling him any more and that the prophetic dreams have stopped. If we still had a book to go I'd be speculating on how much Dumbledore knows, and how he knows it, but we know how it all pans out by now and, well, I guess maybe Snape was getting all this information to him but... well, at this stage it isn't a big deal, but increasingly, as the book goes on, Dumbledore does this incredibly irritating thing of pulling explanations out of his ass, and working on the assumption they are 100% true - and, frustratingly, there is rarely, if ever, any indication that he's wrong. And this is the first of many, and I know more are coming, so it grates.
- Even if Voldemort has decided the speshul connection is too dangerous, why would he stop using it altogether? After all, it worked perfectly at the end of the last book, successfully luring Harry to the hall of prophecies (and taking out a member of the Order in the process). OK, Voldemort didn't manage to get the prophecy, but that's entirely down to the joint stupidity of the death eaters and Harry, not due to any kind of fault with Voldemort's technique. Surely he is a) talented and b) arrogant enough to assume he'll be able to keep using it?
Once this has been dealt with (i.e. not dealt with at all really), Harry thinks to ask where they are and what they're doing. And Dumbledore explains that they are going to "persuade an old colleague of mine to come out of retirement and return to Hogwarts".
So - as lefaym pointed out - when Dumbledore talked about pursuing that flighty temptress, adventure, what he really meant was they were going to recruit a teacher. HARRY POTTER, THE BOY WHO WANDERED ABOUT ASSISTING WITH MID-LEVEL HUMAN RESOURCES TASKS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT.
... Ugh. Look, I'm gonna be honest here: this is a real struggle to write. Virtually fuck all happens in this stupid book, and getting up the motivation to nitpick over a bunch of little details concerning Katie Bell's shoes or McLaggen's... teeth, or something, is difficult. I keep having to remind myself that in, like, three chapters' time I'll get to go completely faghag over Draco, and then about fourteen chapters after that I get to do it again, and then maybe a few chapters after that, Dumbledore dies and we can all have a bit of a celebration because he's such a giant twunt in this book that he totally deserves it. But for the moment...
Meanwhile, Harry and Dumbledore are discussing the appointment of a new minister for magic, a man called Scrimgeo... hang on, haven't we done this already? In, like, every chapter so far? Why are we going over this again? I DIDN'T CARE THE FIRST TIME. Then Harry asks about Dumbledore's messed-up hand, and Dumbledore has the audacity to claim the story of what happened to it is too exciting to be told now, and that he will save it for another time. In the next book in the series, we'll discover he injured his hand by... putting on some jewellery. But we're not supposed to know this yet, so for the time being, let's assume he sustained this injury via his new hobby: drunken falconry.
Then they move on to discussing the Duck and Cover leaflet from the last chapter. They conclude that it wasn't particularly useful; Dumbledore gently mocks Harry for not taking its advice and asking for his favourite flavour of jam. (It's raspberry. For future reference, mine swings between strawberry and apricot.) Exactly why this would have helped when Harry didn't know Dumbledore's favourite sort of jam in the first place is left unexplored.
Actually, while we're on the subject, the security questions we see in canon are - for the most part - crappy anyway. Even if Harry was being vigilant and asking Dumbledore to confirm his favourite flavour of jam, that's the sort of thing he could have found out on Wikipedia or something. OK, maybe not Wikipedia, but certainly a chocolate frog card or somewhere. The wizard equivalent of Wikipedia, anyway. Compare Remus's drunken blathering over his wife's name in DH. If it's common knowledge, it's a rubbish security question. (Arthur and Molly's ones in the next chapter are marginally better, but I'll come back to those.)
Then Harry and Dumbledore move on to the topic of inferi. Dumbledore takes an entire paragraph to confirm that, yes, inferi are zombies. They're zombies! They're corpses that walk around, and they're awesome. There's not much else to add. Although he does also calmly reassure Harry that last time this happened, Voldemort killed enough people to make an army of zombies. Then he smoothly changes the subject. Lucky for him, Thicky Potter over there merely drools in response, rather than saying, perhaps, "WTF, Voldemort's potentially got access to an army of zombies and nobody thought to mention this before now?" or similar.
Anyway, they reach their destination: a small house "set in its own garden". I sort of get what she's going for there - a little garden all the way around the house? Picket fence? - but that phrasing is really clumsy, because why wouldn't the house be in its own garden? It's hardly going to be in someone else's garden. Ugh. Silly. Anyway, they take a look at the house, which looks as if a bomb's hit it. They go in anyway, because they are pursuing that flighty temptress, adventure. Or else they are just hugely dumb. I suppose wizards, not being muggles and all, never had to sit through those terrifying public information films about not playing on building sites. I couldn't find the specific one I was thinking of, so have one about strangers, which is oddly pertinent in the context of this chapter.
Inside the house it's just as bad: broken furniture everywhere and even blood on the walls. (In a minute we'll find out it's meant to be unicorn blood. It's red. I'm fairly certain unicorn blood used to be silver in canon, but maybe it goes silver when it oxidizes or something. Or maybe, maybe,, JKR is really rich.) My bad! It's dragon blood in the book, not unicorn. Epic fail on my part. Thanks to esmestrella for pointing that out. :)
Click to viewBut where is that flighty temptress, a retired teacher? He is nowhere to be found - until Dumbledore, apparently, sexually assaults him:
without warning, Dumbledore swooped, plunging the tip of his wand into the seat of the overstuffed armchair, which yelled "Ouch!"
- p65, UK edition
I mean, Jesus, is there really any need for that?
Anyway, the armchair - which is really Horace Slughorn, the retired teacher, just disguised as a chair, wait I see what he did there - straightens up and complains that Dumbledore wasn't gentle enough. Slughorn, incidentally, is pretty fat. You might want to make a note of this fact, because it will only come up again, say, a BILLION TIMES over the next 26 chapters, so you could easily forget.
"GTFO of my house, you liberal druid," Slughorn bellows at Dumbledore. OK, no, he doesn't say that - instead, he and Dumbledore (which, incidentally, I keep typing as "Dumbledire") exchange some mild banter and magically clear up. Crazy stuff! That flighty temptress, adventure, rears its head again.
At some point, Slughorn notices Harry and tells Dumbledore that even Harry's presence won't persuade him to come back to Hogwarts. Dumbledore doesn't deny that this is why Harry is with him, and in fact positions Harry near a lamp, so that Slughorn can see him better. God, this whole scene is just so skeevy. Dumbledore is like some sort of kindly, grandfatherly pimp, trying to sell his prize boy to a particularly rich trick. It makes my skin crawl.
For what it's worth, the first time I read this book the whole idea of Slughorn being kind of a paedophile - which I know there was disagreement over - went over my head entirely. I suspect this is to do with having read the first half of the book the night it came out, very fast, and then having finished it, being so disgusted with the R/T "plot" that Slughorn ceased to matter. This time, though, I can completely see where this idea comes from. I guess I'll point out specific examples when they arise, but... yeah. OK, so he comes across like a benign, likes-boys-with-pretty-faces, oh-dear-I've-dropped-my-handkerchief-won't-someone-pick-it-up kind of kiddy fiddler, rather than the rapist kind, but...
Anyway, you know something? Even if he isn't a paedophile at all, even if his interest in young people really is entirely benign and all about the social networking and whatever, even if his general interest in children is because he wants to eat them rather than molest them, it doesn't matter, because he's incredibly creepy regardless. (I wonder, is he supposed to show us what a Slytherin who isn't evil is like? Because if ambition can only manifest itself as a) evil or b) creepy, then that totally sucks!)
Anyway - where were we? Uh, OK, so then Slughorn and Dumbledore do some catching up. We learn that this isn't actually Slughorn's house (he broke in); he doesn't want to come back to Hogwarts; he doesn't like Umbridge (which I guess is included so that we know he isn't all bad, but that's a bit ad hominem in my view). At one point, while talking, Dumbledore spreads his hands out wide, the only purpose of which seems to be so that Harry (and we) can notice the blingy gold ring, set with a cracked black stone, that he wears. Of course, in course of the remainder of the series we'll discover that this is a) a horcrux and b) one of the famous deathly hallows (so famous, in fact, that we've never heard of them). He's wearing it on his uninjured hand, as well. I'm not sure what to make of this - except that the fact that he's randomly wearing the ring, having already sustained the injury to his other hand, lends weight to my general suspicion that the entire hallows subplot (including the Ariana storyline and - loath though I am to say so - Albus/Gellert) was inserted at a very late stage, and not until after this was written.
Then Dumbledore fucks off to the toilet, leaving Harry, his favourite whore, with the drooling creep on the other side of the room. Said drooling creep stares at Harry for a while, then comments that he looks like his father but has his mother's eyes. Harry finds this "a bit wearing"; by an extraordinary coincidence, so do I. Then he spends some time blathering about Lily and how awesome she was, and how the house you're in normally runs in families but not always: almost the entire Black family was in Slytherin, but not Sirius (obviously). He talks about how he'd have "liked the set", which is one of the bits that tips the scale a little in favour of "icky paedo", I guess because it's a bit objectifying, and, yeah, creepy.
Uh, what else. OK, then he talks about how he assumed that Lily was pure-blood because she was so clever and talented; Harry defends muggle-borns, pointing to the example of Hermione. (His exact words are, "One of my best friends is muggle-born and she's the best in our year". I get what he - and JKR - are going for, but that way of putting it really annoys me, for reasons that are too boring and finickity to bother going into here.) Moving on, Slughorn does a bunch of name-dropping, including mentioning that he knows one "Gwenog Jones". (Isn't she a bit-character in Torchwood? If she isn't, she probably will be at some point.) Except none of these people are relevant any more; he's been out of touch with them while on the run, or possibly hiding, moving from place to place. He talks to himself for like a page about how much it sucks that he doesn't get sent hampers of ham any more and how he's scared and how he supposes he might be safer back at the school after all. (Really, of course, he's remembered that schools are, generally speaking, full of children. Ew.)
Eventually, Dumbledore returns from the toilet; Slughorn asks if he has an upset stomach. And, ew, there's a mental image I didn't want. Ugh. You know one of the reasons the Star Wars franchise is so successful? Never once do we have to deal with the issue of Obi-Wan Kenobi taking care of business, much less the details of it. Anyway, he announces they're leaving, which is what pushes Slughorn's decision, and he agrees to come back to teach at Hogwarts. I'm skipping over the details because I meant to post this like two weeks ago and it's taken me so much effort to get this far and god this is boring.
OK, so in case we'd failed to get the measure of Slughorn in that last section, Dumbledore now spells it out for us: he likes the company of powerful and influential people and the dividends that their company allows him to reap, which may well be a box of "his favourite crystallised pineapple", a foodstuff to which he, apparently, maintains an addiction. Now, I went looking for this crystallised pineapple stuff in doing my research for this chapter, and couldn't find it anywhere, even in the local world-foods-and-crap-for-vegans emporium, which has an entire aisle of crystallised things and nuts that I don't even know what they are. (It also sells something called " Corn lupin bread", which I was quite excited about when I saw it there, but I can't figure out what the hell it is.) In any case, let's be honest, you don't get that fat off pineapple, not unless it's the kind that comes with ham, tomatoes and mozzarella atop a fresh-dough base. So from now on whenever there's a mention of it in the book I'm going to assume that we are actually talking about a Domino's Meateor ("Five delicious meat toppings: Pepperoni, Sausage, Meatballs, Ground Beef and Smoky Bacon, together with our tangy BBQ Sauce and Mozzarella Cheese. Health insurance not included").
Anyway, Dumbledore explains that he's telling Harry all this so that Harry can be on his guard - because Slughorn will almost certainly attempt to "collect" him. Well, yes, as we'll see, he will - and the fact that Dumbledore brought Harry right to him and paraded him about like a carrot on a stick in front of a donkey pulling a cart, I'd imagine, will have had something to do with that.
They apparate again, and find themselves approaching Casa Weasley, aka the Burrow. Harry begins to drool, thinking of all the stodgy food he will be force-fed over the coming weeks, but before he can get in there and start shovelling it in, Dumbledore drags him off for a private word in an "outhouse" where brooms are kept. An outhouse is an outdoor toilet, isn't it? Man, the wizarding world really is different from the muggle one, isn't it - because I don't know of any schools where it's considered acceptable for the headteacher to be alone with a student in a toilet in the middle of the night. But, you know, ~*wizards*~.
Uh, yeah, so Dumbledore wants to give Harry some more Werther's Originals and then remind him that his godfather is dead, in case he's forgotten (I can't decide here whether to be snarky at Dumbledore for being such a bastard, or at Harry for being so stupid). Harry reassures Dumbledore in turn that although it's hard to know Sirius is gone...
"While I was at the Dursleys' [...] I realised I can't shut myself away or - or crack up. Sirius wouldn't have wanted that, would he? And anyway, life's too short..." (continues)
- p77, UK edition
Uh. Harry? You know it's your fault he's dead, right?
OK. Perhaps that's a little unfair. A number of people are responsible for Sirius's death, not least Bellatrix, who was the one who actually killed him. And some of the blame must lie with Dumbledore for keeping him locked up all year while simultaneously keeping Harry in the dark. But Harry has to take some credit; I find re-reading the closing chapters of OotP quite difficult, because he fucks up at every stage. If he'd opened the package with the mirror in it, if he'd contacted Snape right away, if he'd listened to Hermione's advice, if he'd bothered with occlumency, and so on.
My point is, it seems pretty cold of Harry to be so prepared to move on at such an early stage when - well, I would expect the Harry I know from earlier books to be overwhelmed not only by grief but by a major case of survivor's guilt. (Actually, Harry comes off as a real jerkass in this book. We don't really see him grieve over Sirius; after the sectumsempra incident his main worry is that he gets detention and has to miss quidditch; he laughs at the misfortune of others on a variety of occasions; and the emotions he is most often shown to experience are, I would argue, lust and jealousy. But I'll come back to all of these points in the coming weeks and months.) Two pages after this, Harry and Dumbledore will share a hearty chortle over Harry's epic failure to master occlumency, which is a bit of a piss-take, given that this failure - as I said above - is a major factor in luring Harry to the ministry and, ultimately, in getting Sirius killed.
Or course, what's really going on here is that JKR didn't want to have to write Harry's grief into the book as well as all the other exposition and (supposed) character development, so she handwaved it away under the guise of Harry becoming a man or some such shit. What comes across, though, is the impression of someone doing his level best to repress every unpleasant feeling he experiences, and, I guess, hardening his heart.
Anyway - the upshot of all this is that Harry's doing his best to be over that Sirius guy, except as an excuse to kill as many death eaters as he can. No, seriously, he explicitly says that. Then Dumbledore spends like a page telling him that he should confide in Ron and Hermione a bit more, like about the prophecy and things like that. When Harry says that he doesn't want to worry or upset them, Dumbledore plays what I will be referring to as the Sirius card, so that he STFUs and does what he's told.
Uh, what else? I'm skipping again, because I don't want to leave anything out but at the same time, this is BORING and STUPID and I just want to PUNCH EVERYONE. OK, so Dumbledore says that he'll be giving Harry private lessons this year, but he won't say what in (which - if it were me - would set off my internal Skeeve Alarm, especially given the recent visit with Slughorn - but then, Harry is remarkably stupid). Then they share a hearty chuckle over Harry's tendency to cause the deaths of people he likes, as discussed above. Finally, Dumbledore provides two more pieces of advice: keep the cloaking device with you at all times, and don't take the piss out of the Weasleys' hospitality by sticking your fingers in any sockets or anything while you're here. And that's it, that's the chapter. It's over, and you have no idea of the sense of relief I feel. I hated writing this. Oh well - I get to bitch about - well, about women being bitchy to other women, actually, and there's an irony in there somewhere - in the next one, so that should be fun. And in the meantime, and to make up for how late and crap this chapter is, here's a picture of a shark. AWESOME!
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