HBP Chapter Four: "Horace Slughorn"
Nov. 12th, 2012 11:31 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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deathtocapslock* Harry feels embarrassed to think of his last meeting with Dumbledore, when he shouted a lot and smashed the Headmaster’s possessions. It’s nice to see Harry actually being self-critical once in a while. Pity he doesn’t do it more often, really.
* “‘If there is an attack,’ said Dumbledore, ‘I give you permission to use any counter-jinx or -curse that might occur to you.’” Normally, of course, underage wizards are allowed to use magic in self-defence without their Headmaster’s say-so, but given the corrupt and arbitrary nature of wizarding justice, I don’t blame Harry for needing a bit of extra reassurance.
* Of course, whether Dumbledore actually has the authority to give such reassurance is another matter…
* “‘I, on the other hand, thought otherwise,’ said Dumbledore.” Well, yes, Dumbles, being the author’s mouthpiece does have a few advantages. Like the ability to know the motivations and accurately predict the actions of all the other characters in the series.
* So, Voldemort has started using Occlumency against Harry to stop the Chosen One from reading his mind… anybody remember the explanation for why he apparently stopped doing this in the next book? Anybody remember if there even was an explanation?
* “This, Harry, is the charming village of Budleigh Babberton.” Argh, what is it with JKR and silly names? Early on in the series it was quite cute, but we’re supposed to be in serious, grown-up territory here, and having silly names for everything just undercuts that.
* “The odd chill that had lain over Privet Drive for two weeks persisted here, too.” So does this mean that Harry and Dumbledore are walking through mating Dementors? Ewww.
* “Courtesy dictates that we offer fellow wizards the opportunity of denying us entry.” Not that such niceties apply to muggles, of course. You can feel free to barge into their homes whenever you feel like it.
* Once again we are reminded that you can’t apparate or disapparate inside Hogwarts, just in case we’d somehow missed all the millions of other times this was mentioned earlier in the series.
* “Hermione Granger told me.” Oh, Harry, we all know that you and Ron depend on Mummy Hermione for everything, but please, do you really need to keep rubbing our noses in it? Can’t we be allowed to pretend that you found something out by yourself for once?
* I wonder how exactly Harry would define a “good” Minister for Magic. No need to ask that question for Dumbledore, of course: a good Minister is one who does whatever the Twinkly One tells him to!
* Harry asks what happened to Dumbledore’s hand, and Dumbledore deflects him, adding, “It is a thrilling tale, and I wish to do it justice.” I don’t recall any such tale, so either Dumbles dies before getting his chance to give it, or JK Rowling’s idea of a “thrilling tale” is very different to mine.
* Is that whole jam flavour thing supposed to be in the Ministry leaflet, then? That would explain why Dumbledore brings it up; otherwise, it would be a bit random and out of the blue.
* I’m surprised Slughorn wanted Dumbledore’s help in cleaning up, since all it seems to take is waving his wand, with no real effort involved whatsoever.
* I presume that Slughorn wasn’t expecting Dumbles to track him down, since otherwise he’d probably have prepared a cheaper alternative to dragon blood for splashing over the walls.
* I’m not sure how to take Slughorn’s “Oho!” On the one hand, fawning over The Boy who Lived would be IC for him and about 90% of the rest of the wizarding world; on the other, his “So this is how you thought you’d persuade me, is it?” suggests the “Oho!” might instead mean “Oh, so this your plan, then.” The second would be more appropriate for a cunning social networker like Slughorn, which is why I suppose the correct explanation is probably the first one.
* “[Slughorn] sank into the cushions of a repaired sofa and a disgruntled silence” – liking the zeugma in that sentence. J
* Slughorn’s legs are apparently so short they don’t reach the ground when he sits down. Oh dear maths history proportion.
* Slughorn suffers from a series of ailments, all of which he attributes to old age. As opposed to, y’know, over-eating and excessive weight gain.
* Slughorn’s room looks like that of a “rich, fussy old lady”, possibly foreshadowing another rich, fussy old lady who was also taken in by Tom Riddle several decades ago.
* Any idea what “pale gooseberry eyes” would be like? Eyes which bulge out and look gooseberry-shaped? Eyes which are pale green and gooseberry-coloured? Eyes which taste nice baked in a crumble and eaten with custard?
* Slughorn’s squatting in a house whose owners are on holiday in the Canary Islands. So what does he do to stop the neighbours noticing movement in the supposedly deserted house and calling the police? He doesn’t seem to be making any effort to conceal his presence, after all.
* Speaking of concealing his presence, how come Dumbledore knew where to find him?
* So Slughorn, alumnus and former head of the pure-blood fanatic House, knows what a burglar alarm is and how to disable one. Arthur Weasley, notable campaigner for muggle rights, doesn’t know how to say “telephone” or “electricity” and wets himself with excitement every time he sees a ticket machine. Go figure.
* Although Slughorn does include the obligatory pop at muggle technology – apparently burglar alarms are “absurd” substitutes for Sneakoscopes. Yeah, because obviously it’s completely stupid to have a device telling you when somebody’s trying to break into your house.
* I wonder what rumours Slughorn heard about Professor Umbridge, and whether they’re at all similar to the fan speculations on the matter.
* Slughorn’s next action is to start slobbering over the memory of Lilly, showing the readers that he’s not one of those nasty gay boy-fancying teachers. No, Horace is an equal-opportunities pervert.
* He’s also one of the good Slytherins (or as good as a Slytherin can be, which is to say, selfish and pathetic, but not actively malevolent). We can tell this because he immediately apologises for belonging to his House.
* Harry’s first reaction on being told that Horace is a Slytherin is to pull a face. It’s a pity Dumbledore isn’t here, he’d probably be thrilled to see how effective his anti-Slytherin conditioning has been. Oh well, he can always just Legilimens the memory out of the boy later on.
* Slughorn mentions Sirius Black, and Harry feels “as though an invisible hand had twisted [his] intestines and held them tight.” See, he does care about his godfather’s death! He’s not an uncaring, self-centred jerk! Honest!
* Actually, it’s not surprising Slughorn associates being a talented wizard with being a pureblood. Due to the idiocy of the Trace system, pureblood kids would be able to get away with practising magic over the holidays and passing it off as their parents’, something muggle-borns wouldn’t be able to do. Not that we ever see anybody doing this. Maybe the purebloods are all just too honourable to take advantage of this loophole.
* I have to admit, Slughorn’s enthusing over his former protégés is rather sweet. There’s just something so disarmingly childlike about it.
* Slughorn’s keeping clear of Hogwarts and the Order of the Phoenix because he doesn’t fancy the mortality rate among Dumbledore’s minions. It apparently doesn’t occur to him that, if he wants to keep safe, he could do far worse than moving to a magically-defended castle run by a wizard so powerful that Voldemort himself is afraid of him.
* Harry’s sufficiently recovered from hearing about Sirius for the thought of his dead godfather to cease being a source of anguish, and instead be a stick with which to beat up other people.
* New theory on that whole You-Know-Who thing: “Voldemort” is actually a really bad swear-word in the wizarding world, so the reason people don’t like saying it is because of good manners, not fear. Muggleborns keep saying it because they don’t know any better, and Dumbledore says it because he’s never cared about politeness unless he can use it to passive-aggressively cultivate an air of moral superiority. Hey, it makes about as much sense as the official explanation.
* Slughorn is left breathless after running to the door of the sitting-room. Erm… okay.
* “He also likes the company of the famous, the successful and the powerful. He enjoys the feeling that he influences these people. He has never wanted to occupy the throne himself; he prefers the back seat… He used to handpick favourites at Hogwarts…” Oh, for a minute there, I thought Dumbledore was talking about himself rather than Slughorn. I was jerked back to reality by the line “making introductions, forging useful contacts between members.” Dumbledore never gives his protégés any such benefits in return.
* Also, note how Horace likes the back seat because there’s “more room to spread out”. Yeah, he needs it alright, because he’s so fat! Good job Dumbledore drew my attention to the fact, because Slughorn’s obesity was handled so subtly in this chapter, I might have missed it otherwise.
* Now Harry and Dumbledore apparate to the Burrow, and Harry looks forward to seeing Mrs. Weasley, “who could cook better than anyone else he knew.” The portrayal of food is just so weird in these books. On the one hand, people like Dudley and Slughorn eat a lot and are fat and pathetic, on the other, Harry and his friends eat a lot and are still good and normal-sized. I can’t imagine what JK Rowling might have been trying to do with this. Maybe she just didn’t notice that anybody who ate as much as Harry did would be pretty fat themselves.
* So the Weasleys keep their brooms in an outhouse? Really, JKR? Are you sure you didn’t actually mean “shed”?
* Dumbledore takes Harry into the outhouse/shed, which is “a little smaller than the average cupboard”. That’s… kinda intimate, really.
* “‘Sirius represented much to you that you had never known before,’ said Dumbledore gently. ‘Naturally, the loss is devastating…’” I can see why some people think Dumbledore ought to have been in Ravenclaw: his natural reaction to grief seems to be to try and analyse it dispassionately. (He did something similar at the end of OOTP.) The contrast with the usual anti-intellectual truthiness of Gryffindor is quite striking.
* Sometime during the holidays, Harry decided that he’s going to get over Sirius and live life to the full. By, erm, spending all day lying in a room littered with apple cores, dirty underwear, and scraps of old parchment.
* Dumbledore describes the broom shed as “smelly”. Hmm, maybe it is a real outhouse after all.
* No doubt the fact that wizards have outhouses whereas we muggles are stuck with nasty indoor flushing toilets is just another sign of how superior the wizards are.
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no subject
Date: 2012-11-13 05:47 am (UTC)Relative morality: They cast curses, we cast counter-jinxes.
So, Voldemort has started using Occlumency against Harry to stop the Chosen One from reading his mind… anybody remember the explanation for why he apparently stopped doing this in the next book? Anybody remember if there even was an explanation?
No explanation was given, but Harry got the first Voldie-vision after the 7P battle, so I'm thinking one of the things Harry's wand did while on autopilot was to cast Legilimens on Voldemort.
Harry asks what happened to Dumbledore’s hand, and Dumbledore deflects him, adding, “It is a thrilling tale, and I wish to do it justice.” I don’t recall any such tale, so either Dumbles dies before getting his chance to give it, or JK Rowling’s idea of a “thrilling tale” is very different to mine.
We get bits and pieces of a tale, with enough internal contradictions for Terri to spin some nice theories about what had happened.
Oh, for a minute there, I thought Dumbledore was talking about himself rather than Slughorn.
Grin. Slughorn, Voldemort and Dumbledore - variations on a theme.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-14 03:51 am (UTC)And Draco Malfoy, son of Death Eater and pureblood-supremacist Lucius Malfoy, somehow knows what ballet and helicopters are.
/Slughorn’s next action is to start slobbering over the memory of Lilly, showing the readers that he’s not one of those nasty gay boy-fancying teachers. No, Horace is an equal-opportunities pervert./
To be honest, I never got the sense that Slughorn was a pedophile or ephebophile while I was reading HBP. Maybe I’m just naive, but when I read people’s comments on the Internet, it felt like they were seeing something that I wasn’t.
/Harry’s first reaction on being told that Horace is a Slytherin is to pull a face./
*wryly* So, I guess that we’ve completely forgotten about the Sorting Hat’s plead for House unity in OotP, huh? And Harry is in no way biased or prejudiced against Slytherin House or anything.
/Due to the idiocy of the Trace system, pureblood kids would be able to get away with practising magic over the holidays and passing it off as their parents’, something muggle-borns wouldn’t be able to do/
Unless they were Tom Riddle.
Nice catch about Dumbledore and Slughorn’s similarities.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-14 04:55 am (UTC)Oh God, this had me in tears!
* Although Slughorn does include the obligatory pop at muggle technology.
To be fair, it's entirely Rowling's fault. In DH even Ted Tonks has a comment to make about "Arthur Weasley and his muggle rubbish" and Ted is a muggleborn!
no subject
Date: 2012-11-14 05:43 am (UTC)I'm a full Muggle, thank you very much for asking, and I have comments to make about "Arthur Weasley and his [by Arthur's conceptions, Muggle] rubbish."
no subject
Date: 2012-11-14 11:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-14 08:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-26 02:32 am (UTC)I hate to defend JK, but I have short legs and it's not unusual for me to find chairs where if I sit in them my feet don't touch the ground.
* Slughorn’s keeping clear of Hogwarts and the Order of the Phoenix because he doesn’t fancy the mortality rate among Dumbledore’s minions. It apparently doesn’t occur to him that, if he wants to keep safe, he could do far worse than moving to a magically-defended castle run by a wizard so powerful that Voldemort himself is afraid of him.
It would be safe at a magically-defended castle run by a wizard so powerful that Voldemort himself is afraid of him.if Dumbledore actually cared to the safety of anyone else. Later in this book he has no problem with keeping Draco at school even though Draco nearly gets people killed. Draco is no real threat to Dumbledore, so what does he care about collateral damage.?
Mrs. Weasley, “who could cook better than anyone else he knew.”
What other cooks does he know? He cooks at the Dursleys and has no other friends.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-06 02:08 pm (UTC)The house-elves. And he used to live at the Leaky Cauldron.