Deathly Hallows uberwank: Chapter 12, Magic Is Might
Sorry this one took so long to arrive. I've been staying with my folks, and boy do they party hard. Time set aside for uberwanking was spent getting over hangovers, watching a Genesis tribute band, and squeeing over gay Dumbledore. But enough excuses. Onward to wank!
Last time, a bunch of stuff happened at 12 Grimmauld Place, and we're still there as this chapter starts. We begin with around a page and a half of detailed description of the changing season as August draws on, muggle curiosity at number 12 apparently being missing, the growing numbers of death eaters wandering about the square, etc. For the record, I really like the style of this segment - that detached, omniscient-narrator view. I think JKR writes it well, and in some ways I wish she wrote this way more often. (It's also the sort of style I thought we'd be getting in the epilogue, which is one of the reasons that chapter sucked balls, in my opinion - but the rant over that chapter is going to be the biggest and baddest and most epic Grand Finale of all time, so I'll save this one for then.)
On September first, however, our perspective switches back to Harry. (Damn.) We rejoin him as he apparates on to the doorstep and almost has his elbow spotted by a death eater, but gets inside the house before they can get their sticky paws on him, and they fall back, disappointed. Time for a tangent where I go into the questions this raises about the nature of the fidelius charm.
So the death eaters know that this is the location of someone who keeps saying Voldemort, and they've seen (e.g.) Harry's elbow on the edge of, presumably, the magic "barrier" surrounding the house (or the event horizon of the fidelius charm or whatever). And they can presumably see that there is number 11 and there is number 13 and there's nothing in between. And surely they can put two and two together. So does that count as them knowing the secret? I guess not, since they are hanging around outside and clearly can't see the house. But what if, say, one of these death eaters was mates with Regulus back in the day, and had been to his house? Surely, surely that death eater would pretty much know the secret?
I suppose this is really part of the bigger question of how the fidelius charm works in general. Unless I've misunderstood canon, there's an inconsistency here: after Wormtail told Voldemort where the Potters were hiding, presumably the charm was broken, because Hagrid was able to retrieve baby Harry from the house and, later in this book, Harry and Hermione go to Godric's Hollow and find the house. From the events of Halloween 1981 as described in PoA, I'd assumed that the secret keeper telling anyone the secret effectively broke the enchantment. However, in OotP, Harry is told the location of the house by Dumbledore (well, it's written down and he reads it, but isn't that the whole thing - Dumbledore is secret keeper, so he has to tell Harry). And when Dumbledore dies, the secret "passes down" to everyone who was told it. Therefore, right here in this chapter, the death eaters can't see or get into the house. Inconsistency? Slip-up? Hmm. Odd one.
Meanwhile, back in the present, Harry is pulling off his cloak and sitting down for dinner. The kitchen is unrecognisably clean and nice, because apparently one elderly but placated house-elf can do more in a month than a bunch of adults and teenagers can do in like over a year. There's a fire in the grate, and Kreacher has made soup, stew, and treacle tart, in early September. Anyway, Harry has bad news - Snape has been made headmaster of Hogwarts and the Carrow siblings (Amycus and Alecto - and I often forget one of them is a woman, because both those names have masculine endings, you know), both death eaters, have been given teaching posts. Harry and Ron talk over how much that's going to suck balls, but they reckon the other teachers will stick around, if only to protect the kids. As they eat, they angst a bit over the fact that they're not on the Hogwarts Express today, hanging with Ginny, Neville and Luna, who they are certain are making molotov cocktails and spraying situationist graffiti on the train windows at this very moment.
They start yamming their soup, and Hermione shows up - she's had the badass notion of putting Phineas Nigellus's portrait in her bag of holding, to provide a way of knowing what's going on at Hogwarts and so that Snape can't use the same trick to see what they're up to at the house. Harry reports back from his day of watching the entrance to the Ministry of Magic: Art Weasley is fine, no sign of Umbridge. Ron mentions that maintenance workers wear navy blue and Hermione chews him out for not mentioning it before. Harry interrupts their tedious bickering to say he thinks they should invade the ministry tomorrow; it seems the plan is to rip off various parts of Star Wars and, dressed as Stormtroopers, break into Umbridge's office to retrieve the real horcrux locket. Their month of spying and eavesdropping has led them to the knowledge that they can't floo or apparate in, and will have to blag their way inside the ministry in some other way. They've allegedly spent a month discussing how to do this, but as we will see in the next chapter, this seems to mean they've listened to random people outside the ministry, come up with an ideal scenario for getting in, and not dwelt for a second on the possibility of any outcome other than a) everything works out perfectly or b) they all die instantly and don't need to worry any more. Well, Hermione has been worrying about things not happening properly, but only to the extent of "Oh no, something might go wrong", rather than, "What if X happens? We should do Y to ensure it doesn't".
They continue to bicker over the ins and outs of the plan, when Harry's scar hurts and he runs to the bathroom sink. The sink is black and has taps in the shape of open-mouthed snakes, which is pimpin'. I can totally see Harry, post-DH but pre-epilogue, appearing in the wizarding version of MTV Cribs, showing us around his house with its serpent-shaped taps and, probably, ceiling mirrors and 6-foot-wide plasma screen TVs and a hot tub with fire around it. Anyway, Harry gets another one of his rather convenient updates on what Voldemort is doing, which, on this occasion, is visiting what is either a really old-school German village or the fairytale section of an amusement park. He breaks into a house and asks for Gregorovitch, that wandmaker who I guess is relevant in some way. The woman yells in German that he has moved away, but Voldemort does not have time for her bullshit, and he AKs her and her kids right there. (Interestingly, the woman shields her kids with her body, which I think leads to questions about Lily's sacrifice, like why doesn't this woman's death cause the AK to bounce off the kids? What in particular caused this to happen the night the Potters died? I would wank out a theory but, meh.)
Harry comes around and tells Ron and Hermione that he was just having a nap or something. Oddly enough, they don't buy this (Harry is pretty much the worst liar ever), so Harry angsts about Cedric's death, which was a bit like the one he just saw. I like that little bit of continuity there, Cedric being acknowledged and stuff. Hermione chews Harry out for not mastering occlumency, which is - in theory - also a nice little bit of continuity, but in reality makes my heart sink, because the whole occlumency thing was only interesting some of the time and was more or less pointless anyway. They argue, with Harry making noises about using his power for good and the Crew being sceptical about this whole thing, but eventually they all agree to STFU and head back to the kitchen to eat stew and treacle tart until their hearts stop.
They stay up late, going over the plan (which is odd, considering how shoddy this "plan" turns out to be), and then bedtime; Harry is now sleeping in Sirius's bed (is it just me, or is this a bit... odd? What with Harry's daddy issues and all that? Or possibly just slashy, whichever). In the morning, Ron wakes Harry by calling him a hideous fucker or something, and they breakfast on hot rolls and fresh coffee. I wrote the first draft of this post on a train, listening to a small child saying, "Mummy mummy mummy mummy mummy mummy mummy mummy mummy can I have sweets", and the buffet car was closed, and it was like JKR was mocking me with her talk of coffee. Over the food, Hermione doles out supplies for the mission - there's some nicely shoehorned in product placement for various Weasley brand props, like those hilarious sweets that hilariously give you dysentery, and little packages of sarin gas and stuff like that. Finally, after the promise of pie from Kreacher (damn you, JKR! Now I want pie!) they apparate off to the ministry.
Action time! First up, Hermione stuns one Mafalda Hopkirk, polyjuices into her, and hides the original Mafalda in a disused building. As Mafalda, Hermione force-feeds one of those vomity sweets to some maintenance guy, who duly chunders all over the floor. Ron polyjuices into him, and we discover he is one Reg Cattermole. Reg!Ron and Mafalda!Hermione fuck off for a while and return with some more hair, which Harry uses to polyjuice into a tall, buff and apparently badass chap. Together, they head for what appear to be public toilets. Some hilarious fucker remarks that they security levels are a bit high, it's stupid, it's not like Harry Potter's gonna turn up! Ha! Ha! Which is surely up there with joking that there's a bomb in your luggage at the airport check-in. Plus, you know, LOL THE IRONY. Anyway, that guy fucks off, so Ron and Harry decide to do some impromptu cottaging while they're here and enter a cubicle. However, by an extraordinary coincidence, it turns out that to enter the ministry, you have to flush yourself down a toilet, so that's what they do. Man, these wizards are so fucking wacky I could just kill myself.
The trio find themselves in the main atrium of the ministry. Last time we were here, there was a big golden statue, but Voldemort and Dumbledore joined forces to utterly fuck that up, and in its place are statues of a witch and a wizard, sitting on piles of ugly, deformed-looking muggles, with a caption reading MAGIC IS MIGHT, which I do find quite chilling, actually. Yaxley, a blatant death eater we've met before, joins them and bollocks Reg!Ron on account of Yaxley's office is raining and Reg should have sorted it out by now. In bollocking Ron, he helpfully provides us with some useful exposition concerning Reg's wife, who is muggle-born, and is being interrogated today, and if Ron cocks up, then she is fucked.
Our intrepid trio board a lift and a series of characters get in and out, providing exposition as they go. We learn that Harry has polyjuiced into Runcorn, a jerk, and that Ron needs Hermione telling him what to do at all times. Ron gets off at level two, and finally, the lift reaches level one, and the doors open, and ohnoes there is Umbridge! And the chapter ends.
I don't have too much more to say about this one. It's relatively fast-paced, with lots of action, which is certainly more enjoyable than the bits coming up where they spend the whole chapter sitting around doing sod all. Also, we get to see some concrete examples of how the ministry is now treating muggle-borns (and there are more in the next chapter too), which is both more satisfying and more chilling than just being told about it. On the other hand, for all the action, there's not much development, and ultimately this entire section is a bit unnecessary (in the sense that there's no dramatic reason for Umbridge to have the locket - JKR could just as easily have written that Mundungus still had it, or Kreacher did, or whatever).
The problem isn't so much with the sequence per se but with the context in which it occurs. This kind of sequence can actually work very well in the context of a video game, because it gives the player more to do, makes for more interesting and longer gameplay, gives the player the option of straying from the main narrative (the Zelda games tend to do this very well, with lots of poe souls, golden bugs or skulltulas to collect, sword upgrades, item-swapping, timed horseback races and so on). Even the oddly convenient nature of the quest itself is acceptable, again because it's fun (it's not particularly realistic that each of the, I don't know, Pendants of Ry'leh is in a different area of the map and each can only be found by using the item you just happen to have found in the last dungeon, but it doesn't matter). In a novel, not so much, because there is only the one narrative - you read the book from the start to the end. So, in practice, this chapter (and the next one) are less like a side-quest and more like, say, that early sequence in the Zelda game Ocarina of Time when you have to sneak into Hyrule Castle without getting seen by the guards. It's a useful way of getting used to how the game works, a nice and easy mini-quest to start the game with, but nevertheless it's bloody tedious, especially when you're playing the game for the second or third time (or seventeenth time, if you're me), and considering that if you mess up you have to start over from the beginning. Plus, it's set up like a fun diversion but it's actually essential for continuing with the story, so it rapidly stops being fun. That's the overall feeling I get from this section, then - boredom, wishing things would hurry up and happen, feeling like the characters (and therefore the author) are kind of wasting my time. The thing is, if the plot was such that this bit really was essential (i.e. if it didn't feel like a random excursion - don't ask me how, I'm no author), this could easily be one of the best bits of the book.
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Last time, a bunch of stuff happened at 12 Grimmauld Place, and we're still there as this chapter starts. We begin with around a page and a half of detailed description of the changing season as August draws on, muggle curiosity at number 12 apparently being missing, the growing numbers of death eaters wandering about the square, etc. For the record, I really like the style of this segment - that detached, omniscient-narrator view. I think JKR writes it well, and in some ways I wish she wrote this way more often. (It's also the sort of style I thought we'd be getting in the epilogue, which is one of the reasons that chapter sucked balls, in my opinion - but the rant over that chapter is going to be the biggest and baddest and most epic Grand Finale of all time, so I'll save this one for then.)
On September first, however, our perspective switches back to Harry. (Damn.) We rejoin him as he apparates on to the doorstep and almost has his elbow spotted by a death eater, but gets inside the house before they can get their sticky paws on him, and they fall back, disappointed. Time for a tangent where I go into the questions this raises about the nature of the fidelius charm.
So the death eaters know that this is the location of someone who keeps saying Voldemort, and they've seen (e.g.) Harry's elbow on the edge of, presumably, the magic "barrier" surrounding the house (or the event horizon of the fidelius charm or whatever). And they can presumably see that there is number 11 and there is number 13 and there's nothing in between. And surely they can put two and two together. So does that count as them knowing the secret? I guess not, since they are hanging around outside and clearly can't see the house. But what if, say, one of these death eaters was mates with Regulus back in the day, and had been to his house? Surely, surely that death eater would pretty much know the secret?
I suppose this is really part of the bigger question of how the fidelius charm works in general. Unless I've misunderstood canon, there's an inconsistency here: after Wormtail told Voldemort where the Potters were hiding, presumably the charm was broken, because Hagrid was able to retrieve baby Harry from the house and, later in this book, Harry and Hermione go to Godric's Hollow and find the house. From the events of Halloween 1981 as described in PoA, I'd assumed that the secret keeper telling anyone the secret effectively broke the enchantment. However, in OotP, Harry is told the location of the house by Dumbledore (well, it's written down and he reads it, but isn't that the whole thing - Dumbledore is secret keeper, so he has to tell Harry). And when Dumbledore dies, the secret "passes down" to everyone who was told it. Therefore, right here in this chapter, the death eaters can't see or get into the house. Inconsistency? Slip-up? Hmm. Odd one.
Meanwhile, back in the present, Harry is pulling off his cloak and sitting down for dinner. The kitchen is unrecognisably clean and nice, because apparently one elderly but placated house-elf can do more in a month than a bunch of adults and teenagers can do in like over a year. There's a fire in the grate, and Kreacher has made soup, stew, and treacle tart, in early September. Anyway, Harry has bad news - Snape has been made headmaster of Hogwarts and the Carrow siblings (Amycus and Alecto - and I often forget one of them is a woman, because both those names have masculine endings, you know), both death eaters, have been given teaching posts. Harry and Ron talk over how much that's going to suck balls, but they reckon the other teachers will stick around, if only to protect the kids. As they eat, they angst a bit over the fact that they're not on the Hogwarts Express today, hanging with Ginny, Neville and Luna, who they are certain are making molotov cocktails and spraying situationist graffiti on the train windows at this very moment.
They start yamming their soup, and Hermione shows up - she's had the badass notion of putting Phineas Nigellus's portrait in her bag of holding, to provide a way of knowing what's going on at Hogwarts and so that Snape can't use the same trick to see what they're up to at the house. Harry reports back from his day of watching the entrance to the Ministry of Magic: Art Weasley is fine, no sign of Umbridge. Ron mentions that maintenance workers wear navy blue and Hermione chews him out for not mentioning it before. Harry interrupts their tedious bickering to say he thinks they should invade the ministry tomorrow; it seems the plan is to rip off various parts of Star Wars and, dressed as Stormtroopers, break into Umbridge's office to retrieve the real horcrux locket. Their month of spying and eavesdropping has led them to the knowledge that they can't floo or apparate in, and will have to blag their way inside the ministry in some other way. They've allegedly spent a month discussing how to do this, but as we will see in the next chapter, this seems to mean they've listened to random people outside the ministry, come up with an ideal scenario for getting in, and not dwelt for a second on the possibility of any outcome other than a) everything works out perfectly or b) they all die instantly and don't need to worry any more. Well, Hermione has been worrying about things not happening properly, but only to the extent of "Oh no, something might go wrong", rather than, "What if X happens? We should do Y to ensure it doesn't".
They continue to bicker over the ins and outs of the plan, when Harry's scar hurts and he runs to the bathroom sink. The sink is black and has taps in the shape of open-mouthed snakes, which is pimpin'. I can totally see Harry, post-DH but pre-epilogue, appearing in the wizarding version of MTV Cribs, showing us around his house with its serpent-shaped taps and, probably, ceiling mirrors and 6-foot-wide plasma screen TVs and a hot tub with fire around it. Anyway, Harry gets another one of his rather convenient updates on what Voldemort is doing, which, on this occasion, is visiting what is either a really old-school German village or the fairytale section of an amusement park. He breaks into a house and asks for Gregorovitch, that wandmaker who I guess is relevant in some way. The woman yells in German that he has moved away, but Voldemort does not have time for her bullshit, and he AKs her and her kids right there. (Interestingly, the woman shields her kids with her body, which I think leads to questions about Lily's sacrifice, like why doesn't this woman's death cause the AK to bounce off the kids? What in particular caused this to happen the night the Potters died? I would wank out a theory but, meh.)
Harry comes around and tells Ron and Hermione that he was just having a nap or something. Oddly enough, they don't buy this (Harry is pretty much the worst liar ever), so Harry angsts about Cedric's death, which was a bit like the one he just saw. I like that little bit of continuity there, Cedric being acknowledged and stuff. Hermione chews Harry out for not mastering occlumency, which is - in theory - also a nice little bit of continuity, but in reality makes my heart sink, because the whole occlumency thing was only interesting some of the time and was more or less pointless anyway. They argue, with Harry making noises about using his power for good and the Crew being sceptical about this whole thing, but eventually they all agree to STFU and head back to the kitchen to eat stew and treacle tart until their hearts stop.
They stay up late, going over the plan (which is odd, considering how shoddy this "plan" turns out to be), and then bedtime; Harry is now sleeping in Sirius's bed (is it just me, or is this a bit... odd? What with Harry's daddy issues and all that? Or possibly just slashy, whichever). In the morning, Ron wakes Harry by calling him a hideous fucker or something, and they breakfast on hot rolls and fresh coffee. I wrote the first draft of this post on a train, listening to a small child saying, "Mummy mummy mummy mummy mummy mummy mummy mummy mummy can I have sweets", and the buffet car was closed, and it was like JKR was mocking me with her talk of coffee. Over the food, Hermione doles out supplies for the mission - there's some nicely shoehorned in product placement for various Weasley brand props, like those hilarious sweets that hilariously give you dysentery, and little packages of sarin gas and stuff like that. Finally, after the promise of pie from Kreacher (damn you, JKR! Now I want pie!) they apparate off to the ministry.
Action time! First up, Hermione stuns one Mafalda Hopkirk, polyjuices into her, and hides the original Mafalda in a disused building. As Mafalda, Hermione force-feeds one of those vomity sweets to some maintenance guy, who duly chunders all over the floor. Ron polyjuices into him, and we discover he is one Reg Cattermole. Reg!Ron and Mafalda!Hermione fuck off for a while and return with some more hair, which Harry uses to polyjuice into a tall, buff and apparently badass chap. Together, they head for what appear to be public toilets. Some hilarious fucker remarks that they security levels are a bit high, it's stupid, it's not like Harry Potter's gonna turn up! Ha! Ha! Which is surely up there with joking that there's a bomb in your luggage at the airport check-in. Plus, you know, LOL THE IRONY. Anyway, that guy fucks off, so Ron and Harry decide to do some impromptu cottaging while they're here and enter a cubicle. However, by an extraordinary coincidence, it turns out that to enter the ministry, you have to flush yourself down a toilet, so that's what they do. Man, these wizards are so fucking wacky I could just kill myself.
The trio find themselves in the main atrium of the ministry. Last time we were here, there was a big golden statue, but Voldemort and Dumbledore joined forces to utterly fuck that up, and in its place are statues of a witch and a wizard, sitting on piles of ugly, deformed-looking muggles, with a caption reading MAGIC IS MIGHT, which I do find quite chilling, actually. Yaxley, a blatant death eater we've met before, joins them and bollocks Reg!Ron on account of Yaxley's office is raining and Reg should have sorted it out by now. In bollocking Ron, he helpfully provides us with some useful exposition concerning Reg's wife, who is muggle-born, and is being interrogated today, and if Ron cocks up, then she is fucked.
Our intrepid trio board a lift and a series of characters get in and out, providing exposition as they go. We learn that Harry has polyjuiced into Runcorn, a jerk, and that Ron needs Hermione telling him what to do at all times. Ron gets off at level two, and finally, the lift reaches level one, and the doors open, and ohnoes there is Umbridge! And the chapter ends.
I don't have too much more to say about this one. It's relatively fast-paced, with lots of action, which is certainly more enjoyable than the bits coming up where they spend the whole chapter sitting around doing sod all. Also, we get to see some concrete examples of how the ministry is now treating muggle-borns (and there are more in the next chapter too), which is both more satisfying and more chilling than just being told about it. On the other hand, for all the action, there's not much development, and ultimately this entire section is a bit unnecessary (in the sense that there's no dramatic reason for Umbridge to have the locket - JKR could just as easily have written that Mundungus still had it, or Kreacher did, or whatever).
The problem isn't so much with the sequence per se but with the context in which it occurs. This kind of sequence can actually work very well in the context of a video game, because it gives the player more to do, makes for more interesting and longer gameplay, gives the player the option of straying from the main narrative (the Zelda games tend to do this very well, with lots of poe souls, golden bugs or skulltulas to collect, sword upgrades, item-swapping, timed horseback races and so on). Even the oddly convenient nature of the quest itself is acceptable, again because it's fun (it's not particularly realistic that each of the, I don't know, Pendants of Ry'leh is in a different area of the map and each can only be found by using the item you just happen to have found in the last dungeon, but it doesn't matter). In a novel, not so much, because there is only the one narrative - you read the book from the start to the end. So, in practice, this chapter (and the next one) are less like a side-quest and more like, say, that early sequence in the Zelda game Ocarina of Time when you have to sneak into Hyrule Castle without getting seen by the guards. It's a useful way of getting used to how the game works, a nice and easy mini-quest to start the game with, but nevertheless it's bloody tedious, especially when you're playing the game for the second or third time (or seventeenth time, if you're me), and considering that if you mess up you have to start over from the beginning. Plus, it's set up like a fun diversion but it's actually essential for continuing with the story, so it rapidly stops being fun. That's the overall feeling I get from this section, then - boredom, wishing things would hurry up and happen, feeling like the characters (and therefore the author) are kind of wasting my time. The thing is, if the plot was such that this bit really was essential (i.e. if it didn't feel like a random excursion - don't ask me how, I'm no author), this could easily be one of the best bits of the book.
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