Nick's Café Canadien

I’m quite shocked. I didn’t think she could do it.

A July release date for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had been rumoured long before yesterday’s announcement, mostly because the prospect of the seventh Potter being released on 7/7/07 (as was often suggested) was too numerologically fortuitous to pass up. There were two reasons I never believed this: first, it coincided with the anniversary of the London tube bombings, and while I don’t like the idea that we’re effectively letting the terrorists win, I can understand the need for sensitivity.

More to the point, though, all indications were that Rowling wouldn’t finish in time. Books don’t get printed and shipped out as soon as they’re done: the fact that the date is now set to 21 July indicates that a complete draft is already in the can. I had no idea she was anywhere close to this. Settling on a title in December was probably the first indication that the book was coming along much faster than I expected, but even then, this is all rather sudden.

It’s encouraging, though. As was the case with The Prisoner of Azkaban, a quick turnaround time means things were tightly planned, things are going as planned, and the author isn’t struggling. It could make for a satisfying finale, to say the least.

By the way: while I have to read The Half-Blood Prince again before I commit to anything, my chips are still on “Harry is not a Horcrux,” “Snape is evil” and “Harry, Ron and Hermione all make it out alive.” All three of these positions are somewhat contrarian, and I wager I’m one of very few people to hold all of them at once, but we’ll see who’s eating crow come Saturday the 21st.

Next item on the agenda: Family Guy.

I make it no secret that I am not at all a fan of the show. In fact, I find it often irritating and outright dumb. After watching a few consecutive episodes one summer, it became readily apparent to me that however fresh it must have seemed back in its inaugural season, what passes for comedy on Family Guy amounts to a bag of three or four basic tricks.

I’m not going to get into details here. I tried once, but I couldn’t get to the end. Just read this guy and pay special attention to #9, #7, #3 and #2. And just know that the moment the show lost me for good was when I realized it didn’t even know how to make a decent jab at The Da Vinci Code.

I only bring up Family Guy now because for all its failings, the one element that never ceases to impress me is the music, be it the nostalgic sitcom cues or the full-blown musical numbers. Sure, like the rest of the show, most of them are merely referential and not parodic, which means that they can be cute, but not necessarily funny. I know at least one person who only knew the great Lerner/Loewe tune “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” from Seth McFarlane doing Stewie doing Rex Harrison in one of Family Guy‘s more triumphant moments, and not from My Fair Lady; I’m sure he’s not alone.

So what do we make of this: taking the scene from Anchors Aweigh where Gene Kelly dances with the latter half of Tom and Jerry as a palimpsestic surface, so now we have Gene Kelly dancing with Stewie Griffin?

Personally, I find it quite enjoyable, and probably as good as the show is ever prone to get. In fact, Family Guy is generally a lot more tolerable when snipped into little sketches and segments that are placed online. This is one of its better moments, even if it reeks of the problem I mentioned earlier – that the show can’t tell the difference between reference and parody, and often settles for the former.

But as fun as it may be, Steve Worth is on point: “How much ‘thought to animation and choreography’ does it take to rotoscope someone else’s animation and slap your own character over the top of it?… Family Guy deserves no praise for this. A ripoff is a ripoff.”

Then again, even a ripoff is linguistically interesting from time to time.

As an aside, I started sketching this post in my undergraduate class on the philosophy of mind, and it’s slowly dawning on me just how little most people know about computers. I think it’s a problem, at a basic conceptual level, that the average layman wraps his head around computers as if they were only machines that are or aren’t powerful enough to do certain things, and not as theoretical, mathematical constructions – which, when it comes to a philosophical approach to consciousness, is the part that matters.

Generally, this is probably a consequence of the fact that most people’s exposure to science is limited to an exposure to technology. Consequently, it must be easy for them to fall into the trap of thinking that scientific problems, or philosophical ones with scientific elements, can be solved by technological progress alone.

Keeping in mind that I’m not a stickler for correspondence to source material when it comes to movies adapted from books – relatively speaking, anyhow – I have a few observations to point out regarding the new Goblet of Fire trailer. Like a lot of trailers for big franchise movies that are near enough to release that most of the effects work is done, it shows everything – so if you don’t want to see everything from Hermione’s pink ball gown (yes, it’s pink here and not blue) to Lord Voldemort himself, avert your eyes.

First of all, the tombstone in the graveyard scene has been fixed. Early promotional images such as this one revealed an egregious error – that is, the presumption that Tom Marvolo Riddle’s dead father was also named Tom Marvolo Riddle, which was from the outset more improbable than the transfiguration of a pair of missiles into a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias, and then flatly contradicted by events critical to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Near the end of this trailer there are a few shots from the resurrection in the graveyard (like I said, it shows everything), and the inscription has been corrected.

Much more irritating than anything else – and I suspect this will end up being my greatest annoyance with the finished product when I see it in November – is Dumbledore’s butchered pronunciation of “Beauxbatons”, which is similar to how they pronounce “Baton Rouge” in the drawl of the former Confederate states. Seriously, William the Conqueror died for this? Oh well – I suppose they already neglected to drop the silent T in “Voldemort”, so all bets are off. Now we’ll just have to deal with the premise that a Bulgarian kid learns how to enunciate Hermione’s name but the only one You-Know-Who ever feared stumbles over his French after a century of practice. What would really be upsetting is if the francophone characters do the same.

Like Cuaron’s flying Iceman Dementors in The Prisoner of Azkaban, there are a lot of neat visual inventions on display – Mad-Eye Moodyvision, Sirius Black speaking in the form of the embers in the fire instead of a disembodied head (which makes me wonder what will be done if they keep the scene of Umbridge fumbling about for his presence in Phoenix), and the rippling Jumbotron at the Quidditch World Cup, to name a few. I can see plenty of dynamism befitting the scope of the tale, a pulse that was sorely lacking in the Columbus films. Now that we have a pretty clear idea of the look of the film, the big question mark is the pace.

And I wouldn’t tell you if I did.

One of the ancillary benefits of writing about the new Harry Potter book when all the major fan websites and discussion forums are closed for spoiler protection, as was the case last weekend, is that you appear very high in the Google charts for a day or two, and blog traffic jumps twentyfold as if it just had a run-in with a Great American Jackalope. It seems that being on topic, even be it in a disorganized splitter-splatter that you forgot to sweep under the rug before eight hundred uninvited guests crash your dinner party (and your little server, too!), gives SEO scammers the old one-two any day of the week.

I do have some sober second thoughts to offer about Regulus Black, soul-eating lockets, double-crossing Potions profs and the proper care and feeding of a Blast-Ended Skrewt in light of the myriad observations brought to my attention by respondents in the comment box and via e-mail, but not now. But lest thee think the rest of this post is a mistake, it will commence with my talking Potter once more.

Colby Cosh, I’m told, is a somewhat prominent journalist from this neck of the woods whose blog sports a clean wordmark banner in oblique serifs and middleweight traffic to match. Last week he wrote an article for the National Post which basically amounts to “nobody’s going to remember J.K. Rowling decades from now” and 877 words of eloquent padding.

I wish Mr. Cosh the best of luck in beating back the torrential downpour of hate mail, predominantly written by impulsive illiterates that drown out the level-headed critics, that descends from the heavens whenever a writer with a megaphone attacks something popular that may or may not be spectacularly good (and in this case, I think it is). Words of advice that I feel are appropriate here: draco dormiens nunquam titillandus, kiddo.

As for my part in all this – well, given how resident Anglophile Sarah and something-else-ophile Roman have both given the piece a mention, both very much in their own fashions, I couldn’t possibly remain left out.

There’s honestly not much to respond to, though, so this will be short and won’t even require me to speak of the Potter series’ lasting virtues and pervasive universals, of which I think there are many. Cosh’s syllogism, once you uproot the Opinion-page flower garden, amounts to: a) Some incredibly popular authors from the early twentieth century have since been forgotten; b) J.K. Rowling is an incredibly popular author; 3) therefore, J.K. Rowling will be forgotten within the century.

Allow me to introduce you to ∈. My little buddy ∈ is, in set theory, the “is a member of the set” symbol. Yes, sales figures show that Ms. Rowling ∈ the set of incredibly popular authors. Where, though, is it demonstrated that Rowling ∈ the set of forgettable popular authors who don’t outlive their press and contemporaneous relevance?

Okay, I’m not playing fair. You can’t demonstrate such a thing because it hasn’t happened yet, and any claims either way are predictive. But then let’s work by comparison, as Cosh does, and answer his rhetorical question: “What blind god bestows immortality on some authors and consigns others to oblivion?” And just to show that I mean business, a few paragraphs down I’m going to pull out my 3/3, Flying, Trample Raymond Chandler.

The problem with the comparisons drawn in the article is that there are better ones from the same time period, the early twentieth century – not marginally, but significantly better.

Take Agatha Christie, for instance – nobody special, just the bestselling prose author of all time. Like Rowling, her writing has a characteristic, well-mannered British flavour that appeals to the good Anglophile, not just on the level of form, but also on the level of content for the millions who consume it in translation. Like Rowling, her world is a complex construction populated by an assortment of eccentrics that challenge the starring sleuths at every turn; but it is a cozy world where ultimately, the clues and answers draw more attention than the inciting murders do. And like Rowling, she’s a woman, but we’ll not get into that.

The criticisms of either author’s modus operandi run along similar lines: that their stories lounge on chesterfields too comfy to be threatening and thus too unreal to be believable, that instead of doing something wholly original they solo off the leadsheets of others who quaff the same formulae and choose to impress with meticulousness.

Raymond Chandler, noted inventor of the simile-spouting private eye narrator archetype, wrote a seminal critique of the twentieth-century detective story, published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1944 and entitled “The Simple Art of Murder”. (You can see a slightly off-angle PDF scan here, but it is often reproduced in print with a collection of short stories.) Read the essay, as it is one of the most important things ever written about mystery. In it, he writes that the detective story is some of the most difficult fiction to concoct, yet it is at the same time very easily publishable:

The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn’t get published. The average – or only slightly above average – detective story does… And the strange thing is that this average, more than middling dull, pooped-out piece of utterly unreal and mechanical fiction is really not very different from what are called the masterpieces of the art. It drags on a little more slowly, the dialogue is a shade grayer, the cardboard out of which the characters are cut is a shade thinner, and the cheating is a little more obvious. But it is the same kind of book. Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel.

Chandler goes on in this manner and responds to what today, in hindsight, we refer to as the Christie Cozy – the clue-scrubbing deductive puzzles that invariably miss some critical insurer of plausibility beneath all their intricate workmanship. Some of the authors he glosses over in this deliberation – E.C. Bentley, Freeman Wills Crofts, A.A. Milne – we don’t hear much of anymore, at least not in conjunction with mystery. I suppose we still know who Milne is, but that’s because of his kids’ stuff like Winnie the Pooh and not The Red House Mystery. (This will become important.)

So if the detective stories of the day were all chips off the same block, why is Christie synonymous with everything that followed Arthur Conan Doyle? Chandler answers this, but not directly. In rebuking Dorothy L. Sayers for her statement that mysteries, of which she was herself a prolific writer, were intrinsically second-class escapist literature, Chandler goes on to praise Dashiell Hammett and his first-class The Maltese Falcon for introducing gritty gangland realism as the remedy. But observe:

How original a writer Hammett really was it isn’t easy to decide now, even if it mattered. He was one of a group – the only one who achieved critical recognition – who wrote or tried to write realistic mystery fiction. All literary movements are like this; some one individual is picked out to represent the whole movement; he is usually the culmination of the movement. Hammett was the ace performer, but there is nothing in his work that is not implicit in the early novels and short stories of Hemingway.

His argument is, in effect, that authors are not remembered for originating as much as they are remembered for exemplifying. Once the sort of detective fiction that Philip Marlowe’s creator wrote of passed into history, Agatha Christie became the era’s flagbearer by way of such exemplification.

I do not know if, at the time, Chandler realized that his own work would be regarded one day as the culmination of something that Hammett began – the mythos of the quintessential American gumshoe. His work is representative. So, as we shall see, is Rowling’s.

Where Rowling and Christie diverge is that only the former traverses two other spheres that often intersect. The first is children’s fiction, and the second is fantasy.

Good children’s fiction – the kind that adults go back and read – is notoriously unclassifiable. Often, the subject matter resonates far beyond the the confines of the single-digit Flesch reading level, and one is reluctant to call them children’s stories at all for fear that the term is disparaging and exclusionary. Let’s dispense with this in a hurry. Yes, adults read Harry Potter. I read Harry Potter. University professors, God bless them, teach and study Harry Potter. They’re still children’s novels, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Unlike mysteries, here we deal with authors who write for an audience that doesn’t concern itself with realism simply because it doesn’t have a lot of real-world fact-checking to fall back on. Also unlike mysteries, “children’s lit” is not a genre, since its distinguishing mark is an attribute of form, not content. In contrast, Chandler’s statement that good and bad mysteries fundamentally tell the same stories is an extension of genre defined as fluid form that bubbles around a solid content core, including (but not limited to) a murder and a bowl of petunias.

What we do have, though, is an existing system for passing fiction down from one generation to the next.

How is it that people discover what books to read, anyway? Word-of-mouth recommendations, certainly; bookshop browsing, bestseller lists, movie deals, and allusions from without; in fact, it’s all kind of erratic in a spotty kind of way, which is why it is only in very special cases that everybody reads the same book.

Children’s fiction is the huge exception. Standard curricula, Scholastic book orders, well-read teachers (if you’re lucky) and the active encouragement of doing any reading at all unite with the result of having people read the same books in droves, or at least become aware of them likewise. A lot of books are lost in history because nobody told their kids to read them, and those kids went off and either developed their own tastes, or tragically stopped reading them outright. But the ilk of Roald Dahl, L. Frank Baum and yes, A.A. Milne receive a proper introduction. These books are inherited, as they are easy to leave as cultural inheritance. Without a doubt, Harry Potter ∈ this corpus.

Finally, we turn to the realm of fantasy, which returns us to the generic distinctions assessed of mystery. Just as J.K. Rowling’s brand of sleuthing hearkens back to the Christie Cozy that has long gone out of fashion in mainstream detective writing, Harry Potter marks another sort of representative culmination. It drew adult readers back to the kind of serial fairytale where Magic is fun and (relatively) innocent. Whereas the post-Tolkien “adult fantasy” experiments have drifted off in the opposite direction, churning out paperbacks thicker than they are wide burdened with unpronounceably apostrophic nomenclature, the ever-English Potter breathes some life back into the spellwork of forces good and evil.

History has shown that this is the sort of life that lasts, and I am confident that Rowling’s importance will prove to be historical. A series of books that is this popular, and more importantly, this emblematic, will affect both writing patterns and reading patterns until the Next Big Thing that steps up to bat in the selfsame ballpark – which may not be anything new, but is certain to be the next ripple in a long wave of ripples, the indicator of its precedent’s subsidence.

Rowling works in genres, and a plurality of them at that. Moreover, they are genres that are aware of their own history, and the works of the present propel authors forward, authors who grab new readers by the collar and pull them right back. Cosh’s examples of writers who have faded into obscurity – Harold Bell Wright, Jeffrey Farnol and the American Winston Churchill – dabbled primarily in the historical and the modern, not genres in themselves, where the subject is in flux and there is little propagative continuity in stylistic influences.

I am not saying that novels outside of genre are far less likely to survive; that kind of claim presumes a consistent system to produce a bell of fiction that never stops ringing, and none exists, for physicists have yet to discover the resonant frequencies of written words. But one must admit that Rowling has certain advantages, since she’s more than an author: she’s a movement. Really now, it’s hard to name an author working today who is more thoroughly guaranteed to take the fast-track to English lit’s pantheon.

I suggest that Mr. Cosh take on a certain Dan Brown. There, his argument about press-driven momenta apply just fine, and Brown makes for much easier pickings.

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If your answer is lining up in front of Chapters decked out in your full Hogwarts regalia for your copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and then reading the entire book in three hours, and then spoiling the ending on your blog, and then lamenting the improbability of a romantic relationship between Draco and Hermione, then you clearly need to try something else next weekend.

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If you have yet to read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, do not read this post.

The paradox there, as you may have noticed, is that you would have to have read this post – a part of the whole, anyway – to receive that warning.

Oh, parts and wholes. I’m finding it a lot easier to commit my thoughts to print (or the digital equivalent thereof) about Book Six compared to Revenge of the Sith, which you’ll notice I still haven’t written about two months on. To this I attribute three reasons. Paramount among these is that with The Half-Blood Prince I don’t feel the obligation to be all that deep, analytical and holistic because I am dealing with a part, and microcosmic parts within that part; gut reactions will suffice. I imagine that it’s going to be a lot more difficult to write about Book Seven once I read it, as conclusions of the significance promised are never isolable. Second is the fact that the ending promises a Book Seven so different from everything that has come before it that the room for speculation has never been wider.

Third is that J.K. Rowling has demonstrated once again what a master storyteller she is. Let me explain.

No, on second thought, I shan’t need to, because you’ve read the book.

The Big Fat Kill in Chapter Twenty-Seven was, to me, a complete shock. It was doubly shocking specifically because it had no business being a surprise at all – and here, I’m not referring to the fact that it’s been on the Internet for three whole weeks, with the fact indistinguishable from jokes and hypotheses to, well, most of us. Besides, having read the book, you know that the real surprise is how it happens, and how it is that the slimy bastard gets away with it right under everyone’s noses when Rowling hands him to us in Chapter Two and even has Wormtail serving him drinks for effect.

So, on to the observations – and there may be more coming.

For the most part, the book reads like its brother by symmetry, The Chamber of Secrets – exposition galore about the younger Riddle, almost all of the action confined to school premises for the first time in awhile, and for some time nothing close to the thrill-a-chapter sucker punches in The Order of the Phoenix. After Books Four and Five, this one feels like an old-school Potter; that is, if you ignore the sudden and tragic offstage demises of numerous previously onstage alumni. The Second War fusses about in the background, and we get chapters and chapters of relationship trouble and mucking about in the Pensieve. Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining here, considering that the last few chapters deliver a Goblet-sized payoff that smacks you upside the head and runs you over with a Thestral-drawn chariot – I’m just telling it as it is.

On fate and free will: Dumbledore confirms, and Harry understands, what I always thought since my first reading of Phoenix was pretty clear: the prophecy was a catalyst for a chain of self-fulfilling events, and nothing more. On the other hand, quick as one tends to be in dismissing Divination as a bunch of jokey mumbo-jumbo, you have to wonder about Trelawney’s deck of playing cards.

Between the last book and this one, it only takes a keen eye to infer that the Hog’s Head barkeep is Dumbledore’s brother Aberforth, and I believe Rowling has confirmed as much in public. I don’t think we’ll ever see this explicitly acknowledged within the text itself.

Not that it matters, but Miss Hepzibah “Descended from Hufflepuff” Smith is almost certainly related to Zacharias Smith.

The four remaining Horcruxes: taking it for granted that Nagini’s one – though keeping in mind that after this book, you can hardly say Dumbledore is infallible – and Slytherin’s locket has not been destroyed as promised by this R.A.B. fellow, that leaves Hufflepuff’s little piece of kitchenware and one unknown artefact. That the last piece is unknown, which certifies that its identity will be one of Book Seven’s core mysteries, leads me to think that it can’t be something as (relatively) mundane as Rowena Ravenclaw’s heirloom.

Still nothing about the veil or Sirius’ mirror, and with Wormtail being reduced to serving drinks, I’m beginning to wonder if any of the three have any significant part left to play.

First-years trying out for the Quidditch house team? It’s just short of being an outright contradiction – let’s grant that rules can change from year to year, and technically the rule is that they’re not allowed their own brooms, though who’s to say they can’t use a school one – but it’s glaring.

We still don’t know jack about Lily Evans, aside from her aptitude at Potions. Or, for that matter, her sister Petunia. That smells of business for the next volume.

The Half-Blood Prince scribbles in parentheses that Sectumsempra is non-verbal, but this seems more of a recommendation than an actual restriction on how the spell is to be delivered, as Harry uses it verbally to no ill effect other than letting a certain slimy somebody get away with murder – and his inability to spellcast non-verbally under pressure does him in with all his spells, not just that one.

We’re not done with surprises when it comes to Severus Snape. For one thing, we still don’t know Dumbledore’s unimpeachable reason for trusting him. Harry may have taken it to be Severus’ remorse at letting the prophecy slip, but that struck me as an answer Dumbledore gave in specific reference to Harry’s preceding challenge. I don’t for a moment buy that it’s the whole story. Everything in this book points to a strong conclusion that Snape is evil, but that he acts on an Unbreakable Vow casts a cloud of ambiguity as to his true motives. At the end of the day I think Draco has the measure of him as an eleventh-hour usurper, a Saruman figure if you will – a mere shadow of evil to its fullest but one who joins with it in hopes of its overthrow at his own hands.

To be honest, when I read that breaking an Unbreakable Vow results in death, I was almost expecting Snape to violate it at the critical moment and drop dead on the spot. But what he does instead… beyond how he was bound by contract to comply with the order, I entertain the suspicion that he performs it with Dumbledore’s full consent. We’ve seen our fair share of minibosses all claiming to be Voldemort’s closest pet – Lucius Malfoy (whose role in the story may be over), Barty Crouch, Bellatrix Lestrange – but Snape has now made the most convincing effort yet, and maybe that’s the leg up the good guys need even if they don’t realize it.

The whole Half-Blood Prince debacle and his actions after the Big Fat Kill, though, speak very strongly against him. At the end of the day, Snape the Usurper has a lot more going for it than theories of unfettered obedience to one side or the other. He fears Voldemort, and respects his wishes enough to keep Harry alive, but beyond that, he’s a wild card.

At this point it’s incredible that anybody could still think Severus is anything but a villain who is arguably a more dangerous man than Voldemort himself, but only a book ago almost all evidence was to the contrary, aside from his using the name “the Dark Lord” during Occlumency lessons – the same slip that was a dead giveaway moments before Crouch’s revelation in Book Four.

(For more information on what moles do after they lose the only ones who know theit true allegiance, watch the excellent Hong Kong cop thriller Infernal Affairs.)

R.A.B.: It’s not exactly fair of her to sic a new character on us this late in the game when it comes to something this critical, is it? But here’s what we know: it has to be someone Voldemort would recognize by those initials. He has to refer to Voldemort as the Dark Lord, have a motive for screwing him over with the Horcrux switcheroo and possess the skills to pull it off. Regulus Black’s initials match, but then we’d have to bank on Sirius being wrong about how he was a two-bit good-for-nothing who chickened out.

If it is Regulus, then the Black family connection and the search for lost items of dark power may lead Harry back to Grimmauld Place. And given how his inheritance of the house isn’t an angle that plays out in this book, I fully expect to see it in the next one.

On Dumbledore: well, I suppose there’s the portrait, if Harry somehow makes it back to Hogwarts next year. There’s also the Pensieve, though in the past it’s only been used as temporary storage for temporary examination, and it can only hold so much.

The kiss. Oh, the kiss. I haven’t seen the likes of it since Elliott let the frogs out in E.T.

Speaking of film, notice how from a visual standpoint the BFK at the Astronomy Tower is very similar in staging to the BFK in Revenge of the Sith. I do wonder how it will come off when the movie translation arrives. Cedric Diggory was a swift kick in the pants, I don’t think any of us had any concrete idea what was going on with Snuffles until a chapter or two after his snuffing, but this one was the most iconic and mysterious of them all. When Malfoy appeared on the scene, I was thinking: seriously, the world’s most powerful wizard done in by some punk? No way. At the end of the chapter, I was thinking: seriously, the world’s most powerful wizard done in by some punk? No way. I was wrong the second time.

Before Slughorn starts drinking his face off at Hagrid’s, notice how he mistakenly refers to Ron as Rupert. A slight nod to cinema, mayhaps?

I only have one other thing to say about the sixth movie: I not only hope that Chapter One is included, but that they can somehow hire Tony Blair to do a walk-on cameo as himself. If they can get him on The Simpsons they can certainly get him in the mother country’s pride and joy.

Chapter Two. How very clever. She hands him to us on a platter, has him spout premeditated answers that have seen plenty of ripening, and does it so early that one naturally hears the beckon of incredulous denial. We knew he was a powerful Occlumens. We’d known for two books that Dumbledore can be fooled. And yet… and yet. I’ll admit to being needlessly coy about it all, considering how “Snape kills Dumbledore” is going to be the most popular Google search string by day’s end, but to say it so plainly lends it such finality.

I would have been a lot more prepared for the surprises that The Half-Blood Prince springs on the reader if it were the last book and not the penultimate one. Most of this comes from the expectation that some key events wouldn’t come until much closer to the end. But it’s very clear after this volume that Book Seven has a heck of a lot of ground to cover on its own terms. This one was a backgrounder, setting the stage for a whole book of trials to come.

I think that’s all for now. I don’t think I’ve come across anything too remarkable that wouldn’t be caught by one astute Potter fan or another, considering how many of them are out there, but this meander in the woods was never meant to be a testament to eloquence.

Now that the summer movie season has been over for almost two weeks, with Spielberg’s War of the Worlds being the last major release of any significance, and the next (Gilliam’s Brothers Grimm) not arriving until late August, it is time to turn back to literary pursuits encoded in language alone.

If you’ve been paying any attention to things that matter, you are already aware that this is the week that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is being released. I, for one, will welcome our new half-blood overlord at the stroke of midnight that bridges Friday and Saturday at the Strathcona Chapters on Whyte Avenue. All are welcome, as if it were at all my authority to decide such things.

And so here we are, at much the same position as two years and a month ago, wondering what to expect from Jo Rowling before she beaned us all with the 700-page curveball that was The Order of the Phoenix. We have before us three questions of identity that may not be answerable: the major death, the new Defence Against the Dark Arts professor and the titular royal (assuming Rowling hasn’t been pulling our leg and it was actually You-Know-Who all along). After a lot of thought, if I were at all a betting man, I would think it most probable the second and third are new characters, perhaps the same character. I would also conjecturally doubt that the Half-Blood Prince is a student.

As for who croaks in this one, it’s much easier to take a stand on who won’t. I don’t believe it will be Dumbledore, though I’m fully aware I could be eating my words half a week from now. While the cover art alone implies he’ll be playing a bigger role in this one, whereas one of the big mysteries posed and answered in Phoenix was why he was hardly onstage, I get the sense that he still has a lot to do in the seventh book as the conclusion approaches, not least because he is and always has been Harry’s most direct source of testimonial exposition.

If you’ve read much Potter discussion online you are probably familiar with the Lexicon by now, as it remains the best repository of known knowns, known unknowns and a few unknown knowns for good measure. I’ve also found an excellent collection of essays on the Potterverse here, which delve into the kind of detail I endorse and would have engaged in myself did I have the time or the dedication. The writer is knee-deep in the convolutions of the online Potter community and its wildflowers of rampant fanfiction good and ill that flourish around Rowling’s canon and threaten its boundaries with myriad assumptions, and the Potterverse is honestly a lot more straightforward than he makes it out to be, but the site makes for an interesting read if you want to get those speculative juices flowing.

This is a very exciting time.

Ain’t-It-Cool News has a lot of production art from the post-Chicken Little Walt Disney Feature Animation pipeline – American Dog, A Day With Wilbur Robinson and Rapunzel Unbraided. I heard about these upcoming projects two weeks ago by way of a recent article on one of my daily stops, Jim Hill Media, which was highly critical of the new WDFA policy that prohibits animators from working on a production until it had an approved screenplay, contrary to how animation actually works.

American Dog is from Chris Sanders of the delightful but perhaps slightly overrated Lilo & Stitch, and the preliminary art boasts a charming, edgy aesthetic. Of course, what makes animation great is not the individual frames but how they connect to one another to tell a visual story, so let’s cross our fingers that it all comes together. A Day With Wilbur Robinson, slated for 2006, is an adaptation of William Joyce’s children’s book of the same title, which I have never read, but have heard is fantastic. The story reel, the animation equivalent of the storyboarding and pre-visualization that goes into live-action, is reportedly phenomenal.

The art for 2007′s Rapunzel Unbraided is enchantingly beautiful, but the content itself is a big question mark; I know very little about the film at this stage, but it looks like Disney is trying to pull it closer to the Shrek end of the spectrum like they once tried with the never-made Frog Prince. To which I say, go ahead and make it satirical (The Princess Bride, anyone?) but please, for the love of Mickey Mouse, don’t try to make it all hip and contemporary. PDI’s approach is already showing signs of overstaying its welcome; no need to imitate it further. The Disney reputation was built on timelessness, not the cheap temporal appeal that has reduced many a feature from great to good. Case in point: regardless of whether or not you like the music of Phil Collins, he has absolutely no place in Brother Bear, and I am quite serious when I say that his inclusion takes away from the movie.

I really do hope Disney digs itself out of its hole with these three projects. Hopefully they are as daring and creative as they look, and escape the executive-level mismanagement that has led the Disney brand down a path of decay. Unfortunately, scoring box-office hits with these upcoming features will have the side effect of further convincing Michael Eisner and his cronies that traditional animation is dead, and we may have a long wait ahead of us until Disney returns to its roots.

There are few things the movie industry needs more than a kick in the pants to remind studio execs that 3D computer animation does not a better film make. Or, considering the success of the outstandingly funny Chicken Run and next year’s anticipated hit The Wallace & Gromit Movie: Curse of the Wererabbit, 2D traditional film does not equal a bomb. So maybe the dollar figures say, “Yes it does,” but that is an oversimplification. What we really need are distributors who recognize a great film when they see one and know how to promote it properly, unlike how Warner Brothers completely dropped the ball with The Iron Giant, which will hopefully see a revival as its upcoming DVD re-release rides the hype around The Incredibles. We don’t need people releasing Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazaki’s seminal masterpiece and the biggest box-office hit in Japanese history, dubbed over in English when foreign films have demonstrated a record of doing better when released properly – that is to say, subtitled. We don’t need more grounds for marketing conspiracy theories like the ones surrounding Home on the Range.

SaveDisney.com‘s feature, “Killing Traditional Animation”, says it better than I do.

While on the subject of Disney films, I want to say a few words about a book that mentions some of them in passing: Dan Brown’s mega-hit novel The Da Vinci Code.

Normally I don’t review the novels I read, and there are a number of reasons for this. Foremost is that if I afforded each and every one of them the analysis I wish I could, I would never get through my extensive reading list. Then there’s the matter of personal pride, in the sense that I do not wish to reveal the full extent of how much I haven’t read. Following that is the fact that I spend most of my time reading established classics instead of current releases, and in most cases have nothing to add to the volume of discourse that already exists around them.

Once in a blue moon, though, I get a little curious about just what it is that has propped up authors like this Dan Brown fellow into the #1 slot of The New York Times for such an extended period of time. Besides, it is always good to get an indication of what it is that the public is consuming at large.

So my question is this: is it just The Da Vinci Code, or is the prose in all contemporary pop literature so juvenile?

I’m not saying Da Vinci is bad – far from it. The plotting is tight, the puzzles are clever, the premises are a conglomeration of outlandish but intriguing theories that run contrary to all conventional wisdom, and are proud of it. It’s just badly written. The two protagonists that carry us through the mystery, symbologist Robert Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu, are not characters so much as they are physical manifestations of their respective -ologies. At times, we see every tired prosaic cliché worthy of a loud and sonorous groan – among them, childhood flashbacks and italicized internal monologue up the wazoo. It’s like the entire thing was written with the prospective movie rights in mind, because if anything, The Da Vinci Code feels like a detailed screenplay treatment.

The apologists undoubtedly say, well, plot-driven thrillers don’t need characters, tone and style, or thematic resonance, and only the most pretentiously snobby Ulysses-wielding literati would presume to demand such literary luxuries. Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald and Ian Fleming beg to differ. To name a few.

Full marks for plot construction, though – well, aside from an obvious villain with a concealed identity and a few puzzles that should not have posed our heroes as much trouble as they did. I won’t deny that this is a book that kept me turning the pages to find out what happens next. It’s easy to see why The Da Vinci Code has attracted so much discourse: whether by accident or design, Brown often diverges into passages where he dumps a lot of detailed information geared towards supporting his ideas about revisionism in theological history, and presents them with a non-fictional authority that sends people straight to their search engines in an attempt to separate what is real from what is not.

The downside is that when you do this in front of people who know their stuff, they see right through some of the more frivolous contortions of truth. I’m not referring to the theological debates about the Council of Nicea and the deification of Jesus Christ, but the small things, the details that make the book seem really clever in the eyes of a layman. Observe how in one instance, Brown claims that the Romans referred to the wonders of anagrams as ars magna, the Great Art. Nice try, Mr. Brown. Ars magna is a clever anagram of “anagrams”, but the English word itself was derived from the Greek word anagrammatismos, which lacks the same connection. Such a claim is like saying the Eastwoods dubbed their son Clint deliberately because they could rearrange his name to spell “Old West Action”.

This is also where the Disney connection comes in. Brown has obviously been reading a lot about the surreptitious symbols and malicious metaphors in Walt Disney’s secret destructive agenda, or something to that effect – without much regard for who does what in the development of an animated feature. He claims how Princess Aurora in Sleeping Beauty is concealed under the name “Rose” as an extension of Disney’s purported agenda to spread the truth about the Holy Grail and goddess worship that lies at the centre of the novel – neglecting to mention, of course, that the name is taken directly from Briar-Rose, Sleeping Beauty’s name in the original text of the Grimm fairy tale. Then he leaps forward to make a connection to the modern era of The Little Mermaid, over which Walt had no direct say, being dead and all. Sometimes it is hard to tell if Brown is intentionally mistaking memetics for conspiracies.

In spite of these misgivings, I do think The Da Vinci Code is worth a read, if only to catch up on the controversial things it has to say. But this may be a case where the movie, currently attached to Ron Howard, may very easily eclipse the book.

On the subject of bestselling literature: J.K. Rowling delivered a reading of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in Edinburgh this weekend, and followed it with a question-and-answer session about a number of things, The Half-Blood Prince among them. The book itself is halfway to completion, and Rowling draws attention to some unanswered questions to consider. Very interesting indeed:

There are two questions that I have never been asked but that I should have been asked, if you know what I mean. If you want to speculate on anything, you should speculate on these two things, which will point you in the right direction.

The first question that I have never been asked – it has probably been asked in a chatroom but no one has ever asked me – is, “Why didn’t Voldemort die?” Not, “Why did Harry live?” but, “Why didn’t Voldemort die?” The killing curse rebounded, so he should have died. Why didn’t he? At the end of Goblet of Fire he says that one or more of the steps that he took enabled him to survive. You should be wondering what he did to make sure that he did not die – I will put it that way. I don’t think that it is guessable. It may be – someone could guess it – but you should be asking yourself that question, particularly now that you know about the prophecy. I’d better stop there or I will really incriminate myself.

The other question that I am surprised no one has asked me since Phoenix came out – I thought that people would – is why Dumbledore did not kill or try to kill Voldemort in the scene in the ministry. I know that I am giving a lot away to people who have not read the book. Although Dumbledore gives a kind of reason to Voldemort, it is not the real reason. When I mentioned that question to my husband – I told Neil that I was going to mention it to you – he said that it was because Voldemort knows that there are two more books to come. As you can see, we are on the same literary wavelength. [Laughter]. That is not the answer; Dumbledore knows something slightly more profound than that. If you want to wonder about anything, I would advise you to concentrate on those two questions. That might take you a little bit further.

Now there’s an author of bestselling literature who knows a thing or two about presenting elaborate mysteries under the cloak of witty wordplay and a dramatis personae worth volumes of character analysis.