Tag Archives: J K Rowling

Book review

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J K Rowling, 2000

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire cover.png

In my post on Prisoner of Azkaban I tried to argue that the darkness of that story supported the idea that the novel was the turning point in the series, when they stopped being children’s happy-ever-after tales and became a lot more serious and even disturbing. My evidence rested largely on the role played by Dementors. But the Dementors can be frightened away by a spell; nobody dies in Prisoner, not even Buckbeak, and the only villain present in Hogwarts is a transfigured pet rat. Apart from Pettigrew’s escape and Trelawney’s ominous prediction, everything in Prisoner ends fairly positively. Of course it would have been nicer if everyone had believed in Sirius’s innocence and that Harry could have gone to live with him in Grimmauld Place, but Voldemort still seems a distant, improbable threat.

I was wrong. Goblet of Fire is dramatically darker than any of its predecessors. Real people die in front of our eyes, Voldemort returns to life and to his full powers, together with a band of Death Eaters. Harry seems stripped of the special protection his mother’s sacrifice gave him. The scenes in the Riddle graveyard, when Cedric is brutally and shockingly slaughtered (“kill the spare“), Voldemort rises from the grave and tortures Harry and the Death Eaters return, are difficult to read even now, and only slightly mitigated by Harry’s miraculous escape. This is not a story one would want to read to a young child. Or more specifically these are not chapters one would want to read to a young child – most of the novel is written in the same tone as its predecessors. The level of threat is quite low and Harry is able to master the life-threatening tournament challenges with ease, with lots of people willing to help him.

Obviously another factor is that the novel is significantly longer than the earlier books. This gives Rowling the space to explore and expand upon the magical universe. The international wizarding world is introduced at the Quidditch World Cup, the schools of Beauxbatons and Durmstrang are brought into the narrative, and we learn more about the workings of Hogwarts such as the role of the army of house-elves. While Rowling adheres to her by now very well established story structure spanning the three school terms, this is a year like none other. Here’s a few things I noticed on this read of Goblet of Fire:

SPEW – the Society for the Promotion of Elvish Welfare. What to make of SPEW, Hermione’s campaign to liberate house-elves? The text is unequivocal – with the exception of Dobby, house-elves like being enslaved. They hate the idea of being paid wages, and are horrified by what has happened to Dobby and Winky. There are unsettling echoes of these arguments with the pro-slavery position of the South in America in the nineteenth century – freeing the slaves would be an unkindness, their owners look after them when they are unable to look after themselves, etc. To quote a comment on Reddit “The elves behave like textbook Uncle Toms straight out of Gone with the Wind or Song of the South – the happy servant trope. Other wizards react to their enslavement the same way white people in America reacted to it when people started suggesting it was inhumane: “well, they like being subservient. Serving white people is in their blood.”

Hermione’s campaign is pathetically disorganised and unsuccessful and is perceived by all of her friends, even those closest to her, as an embarrassment. There is very little evidence to indicate her campaign to change attitudes towards the enslavement of house elves has any success. This troubled me because it seems to trivialise the issue for comic purposes, not least in the name of the campaign. Coming from a Muggle family Hermione has a fresh perspective on magical society, and can see the unfairness in the treatment of house-elves than wizarding families are blind to, I just wish her campaign hadn’t been treated as such a joke, an unfunny one at that.

Bertha Jorkins is the witch who plays a pivotal role in the novel (and arguably in the series) but who doesn’t appear in person. She is the Godot of Goblet. I am convinced that she was a late addition to the text, as her only role is to smooth out some of the many wrinkles in the plot. I think the editing process might have gone something like this:

Editor: “OK, love it, great ending, but just a couple of questions. How did Voldemort find out about Barty Crouch Junior having escaped from Azkaban? Also, how did he find out about the Triwizard tournament being staged at Hogwarts this year?

JKR: Good point. I know, I’ll create a character who visits the Crouch family residence, stumbles across Barty Junior hiding there, has her memory modified by Barty Senior so she doesn’t tell anyone that a Ministry of Magic Minister is hiding an escapee from Azkaban, and who then travels to Albania on her holidays, meets Peter Pettigrew, forgets he is supposed to be dead, is lured into a meeting with pre-reincarnated Voldemort who tortures her into revealing Barty Junior’s escape and throws in details of the tournament for good measure. Then he kills her and uses the murder to turn Nagini into a horcrux (as we later learn). There, simples!

The problem with stuffing plot-holes with devices like this (apart from the transparent nature of the process) is that is just opens up more questions. Why wasn’t Bertha’s extended absence in Albania, long-rumoured to be Voldemort’s hiding place, more of a concern for the Ministry? (There are lots of references in the text along the lines of ‘Bertha’s still missing in Albania, goodness I am worried’ but it is never taken that seriously.) Why didn’t Bertha recognise Peter in Albania – not a place one meets many British wizards I assume? It’s all a bit laboured and heavily dependant upon coincidence isn’t it? The film adaptation, forced to make cuts due to the length of the novel, decided to just ignore these problems, cutting out Bertha altogether. No-one bothers to wonder how Voldemort found out about the tournament (it wasn’t exactly a well kept secret, and for that matter there’s no particular reason why it should be) or how he knew Barty Junior had escaped. If he can live in a forest as a disembodied spirit for twelve years he can contact his Death Eaters somehow surely? The film also cuts out two other central characters – Winky, the Crouch family elf, who again is really only there to explain how Harry’s wand is used to conjure the Dark Mark, rather than being a character in his or her own right, and Ludo Bagman, Head of the Department of Magical Games and Sports. Rowling invests a lot of time in building Bagman up as a candidate for Voldemort’s ubiquitous inside man, but Karkaroff does the job perfectly well and Bagman isn’t missed. I don’t think anyone reading Goblet for the first time could have worked out the plot twist re Moody, but few if any would really suspect Bagman either.

The Triwizard Tournament. The tournament is a strange event. It hasn’t been held for a century or more, because it is really dangerous, and student competitors had previously died. So the safety precaution the Ministry introduces (yes, student competitions are governed by the Ministry of Magic) is an age limit? This suggests that previous champions had been younger than seventeen. But if they were chosen by the Goblet it was presumably because they were magically gifted students, most of whom would have been from the senior years anyway. This isn’t much of a precaution, and as it turns out unsurprisingly the tournament is once again lethally dangerous. The other weird thing about the tournament is its duration. It takes all year for just three events, all of which could probably be over in an afternoon and still leave time for tea. Not even a test cricket series takes that long! Rowling seems a prisoner of her school-year format, across which the tournament needs to be stretched irrespective of plausibility.

The challenges themselves are also unusual. The lake-rescue challenge must have been really dull to watch – four champions wade in, nothing happens for an hour, then the champions emerge with their rescued companions. Not exactly an entertaining afternoon down by the lake. There’s some ambiguity about whether the crowd in the Quidditch arena could see what was happening in the maze in the final challenge. People have tried to use trigonometry to work out sightlines by calculating the height of the stands compared to the height of the hedges. But it is fairly obvious they couldn’t see much if anything, because there’s no indication of any reaction when (for example) Krum uses an unforgiveable curse (Crucio) on Cedric, or when Cedric and Harry disappear having touched the trophy. So two out three of the events, with three or four months between them, can’t be watched at all. And why only three challenges? There is time for many more (less dangerous) contests which would have been a lot more entertaining to the audience and allowed the champions to show a full range of magical skills and abilities. A flying for example would have been really fun.

Why is the book called Goblet of Fire? The idea that the “and the” object in each book’s title was an important part of the narrative is pretty obvious, but the goblet of fire only appears briefly to serve as a way of choosing the school champions. It’s a quite unimportant part of the book, but it claims the headline. Perhaps it simply sounded more dramatic than ‘Harry Potter and the Triwizard Tournament‘?

Rita Skeeter. By this point in her writing career Rowling had obviously been on the receiving end of a lot of intrusive press-coverage. Her animosity towards the tabloid press is captured wonderfully in the portrait of the vile Rita Skeeter, and her quick-quotes quill. Rowling’s dislike of the tabloid press is undisguised and vitriolic, and it unbalances the novel slightly – Rita is given a lot more time than she deserves, simply to show her being vile again.

Portkeys. When the Weasley party travels to and from the Quidditch World Cup using a portkey it is clear that they (portkeys) are not simply activated by touch – they travel at specific times. The portkey used to transport Harry and Cedric to the Riddle graveyard is however triggered as soon as it is picked up. Not surprisingly, readers have noticed this apparent anomaly and no doubt drew it to the author’s attention. Subsequently writing on her website, Pottermore, JK explained that there are two different types of Portkey, one pre-programmed, the other triggered on touch. A simple and convincing explanation. Rowling could easily have said “look magic isn’t real so of course it doesn’t follow scientific, rational rules!” but instead she worked really hard to iron out any inconsistencies like these, even long after the series had finished. I suspect this is simply because she enjoys the intellectual challenge.

Goblet of Fire ends on a darkly ominous note – Voldemort is back, and while Dumbledore is going to do all he can to defeat him, he is going to have to do without the Ministry’s support for now.

“Dark times lie ahead of us and there will be a time when we must choose between what is easy and what is right.“

Readers would have to wait three long years to find out what was going to happen next to Hv v         v                                      v                             v                                                          v              v         v                                                   v           v                   v                                                       v           arry and his friends.

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Book review

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, by J K Rowling, 1999

I had the huge pleasure of reading Prisoner to my sons a few years back, and it was that experience which finally persuaded me to take J K Rowling seriously as an author.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.jpg

Philosopher’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets had been fun, with dark moments but plenty of silliness as well, and it seemed the level of peril Harry was going to face was never going to be that serious. He certainly didn’t seem to need the help of adults to face down Voldemort once a year. His plot armour was unbreakable and extended to all his companions. While there is also a strong case to be made for Goblet of Fire being the turning point in the series, where there are key character deaths and the novels begin to grow much longer, I think Prisoner is equally a significant milestone in the series.

First, Prisoner is a much darker novel than its predecessors. Sirius Black has been built up through out the novel as a psychotic and dangerously powerful killer, the only wizard to ever escape from Azkaban (even though his attempts to break into the castle and the Gryffindor common room and bedrooms have not seen anyone killed or even hurt). Having been told relentlessly that he is an extremely dangerous character, we have no reason to believe he is not the novel’s principal villain. After all, who else could it be? In the novel’s climax n the Shrieking Shack the trio are ‘captured’ by Black, Ron is seriously injured, and the only possible help, Professor Lupin, seems to be a traitor. It’s hard to see a way back for them at that point.

The darkness of the novel is underlined by introduction of dementors, a disturbing new element to the narrative. While much of the landscape of Hogwarts is familiar, drawn from traditional stories – ghosts, goblins, giants, unicorns and centaurs – dementors are something new and very scary.

“Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them… Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself… soulless and evil. You will be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life.“

What’s worse in many ways is that the dementors are ostensibly on the ‘good’ side – the Ministry employs them to run Azkaban where psychological torture is the state-sanctioned fate of all, to act as security guards around Hogwarts once the threat to Harry from Sirius becomes understood and to execute prisoners without benefit of trial or sentence in the most appallingly cruel fashion, using the Dementor’s Kiss. They are the stuff of nightmares:

Where there should have been eyes, there was only thin, grey, scabbed skin, stretched blankly over empty sockets. But there was a mouth … a gaping, shapeless hole, sucking the air with the sound of a death-rattle.

Fluffy falls asleep when you sing to him, Aragog is Hagrid’s friend, and the basilisk is pecked out of action by Fawkes – but the dementors will eat your soul.

Second, the climax of the novel following Buckbeak’s ‘execution’ is a sustained, extraordinarily breathless series of reveals, twists, and surprises. Reading these chapters (from seventeen to the end of the novel) I found it virtually impossible to find a natural place to find somewhere to pause for the night – each one ends with a cliff-hanger that demands you read on. It’s brilliantly constructed. Prisoner is still an adventure novel for children and young adults, but the shift in tone and quality from the earlier novels is apparent.

Third, complexity. In the course of this novel that Rowling is able to sustain dramatic tension and build a world of depth and complexity, demanding that we look again at the first two novels, re-evaluating references, incidents, and even casual apparently throwaway lines for new importance. You can start to see her cash in some of the investment made in earlier novels. Scabbers, for example, introduced on that first ride on the Hogwarts Express as Ron’s rather pathetic hand-me-down pet, suddenly becomes a much more important character. Equally, the passing reference to Sirius in the opening chapter of Philosopher’s becomes strikingly poignant when it is revealed he is Harry’s godfather. (Incidentally it is surprising that suspicion did not fall on Sirius immediately following the attack at Godric’s Hollow. Dumbledore knew James and Lily were hiding under the protection of a secret-keeper and believed that person to be Sirius – hence his willingness to let Sirius rot in Azkaban for 12 years. But when he hears that Sirius lent Hagrid his motorbike to convey Harry to Privet Drive – no reaction!)

The case against Prisoner revolves mainly around the use of the time-turner as a plot device. It’s a classic deus ex machina, and invites the question why the Ministry allowed a school-girl to casually use such a powerful magical device for relatively trivial purposes. Within the context of the novel however these questions usually don’t occur to the reader, and the time-travel resolution of the plot seems neatly done. Again, if we can suspend our disbelief to allow the existence of magic, magical creatures, and the whole wizarding world, why can’t we allow for time travel as well, and just skate on past any awkward paradoxes?

These elements build into a powerful combination, using the characters, locations and structures that Rowling established in the first two novels, but beginning to explore the wider wizarding world. These are still school-children, struggling with homework, exams, and the awkwardness of teenage friendships (Ron spends a long time sulking when he thinks Crookshanks has eaten Scabbers). Prisoner begins the transition to the darker, more mature themes that dominate the rest of the series.

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Book review

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, by J K Rowling, 1998

Again, not a review, which would be redundant, but some observations:

  1. The comfort of familiarity. Re-reading Chamber of Secrets I was struck by how similar the story is to Philosopher’s Stone. I am not going to list all the points of comparison here, but (to mention a few) both stories involve:
  • a search for something hidden “miles” beneath the castle
  • a dangerous trip into the Forbidden Forest
  • Hagrid providing clues to the ‘secret’
  • the climax of both novels featuring Harry travelling under the school with his friends, only to be separated from them and having to face You-Know-Who on his own.

The stories are not just similar in terms of their plots. Rowling developed a structure for these novels that was to serve her well and provide a comforting familiarity to her readers. (To be honest it came as a shock when she abandoned that formula in Deathly Hallows). Apart from that one outlier, all the novels start in Privet Drive, feature the journey to Hogwarts, the welcome feast, the three school terms, and culminate conveniently at the end of the summer. Harry’s birthday, lessons, feasts, Quidditch, Halloween, Christmas, Easter and exams are all fixed points of reference in each novel. (It is rare for Rowling to introduce new milestones – so far as I can remember, for example, neither Ron nor Hermione’s birthdays are mentioned or celebrated). This is not an objection, (and I suppose it’s not much of an observation either), but it does mean that each novel was constructed within tightly prescribed parameters, with only limited variations at each outing.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets By J. K. Rowling

2. Still not sure. Rowling was careful not to assume that readers of Chamber had read Philosopher’s, so provides a detailed if rapid explanation in the opening chapter – Harry is a wizard, he goes to a magic school, he is an orphan, etc. Even the rules of Quidditch get a recap. In later novels Rowling is confident enough to assume that her readers are not joining the series mid-way and dispenses with these summaries, which I suspect were something her editors suggested.

3. Believability. When I first read Chamber I was mildly irritated by some of the plot inconsistencies and absurdities. Would Hagrid really have been carted off to Azkaban just on suspicion of involvement in the opening of the Chamber? Could a massive basilisk have moved freely around the pipes of the school’s medieval plumbing? And why didn’t it eat any of its victims, given how hungry it insists it feels? I could probably explain away these and the many other problematic issues that readers have identified over the years, but I am fairly sure that would be missing the point. This is not a realistic adventure story, and it is wrong to treat it as one. There are ghosts, trolls, centaurs and unicorns for goodness sake, not to mention the giant squid living in the lake! It is a children’s story where suspension of disbelief is required. As the series turns darker a more careful analytical reading can be justified, but for now this is still a bit of a lark.

4. A detective story? One of the pleasures of a re-read of any mystery is spotting the clues one missed the first time round, the misdirection and red herrings. Should I have been able to work out the ending and the plot twists? Most readers assume that the heir of Slytherin is unlikely to be either Malfoy or Harry, following the convention that it is never the more obvious characters ‘whodunnit’. But should I have been able to guess that Ginny was the one opening the Chamber and controlling the basilisk? On a reread the clues are there in plain sight, but the added complication of the diary being haunted by the spirit of Tom Riddle (who mysteriously still has his award for services to the school on display in the trophy room, despite the later difficulty with ahem trying to take over the world) clearly wasn’t guessable, in the same way that Quirrell being the host for You-Know-Who’s disembodied spirit wasn’t work-out-able either. The technique works surprisingly well – Rowling makes us think we should have been able to see the solution while at the same time making it obscurely improbable.

5. Easter Eggs. The other main pleasure of Chamber is seeing some of the skeleton of Half Blood Prince in the bones of the plot. References and objects pop up in passing – the Hand of Glory and the opal necklace from Borgin and Burke’s in Knockturn Alley (one of the many things I still really enjoy from the series are silly little jokes like that), the vanishing cabinet and of course Riddle’s diary.

Chamber isn’t the strongest novel in the series, but there’s still so much to enjoy. The story is told with the wonderful economy that was such a feature of the early novels. The central characters are beginning to come alive and be fully rounded, with the supporting cast also assuming much more depth. New characters such as Dobby are introduced, and the portrait of Lockhart is a wonderfully spiteful sketch. Despite the ghosts and the magic there is a grounded believability about Harry and his friends. They struggle with schoolwork, bullies, unpopularity and peer-pressure – the only thing that no-one seems to suffer from is acne. It’s been a real pleasure to return to Hogwarts, and while I doubt I am going to work my way through the whole series again, I might!

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Book review

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, by J K Rowlng, 1997

I normally flag these posts as book reviews, but this won’t really be a review as such – every word Rowling wrote has been analysed in such microscopic detail that any attempts at a summary would be redundant. But ‘I read it so I write about it’ is the rule here, so here are a few things I noticed on this reading of Philospoher’s:

Compression. At around 220 pages the Philosopher’s Stone is a masterpiece of compression. After a relatively leisurely start the last few chapters fly past. Let’s look at what Rowling squeezes in to the novel’s final three chapters:

Having been caught smuggling Norbert out of Hogwarts, the trio are taken to Professor McGonagall’s office where she deducts 150 points from Gryffindor. Harry becomes a pariah and considers resigning from the Quidditch team. Harry, Hermione, Neville and Malfoy report to Hagrid for their detention in the Forbidden Forest. While in the forest Harry sees a cloaked figure drinking unicorn blood, then is rescued by the centaurs, who reveal who is behind the mysterious goings on at the castle. After the year-end examinations, Harry learns Hagrid has revealed the secret of getting past Fluffy. Dumbledore has been lured away from the castle and Professor McGonagall refuses to take them seriously, so the trio set out to stop ‘Snape’ from taking the stone themselves, immobilising Neville on the way. They get past Fluffy, Devil’s Snare, the room of flying keys, and the giant wizards’ chess game, losing Ron at that point. Hermione works out the potions puzzle and then goes back to help Ron while Harry pushes on to find Quirrell looking into the Mirror of Erised. There are a few pages left for Harry to defeat You-Know-Who, rescue the stone, recover in hospital with the benefit of a visit from Dumbledore, attend the end of term feast, win the House cup, and catch the train back to Kings Cross.

This is breathless, extraordinarily compressed stuff – in the film version almost a third of the 160 minutes running time is occupied with these three final chapters, beginning with the Forbidden Forest detention. There’s not a word wasted. The speed with which events flash past make the book hard to put down – where would one pause? – and don’t allow the reader time to consider the extraordinary recklessness with which the trio proceed – for example what were they planning to do when they caught up with ‘Snape’? The later books in the series unfortunately lose this economy, and while the world-building is mainly fascinating and well done, they become more self-indulgent and much slower.

Frivolity. For a story which starts with the attempted murder of a baby and the actual murder of his parents, and which ends with the death of a teacher, this is a surprisingly light-hearted book. The sense of peril is limited – the bad guys are easily foiled, and the trio deals with them without help from friends, teachers or any adults. This sense of comfort – we know things are going to end with the good guys winning – is emphasised by a strong sense of playfulness running throughout the book. Dumbledore consistently messes about, whether in his opening comments to the school – “Before we begin our banquet, I would like to say a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak! Thank you.” – or in his comments about his scar being in the shape of a map of the London Underground (I wonder how they translated that joke in foreign language editions?) Even at the end, when announcing the imminent death of Nicholas Flamel and his wife, he still has time to joke around with Bertie Botts every-flavour beans.

Age-appropriate content. Possibly Rowling’s cleverest idea in terms of the structure of the series is the way the books age with the reader. School stories usually have two ways of handling this issue. One choice – the Simpsons model as I think of it – is for the characters never to age. That way the Secret Seven can enjoy perpetual summer holidays staying with relatives in a variety of unremarkable locations each of which have hidden secrets. The alternative approach, for the characters to proceed through the school years in each episode of the series, can be problematic. The number of stories the author can write using these characters is fixed to the seven secondary school years (none of these stories are ever set anywhere other than in secondary schools). Second, as the children age hormones kick in, more adult themes are introduced, and the author runs the risk of losing younger readers.

Rowling’s chose the latter approach – her characters start school aged eleven, and each story spans one school year. But she was able to write sufficiently quickly – seven books in eleven years (1997-2007) – that the pre-teen readers she captured with this first book aged with her characters, cementing their identification with Harry, Ron, or Hermione. Talk of ‘growing up’ is common among Potter fans (and even her critics), and going through that collective experience, together with all the ceremony that became associated with the later books, made Harry Potter an important part of many people’s adolescence.

Nostalgia. I may have written about this elsewhere in this blog, but I once spoke to a group of primary school children about my experience of going to school in the UK in the sixties and seventies. They all had just the one question – ‘Were the teachers really allowed to hit you?!!’ Rowling is a near contemporary (she was born in 1965) and attended school in Gloucestershire, so would have had a very similar educational experience – and in particular one in which teachers, and adults more generally, were allowed to hit children. (Bear in mind corporal punishment was made illegal in schools in the UK in the1980’s.) Harry’s experience of being hit by his teachers (including the excruciating scenes with Professor Umbridge) are really a reflection of Rowling’s own experience, and something that would alien to children of the late nineties or later. Which point underlies the profoundly nostalgic flavour of the books – they are in the tradition of the boarding school stories of Enid Blyton, Anthony Buckeridge, Angela Brazil and Frank Richards (to name a few). The Potter books are suffused with the atmosphere, themes, values and language of these earlier stories – Malory Towers, Secret Seven, Famous Five, Jennings and Billy Bunter – which I am sure Rowling would have grown up with, but would have been largely unfamiliar to her younger readers. All the cultural references throughout the stories, from lemon drops to the excitement of travelling by steam train, are rooted in Rowling’s childhood.

This is surely part of the incredibly successful formula of Harry Potter – the boarding school story has deeply, rigidly established patterns and structures (crushes, pranks, midnight feasts, inter-house rivalry, letters home, the crusty old janitor, and so on) which will have been well known to adult readers, but felt quaintly historic to most of her millennial audience.

So those were my impressions of this reread of Philosopher’s Stone. It’s aged well, and while you can never recapture the impact of the first read, with all the well-timed surprises and reveals, there are sufficient Easter eggs and signs of how cleverly plotted the whole series was (for example I had forgotten that Hagrid borrows the flying motor-bike he delivers Harry to Privet Drive on from Sirius) to justify one more return to Hogwarts.

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21st century literature, Book review, J K Rowling, The casual Vacancy

The Casual Vacancy by J K Rowling

This is a bit of a trojan horse of a book – ostensibly about middle England’s parochial concerns about a vacancy on the parish council of a small town in the West Country, this novel actually addresses a wide range of social issues, from self harm, racism, prostitution, domestic violence, etc, etc. Its like an episode of the Archers on crack.

The litmus test, as always, is was it a good read? The change of style from the Hogwarts novels is dramatic, and takes time to adjust. We then have a large cast of broadly similar characters doing largely similar things. Sorting out who is who takes a while. The election, when it finally comes, is a damp squib (ha ha, Hogwarts joke there for you) and some of the more melodramatic plot twists are telegraphed some way off. So far so bad, but despite that I found myself turning pages interested in what happens next.

Rowling’s middle England is a bleak, dark place. There’s not one happy family – all the children seem to despise their parents, with good reason. Huge psychological neuroses are carried around on shoulders young and old. A doctor refuses to treat a heart attack patient. There is no love or affection that is fulfilled. The only glimmer of hope for this community dies in the first chapter.

This novel has attracted over 500 Amazon reviews, so the chances of me having much original to say about it are slim. It has been portrayed as a political attack on the middle class, sneeringly done by someone whose political roots and allegiances are with the council estate rather than the detached mansions she now inhabits. This is of course simplistic; Rowling has not rewritten Hard Times here. But the mention of Dickens leads me cunningly on to what I think might be an original point. In this novel the Parish Council website is hacked four times, by four different characters, and messages are posted on the sites comment forum by “the ghost of Barry Fairweather”. Note – “the ghost of BF”, not “BF’s ghost”. Four ghosts – ring any bells? I think there is a deliberate, subtle reference here to the four ghosts in A Christmas carol, including the three Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. Is Robbie Weedon a Tiny Tim figure perhaps?

Why – just a coincidence, or is Rowling making a more subtle point about regret. There is no Scrooge-like redemption at the end of this novel, and I clearly can’t build much of a case for the reference – but I bet it is there somewhere.

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