Harry Potter book 5, digested (from Guardian (contains "spoilers"))

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling

The hottest day of the summer so far was drawing to a close as Kevin Potter squeezed a blackhead. "Can it really only have been a couple of weeks since term ended?" he moaned. "It feels more like three years."
The scar on his forehead began to burn fiercely. "Oh no," he grumbled, kicking a passing cat. "It's starting up again. Haven't I made enough money for all those losers? Not that they're grateful. Nobody seems to care about my privacy."

An icy chill gripped the air. "Not the dementors again," Kevin yawned, pulling out his wand. "Patronus."

"You are not permitted to use magic in the presence of muggles," said Cornelius Fudge, minister for magic. "You are suspended from Hogwarts."

"Like I'm scared," muttered Kevin. "Chuck me out of Hogwarts and the book ends right now."

"You're right," said Fudge. "But you have been warned. And no more of your silly tales about He Who Cannot Be Named coming back."

"But he has. Just read the Goblet of Fire."

"Don't worry, Kevin," said Dumbledore benignly. "You're not alone."

"I am alone. What would you know about it?"

"The faithful and the righteous have formed the secret Order of the Phoenix to fight the evil of Voldemort. Now go in peace to Hogwarts."

"I've been made a prefect," chirruped Hermione.

"Me, too," said Ron.

"I haven't," Kevin grumbled. " S'not fair. "

"I am the new teacher of the Dark Arts," shrilled Professor Umbridge. "I have been appointed by Cornelius Fudge, and there are going to be changes round here."

"Duh," Kevin grunted.

"That's a week's detention, Potter, and you're banned from Quidditch indefinitely."

" S'not fair ."

The scar on Kevin's forehead burnt fiercely as he woke from his dream. But was it a dream? He knew Ron's father, Arthur, was in trouble.

"Thanks for your help, Kevin," said Arthur, recovering in his hospital bed.

"Dumbledore's been sacked and I'm in charge," chuckled Umbridge. "Potter has detention for the rest of term."

" S'not fair ."

The scar on Kevin's forehead burnt fiercely as he woke from his dream. But was it a dream?

"I'm afraid he's dead," said Dumbledore sadly, once the battle was over.

"But you are still alive. And Voldemort will be back. I'm afraid the prophecy states that neither you nor Voldemort can live while the other survives."

"I'd worked that out for myself," Kevin muttered. It had been a tiring 766 pages.

"Do you think you'll still be alive at the end of the seventh book?" Ron said.

"I'm not sure that I care one way or the other."


The digested read ... digested
Kevin Potter and the Goose that laid the Golden Egg

 

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правильная статья про феномен HP - Rowling (чтобы ее прочитать, нужно зарегистрироваться на сайте).

...Auden and Tolkien wrote about the skills of inventing "secondary worlds." Ms. Rowling's world is a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children's literature — from the jolly hockey-sticks school story to Roald Dahl, from "Star Wars" to Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper. Toni Morrison pointed out that clichеs endure because they represent truths. Derivative narrative clichеs work with children because they are comfortingly recognizable and immediately available to the child's own power of fantasizing.

The important thing about this particular secondary world is that it is symbiotic with the real modern world. Magic, in myth and fairy tales, is about contacts with the inhuman — trees and creatures, unseen forces. Most fairy story writers hate and fear machines. Ms. Rowling's wizards shun them and use magic instead, but their world is a caricature of the real world and has trains, hospitals, newspapers and competitive sport. Much of the real evil in the later books is caused by newspaper gossip columnists who make Harry into a dubious celebrity, which is the modern word for the chosen hero. Most of the rest of the evil (apart from Voldemort) is caused by bureaucratic interference in educational affairs.

Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, "only personal." Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.

So, yes, the attraction for children can be explained by the powerful working of the fantasy of escape and empowerment, combined with the fact that the stories are comfortable, funny, just frightening enough.

They comfort against childhood fears as Georgette Heyer once comforted us against the truths of the relations between men and women, her detective stories domesticating and blanket-wrapping death. These are good books of their kind. But why would grown-up men and women become obsessed by jokey latency fantasies?

Comfort, I think, is part of the reason. Childhood reading remains potent for most of us. In a recent BBC survey of the top 100 "best reads," more than a quarter were children's books. We like to regress. I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.

But in the case of the great children's writers of the recent past, there was a compensating seriousness. There was — and is — a real sense of mystery, powerful forces, dangerous creatures in dark forests. Susan Cooper's teenage wizard discovers his magic powers and discovers simultaneously that he is in a cosmic battle between good and evil forces. Every bush and cloud glitters with secret significance. Alan Garner peoples real landscapes with malign, inhuman elvish beings that hunt humans.

Reading writers like these, we feel we are being put back in touch with earlier parts of our culture, when supernatural and inhuman creatures — from whom we thought we learned our sense of good and evil — inhabited a world we did not feel we controlled. If we regress, we regress to a lost sense of significance we mourn for. Ursula K. Le Guin's wizards inhabit an anthropologically coherent world where magic really does act as a force. Ms. Rowling's magic wood has nothing in common with these lost worlds. It is small, and on the school grounds, and dangerous only because she says it is.

In this regard, it is magic for our time. Ms. Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation that hasn't known, and doesn't care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild. They don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had...