Who wrote the Goblet of Fire?

Who wrote Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire?

Sounds like a silly question, doesn't it? Of course J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Her name is right there on the cover, she has publicly claimed it and accepted credit for it.

But I am not sure that the J.K. Rowling who wrote the four Harry Potter book was the same person as the J.K. Rowling who wrote books one, two, three and five.

The Rowling who wrote most of the Potter books is a master story teller, a clear and technically perfect writer, a person who cares about the details as much as she cares about the grand themes of her work.

The Rowling who wrote The Goblet of Fire, on the other hand, seems to me at least to have been a different person: a person in a rush, under pressure to take advantage of the building success of her first three books and publish book four as soon as she could. 

The first three Harry Potter books were published in consecutive years -- 1997, 1998 and 1999 -- and each came in at between 200 and 300 pages. That's a remarkable creative pace but, considering the relatively brevity of the books and the simplicity of their plots, eminently reasonable. And these books are masterpieces, technically perfect in the details and creatively impressive in their overall achievement.

Goblet comes in at a whopping 636 pages but was still published only a year after The Prisoner of Azkaban. And, if you read it carefully, it is a sloppy sloppy book.

At a macro level, the plot is hyper-convoluted and nonsensical: once Voldemort manages to place Barty Crouch Jr. at Hogwarts with access to Harry, the entire Triwizard Tournament is rendered unnecessary. Crouch could simply port-key Harry to the graveyard on any one of the many occasions he had access to our young hero and, in the process, Crouch himself would not have had to be sacrificed.

Further, as I have pointed out elsewhere, there are significant problems with key points in this book, problems that should have been caught by Rowling in the writing:

1. Wormtail killed Cedric Diggory with his own wand and yet, when Harry's wand forces Voldemort's wand to regurgitate its most recent spells ("priori incantatem") in reverse order, Cedric emerges as if Voldemort's wand had killed him;

2. In the same "priori incantatem" scene, Harry's parents emerge from Voldemort's wand in the wrong order: it is made clear throughout the books that Voldemort murdered James Potter first, then was forced to murder Lily Potter in order to get to infant Harry, and so Lily should have emerged from Voldemort's wand first -- but James does; and

3. Rita Skeeter must have overheard the entire scene involving Harry, Dumbledore, Fudge, Snape, McGonagall, Sirius Black and the others in the Hospital Wing at the end of the book, including the confrontation between Fudge and Dumbledore -- once Hermione catches her at the very end of that scene, Skeeter could have been forced to write and publish the entire true story immediately so as to force Fudge to admit the truth. And render much of the plot of Book Five unnecessary.

Even so, it is in the details of the writing that the sloppiness becomes unhappily apparent.

I have chronicled in previous posts how skilled Rowling is at providing the reader background information from previous books in interesting ways while still moving the plot of the current book forward effectively. In Chapter 2 of the Goblet, however, she simply slaps it all into the story in long expository paragraphs. This continues in Chapter 3 and, despite a promising opening chapter, we are almost 40 pages in before the main plot even begins.

The book is also rife with the kind of small grammatical errors (for example, subject-verb disagreements, especially when she uses collective noun such as "group of students" but then uses the verb in its plural form "group of students were") that Rowling usually avoids, with run-on sentences (... and ... and ... and ... but) and with examples where she tells us something rather letting us discover it through action and dialogue.

For example, I opened the book at random and came up with this quote as an example of a run-on sentence:

'Lovely,' said Rita Skeeter, and in a second, her scarlet-taloned finger's had Harry's upper arm in a surprisingly strong grip, and she was steering him out of the room again and opening a nearby door.

 It is possible, of course, that the failure is on the part of Rowling's editors -- perhaps all of her draft manuscripts arrived at the publisher's office replete with errors and the editors whipped them into shape.

Whoever it was, the fourth Harry Potter book fails to live up to the exceptional quality of writing of the other six. And I think it's because Book Four was a significant rush job. Even though it is a mammoth tome, neither Rowling nor her publishers saw fit to take the time necessary to make sure it was of the same quality as her earlier novels in their rush to publish it for their adoring and lucrative public.

Draco's wand chose his mother (apparently)

I am writing this in the middle of the night and without my books in front of me but, as I was reading the French version of The Philosopher's Stone (A L'ecole de sorciers), two issues came to mind, one minor and one fairly major.

The minor one is simply this: at the time the translation of The Philosopher's Stone was undertaken, J.K. Rowling and her publisher had already amended the book so that Adalbert Waffling was NOT listed as the author of A History of Magic on Harry's first year book list. As we all know, Bathilda Bagshot (or, as she is known in the French-speaking world, Bathilda Tourdesac) penned this all important tome.

The translation was done, however, before Rowling corrected the little addition error where she has a woman complain that an item in Diagon Alley costs 17 Sickles (or "dix-sept Mornilles") which, we find out later, is the equivalent of one Galleon ("Gallion"), leading to the question: why wouldn't the woman complain that the item costs a Galleon?

The more major issue that arises in the early part of the first book is related to the subject of wand lore that becomes so important and oft-discussed in the later books.

It is a well-known fact among Potter fans that "The Wand chooses the Wizard". The scene where Harry first vista Ollivanders' to purchase his wand is a classic, in fact, and the allegiance of a wand, how it can be won and lost, and how a wand both learns from and teaches its chosen witch or wizard, are all wonderful aspects of wand lore that we cherish in the Potter world.

What has really jumped out at me in reading the first book in French, however, is the reality that Jo had not really developed her detailed theories of wand lore when she wrote The Philosopher's Stone. These ideas that the Wand chooses the Wizard and that, once that choice is made, a genuine, intimate relationship develops between the two simply do not seem to exist in her mind at that point in time.

Why do I write this?

First, even before Harry visits Ollivanders', he meets a young Draco Malfoy at Madam Malkin's, being fitted for his school robes. What does Malfoy say to Harry? To paraphrase, he says: "My mother is off buying my wand". Yikes! No wand is choosing Draco -- his mother is picking one up for him as she might a new pair of socks or a telescope.

And second, Ron later complains to Harry that he has a "hand-me-down" wand, that used to be his brother's. Wait a minute: that single sentence implies first that a Wizard might decide, after being chosen by his Wand at age 11, that he simply feels like going out and buying a new one. What about he relationship, the teaching and learning? Second, it means that Mr. and Mrs. Weasley have no concerns about their youngest son using a Wand that has not chosen him. Wow. I know they're poor but...

I am smiling, of course, as I write this. I know that it is much too much to expect that Rowling had every detail of her incredibly complex magical world nailed down when she sat down to write that first book. But it is interesting to be able to trace the development of some of the more important details and themes in the books themselves.

Sharing the excitement of the Studio Tour

The Gates of Hogwarts

As I said in my last post, my 50th Birthday visit to the Harry Potter Studio Tour was made even more exciting and enjoyable by the fact that a birthday party of young people adopted me and allowed me to share in their excitement.

This is a photo of me at the Hogwarts Gates with several of these happy young people -- published with permission. Note the fabulous robes on two of them and the big smiles on the faces of all of us.

Every once in a while during the tour, I'd run into them again and they'd shout "hello" and wish me "Happy Birthday" and they would point with excitement at the nearest display and asked "Did you see...?"

They told me that they had all been on the tour at least once before. One of the girls said she already owns at least 12 wands (!!!!) so I was very happy when the Studio permitted us all a sneak preview of the Hogwarts Express display. At least the kids got the chance to see something new!

Harry Potter and my day-to-day life

I know, I know, I know. It's been a very long time since I wrote a new entry for this blog. I apologize. I have been so caught up in other projects that I haven't had the chance to read, or write, about Harry and his friends in quite some time.

That doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about J.K.'s magical world. No, that world never drifts far from my mind. It just means I haven't been actively reading the books, watching the films or writing this blog of late.

And Harry Potter keeps popping up in my day-to-day life. It's in some ways amazing how these books and films that are now several years in the past continue to have life, continue to influence the world in which we live.

Three examples:

1. Did you see the articles on the various new websites about how scientists are working on developing an Invisibility Cloak, similar to that "seen in Harry Potter"? Awesome. I have gotten used to seeing articles of this kind that talk about scientific developments that bring to life technology that was first seen in Star Trek but this is the first article that referred to Harry Potter. What's next, the development of flying brooms? a flue network? a deluminator?

2. I watched the Jim Carrey film Yes Man on Netflix the other day and was pleased to see Harry Potter play a significant role. Now, this is not a great movie. It starts well and seems to be promising some interesting stuff but, unfortunately, it starts to fall apart about half way through and degenerates into silliness by the end. Be that as it may, it was a lot of fun to see Jim Carrey (dressed as Harry) and Zooey Deschanel (dressed as Hermione) attend a Harry Potter party, complete with an awesome Dobby in attendance.

3. I was chatting with my boss the other day about my holiday plans. My partner, you see, is preparing a big trip for us to celebrate my upcoming birthday and she has kept our destination a secret from me. This makes the whole thing very fun, exciting and mysterious. It also leads to a lot of questions, both from me and from other people in my life. My boss asked where I thought I might end up going. I said I can think of a variety of possibilities, all of them fantastic: England, France, Italy, Prague, the Netherlands, California, Victoria BC, even Florida so that we can go to Harry Potter World. When I mentioned the last option, my boss, the last person in the world I would have thought to have read Harry Potter not to mention to have gone to Harry Potter World, smiled, nodded and said: "We waited in line for three hours to get a wand!"

Awesome.

I wonder where I'm going to go.

On fickle fondness, falling to pieces and Pottermore

I think, if you read this blog from start to finish, you would probably find that I have posted entries saying how much I love each one of the seven Harry Potter books in turn but, at some other date, have stated very strongly how much I hate every Harry Potter book in turn.

It's funny how much my opinion changes on some of these books each time I re-read them.

For example, I have just finished re-reading The Half-Blood Prince.  If memory serves, I have often said that this is one of my least-favourite of the seven. And yet, this time out, I really enjoyed it. It was a fun read and I found the trips into the various memories to learn about Voldemort's past very interesting this time around.

Strange. And now I'm on to The Deathly Hallows again. This, along with The Prisoner of Azkaban, has always been one of my favourites. I wonder if I'll like it as much upon this reading.

Another strange point: I find myself ridiculously proud of the fact that my copy of this long last novel, a hard cover copy no less, is starting to fall into pieces. I have actually read this book so many times that it's starting to fall apart. Wow. That's devotion.

And I've joined Pottermore finally. My Pottermore name is "Bloodquill 19500" so, if you enjoy reading this blog and are a member of J.K.'s site too, why not friend me? We can duel. I'm a terrible duellist so far so you'll earn your House many many points by taking me on.

Have I mentioned that I was sorted into Gryffindor on Pottermore? Have I said how proud that made me feel? Cool.