In the past week I have both read
Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows and seen
Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix at the cinema. Both were enjoyable, but each was also somewhat disappointing in it's own way. I'll deal with the book first...
J.K. Rowling has some brilliant ideas. The world she has constructed over the course of seven books is full of imagination and is brimming with detail. Huge amounts of thought has gone into the world she has created. The characters and their situations are exciting and compelling. From a purely conceptual point of view, the stories are brilliant.
The downside, however, is that J.K. Rowling is a truly terrible writer. Her sentence structure is terrible - rambling all over the place. The characters dialogue is truly terrible at times. She clearly owns a "word of the day" book, as the same words turn up several times in the space of a few pages, then disappear without trace. She is prone to waffling and filling the books with tedious back story, then skipping over other details from the past books in the blink of an eye, leaving you groping for the relevance of something, wondering whether you can really bothered to dig out a copy of the old book in question, or at least search Wikipedia to figure out what she's talking about.
The book is badly written, and was also clearly badly proof-read - probably in a bid to minimise the risk of this sort of thing. For someone with a decent understanding of the English language and how it should be written - a group I would like to think I belong to - the book is positively frustrating at times, such is it's poor quality of writing.
It is quite the dichotomy... The story is brilliant. The writing is terrible. I felt like I was having to compromise or compensate in reading it - letting Rowling off for her writing on the basis that the story and the ideas were just so good. I wonder whether Rowling might have been better off dictating her ideas and the story to someone more capable, and letting them write it for her, or at least just getting a decent editor to sort out the more glaring problems.
Still, I loved the series start to finish, and she's made a tidy pile of cash, so I doubt anyone can really be that bothered by it.
On a related note, the films have been similarly frustrating, but for different reasons. The stories have benefited from their transition to the silver screen, presumably because the screenwriters have had to condense the story to a manageable length. The special effects are pretty special, and some of the acting is brilliant. The problem? Well, it is quite simply that some of the acting is terrible. Dear goodness, it's painful at times. The reason being - they're a bunch of kids! Sure, they're hitting their stride a bit more now that they're five films in, but even so it's still pretty patchy. There are many scenes that are carried by the abundantly capable adult cast (and what a cast - Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, Ralph Fiennes, Imelda Staunton... I could go on) which is all well and good, but for the fact that the story centres around the kids who just can't act all that well. Once again, I was compromising and letting them get away with it because the effects were just too cool and the rest of the acting just too good.
Book? Great story, terrible writing.
Film? Great to watch, terrible acting.
Still, this is what one puts up with sometimes when one partakes of mainstream entertainment... Said the snobbish grammar Nazi.
Join me next time, when I will be complaining about the idiocy of letting a fancy database decide what CDs I should be buying.
