Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!

A Review of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J. K. Rowling:

I have been meaning to write about Harry Potter for some time but I don't think I can do justice or that I have good enough words. Still I decided to give it a try. I read it for the first time many years ago, after having been a forced listener to the rants of one of my school friends who was a big fan of Harry Potter series. In those days, you could find Harry's face on literally everything including rulers, sharpeners, pens, pencils, handbags, diaries and what not. So I finally bought a copy and up till now, it has become extremely battered from excessive use.

On opening it for the first time, it is not the story but J. K. Rowling's style that caught my attention:

"Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense. Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors. The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley and in their opinion there was no finer boy anywhere."

Could there be any better introduction of the bullying, nosy, obnoxious Dursleys!! These are some of my favorite lines from this book.

As I continued, I became somewhat lost! I mean, what is happening!! owls and fancily dressed people and this strange Dumbledore (who appears suddenly late at night) and McGonagall (who was impersonating a cat for the whole day sitting on a wall in Dursleys' street). Turns out there is some big cause for celebration that night. And Dursleys are about to be at the receiving end of a great surprise.

Ten years have passed since Dumbledore left Harry with the Dursleys. During this time, harry somehow made strange things (including setting a Boa constrictor free after actually chatting with it in a zoo)happen around him, which continued testing the "excessively normal" Dursleys' patience for 10 years.

So now it is harry's 11th birthday. Harry has never got a birthday cake and has spent his birthdays wondering what it would be like if his parents were there (who had supposedly died in a car crash: Dursleys' version of the story). But this time there is something special. On the day before his birthday, there are heaps of letters addressed to Harry which follow them everywhere when Mr. Dursleys tries to escape them while getting even madder than he already is. When they think they have managed to escape the letters, the sender of these letters Hagrid himself arrives with Harry's first ever birthday cake!

Now Harry is being told the truth of his identity (oh he is a wizard and a very popular one among thousands of others). What the hell was he doing with Dursleys who are so excessively Muggle (not a wizard)? Well, it turns out that Dursleys had lied about his parents death. Both of them were also wizards and had been killed by the darkest wizard of all times Voldemort (nobody but very few people in wizard's world dared speak or write or even spell his name). Harry being the only one who had defied Voldemort as a one-year-old was very famous in his world. So Hagrid tells him that there is this magic school Hogwarts, where Harry has got a place. Harry shops for his school, gets a wand and an owl (his first ever birthday gift) and finally leaves for Hogwarts on Hogwarts express.

And he reaches the great, prestigious Hogwarts, where he comes to feel at home!

At Hogwarts, life is totally different. He finds friends, Ron and Hermione, who are just as adventurous as Harry himself. He is both liked and hated. He meets his new teachers including formidable McGonagall, quivering Quirel, bitter and contemptuous Snape and the sleepy ghost Binns and learns to play Quiditch as a seeker (youngest in a century). Now, Harry and his friends have a knack of attracting trouble. When everybody is busy in studies and other normal school routine tasks, Harry, Ron and Hermione are intrigued by a three-headed dog (which they were not supposed to set eyes on in the first place). They don't even refrain from going into the forbidden forest (after Harry receives an invisibility cloak on Christmas) and badgering Hagrid with questions about the dog and what he was protecting. After some help from Hagrid's blunders, they discover that the dog was protecting the Philosopher's stone and they take it upon themselves to save the stone from Snape. Later it turns out that they were wrong about Snape. But Harry, in his very first year, comes face to face with Voldemort, who had been in hiding all these ten years and now is trying to come back.

Apart from the adventures, Harry learns the true meaning of friendship, of sticking together with friends and standing by each other, not to mention, making troubles together as well. He also makes enemies in the form of Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle. 

So Harry's first year ends and I am tempted to read it again since I realized while writing this review that I cannot recall a lot.

Besides some lines from the book that I mentioned in the beginning, I also like Dumbledore's talk with Harry when he is at the hospital after his adventure:

“The truth.” Dumbledore sighed. “It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution." 

"If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realize that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign … to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever. It is in your very skin.."

I doubt I will ever say goodbye to Harry Potter. It is still fresh in my memory. It was my introduction to English fantasy and I still think about fantasy as something to do with Harry Potter. No novel has ever been even nearly harry potter-good. It really deserves the attention and world-wide fame that it got. Just to be clear, I am not a fan of Harry Potter movies. And that is not because they were any of the actors or directors fault. The plot of the actual stories is so rich that it is probably not possible to capture it in a 2 and 1/2 hour movie.

The Spell Has Broken..

The Casual Vacancy by J K Rowling:

I finally managed to complete it!!!

My opinion of this novel is a blend of like and dislike or more appropriately annoyance, although I am less annoyed now than a few days ago. It took me almost two months to complete it or to be more accurate, it took me two months to read its first half. It is because of this novel that I have 5 books on my currently-reading list. In just could not stick to it and kept on finding something else to read. More than half of it is dull and tiresome. It falls into that category of books that I usually leave unfinished, but I just could not do it with Rowling. In the second half, however, things start to speed up and it moves towards such a disastrous and dramatic end that it changes every single character's life and to a large extent, my opinion as well.

The story is about a small town Pagford and its local politics. It is about petty problems of everyday  which do not sound a great deal to us but they actually define some people's entire life. It shows the result of prejudices and social negligence and of failing to understand the depth of the problems that remain eclipsed by seemingly more important ones.

The most interesting that I found in this book is the way that Rowling has gradually built her different characters that belong to common families from the same small town but are so different in their attitudes. It relates the events that follow the local Councillor Barry Fairbrother's sudden death and now at the end I realize that this death was the cause of so much change and that so much depended on one person.

The Mollisons whose entire life is gossip. They enjoy nothing more that pulling other people's legs. They are materialistic, jealous and prejudiced and feel so self-important that they are not even affected by the graveness of death. Rather they are just happy that it served their prejudice well. Their reaction to Fairbrother's death was that they had a news to tell people and to boast that they knew about it and others did not. They even enjoyed shocking the deceased friend with the news. They considered their dislike of Fields (which was another small town attached to Pagford for which Pagford council had to provide funds) more important than the many problems people would suffer if the two towns' association was broken. And this dislike was something based on a stupid history which really did not involve people who are living in the present. Even after the head of family and notoriously obese Howard Mollison experiences heart attack and is bed-ridden, his wife actually enjoys that she is getting all the attention.

Their first reaction to Fairbrother's death was to celebrate the fact that now they would be able to get rid of Fields, after Howard's son Miles Mollison will take the seat of the Councillor, something his wife is not happy about and they end up place their married life in jeopardy.

Then there are the Jawanda family and Wall family, who were friends and allies with Barry Fairbrother and intend to carry on his good work. Collin Wall, who is also the Headmaster of the local school, decides to participate in the election against Miles Mollison. But Collin Wall has a weak personality and he does not get along well with his adopted son Stuart Wall, who is literally the wild teenager who annoys his parents just for the fun of it.

It feels like half of the novel comprises of parents versus teenagers shouting match, that is painfully customary in Pagford and Fields.

The Jawanda family also have some difficult relationships at home. their youngest daughter Sukhvinder is constantly being compared to her overachieving siblings and she ends up having a habit of hurting herself. Though at last she manages to get the attention of her parents but the account of her life tells the consequences of the parent-children communication gap.

At this point I am realizing that Rowling somehow made it sound so funny. It did not feel like I was reading something that addressed some very serious issues.

Then there are Weedons. They are mostly treated as social outcasts. They are involved in drugs and are living an unruly life. They represent a class of people who are shunned by the society, which fails to understand the causes that shaped their lives and refuses to help them to recover. This family ends up in a catastrophic situation.

The life of the Price family is also interesting in another way. They include a short-tempered, abusing father, a frightened , indecisive mother and two boys with confidence problems.

Its great how Rowling has portrayed simple, common people to be so different for one another and how they cultivate a new generation with the traits that are a consequence of their own.

To sum up: character building was great, writing was good, some things like teenagers' unruly activities and adults' gossip habits were overdone and its end leaves an impact. So in short, worth reading (but don't expect to find any thrill).

Actually I now realize that there are so few books I have ever read talk about society in general. They are mostly about a few characters. They very rarely address different kinds of people and their lives in a social setup. So for me, it was a different type of book. And as I successfully completed it at last, I just want to believe that "All is well that ends well".

I hope J K Rowling keeps writing (children stuff I mean)!