Deathly Hallows, Chapter 1: The Dark Lord Ascending

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

Author’s note: This installment contains spoilers for the first Warriors series by Erin Hunter.

The title of this chapter makes me think of Voldemort rising into the air in a hot air balloon. No doubt it would be green with a silver Dark Mark on it. Given how full of hot air this book is, this is a remarkable example of accidental truth in advertising. However, most of the bloviating is done by the “good guys” rather than the “bad” ones.

Other people have noted the silliness of the proto-Nazi salute Snape and Yaxley give to enter the Malfoy estate, as well as Rowling’s lame attempts to impart a spooky and portentous atmosphere. My favorite sentence so far is this one:

“Somewhere in the dark garden beyond the hedge a fountain was playing.”

I know this is supposed to mean something like, “The water was tinkling prettily,” but I can’t help thinking of an animate fountain dancing around, maybe throwing a ball back and forth, or dodging around under its own water spray, like children do with sprinklers.

Hey, this is the wizarding world! It could happen!

When Snape and Yaxley enter, they notice an apparently unconscious person tied up and hanging upside down, slowly rotating above the table. Pay attention to that. We’ll see later that It’s a really important example of how evil Voldemort is.

Speaking of whom, I like this description of him: “...[H]is face shone through the gloom, hairless, snakelike, with slits for nostrils and gleaming red eyes whose pupils were vertical. He was so pale that he seemed to emit a pearly glow.” OMG! It’s Michael Jackson! I knew he was evil!

Snape gets the place of honor at his lord’s immediate right. That’s supposed to confirm he’s a bad guy, no doubt, but it just makes me glad somebody appreciates Snape enough to give him respect. That underlines how sick these books are: Snape did more than anyone else to ensure the “good” side won; he dedicated his life to the cause. Yet the supposed epitome of evil treats him with more honor and consideration than the epitome of goodness, Scumbledore.

The DEs and Voldy discuss capturing Harry and infiltrating the Ministry of Magic, and Voldy looks up again at the rotating body. Just in case we forgot about it.

Then they discuss capturing Harry and infiltrating the Ministry some more, and Yaxley cuts in. It says Yaxley “seemed determined to receive some portion of approval” from Voldemort, implying he was jealous of Snape. Awwww, isn’t that cute? Sibling rivalry among the Death Eaters. It shows even the bad guys are just like family, the same way Harry and his friends are. OBHWF, meet OBHDEF: One Big Happy Death Eater Family.

Voldy looks up at the body and says, “That Potter lives is due more to my errors than to his triumphs.” This echoes Snape’s remarks in chapter 2 of HBP, thus showing great minds think alike. Hmmm. I guess that means everybody on DTCL is also evil, since we think that, too. This is the first of many times in DH when a “bad guy” says something that happens to be true, but that the reader is immediately supposed to reject because a bad guy said it.

The Dull Dark Lord continues talking to himself while apparently addressing the body above them, and looks up at the body again. I’m getting the feeling this discussion is just filler, delaying the point at which we find out the SHOCKING TRUTH about this captive.

Voldie asks to borrow a wand from one of his minions. They react with horror: “The faces around him displayed nothing but shock; he might have announced that he wanted to borrow one of their arms.” Or something else from the guys, eh? *wink, wink, nudge nudge* “Know what I mean? Know what I mean?” Sorry. I got nostalgic for Monty Python there for a minute.

Voldie speaks, and the narration continues, “The soft voice seemed to hiss on even after the cruel mouth had stopped moving...[T]he hissing grew louder...The huge snake emerged to climb slowly up Voldemort’s chair.” How sweet. Voldie and Nagini are so much in accord they can finish each other’s sentences. You can see how much they care about each other in the picture heading chapter 1 in the American Scholastic edition of DH. Their love is much truer than that of HP/GW or RW/HG. Oops. There’s another example of how the “bad guys” are more sane and/or virtuous than the “good guys.” Remind me which side I’m supposed to root for again?

JKR betrays her either her ignorance or “ignore-ance” of biology by describing Nagini’s eyes as “unblinking.” Of course they are. Snakes don’t have eyelids. The poor thing couldn’t blink if she wanted to.

Voldie tells Bella she has his permission to “prune her family tree” by killing her tainted relatives, and she weeps with gratitude at his goodness. Here again, I know I’m supposed to be appalled at the mutual depravity on display, but all I could think was, “Which relatives would I like to, not necessarily kill, but see dead?” (They’re not worth the damage to my character killing them would cause, much less a stint in prison.) Two of my three siblings would be first up, not because they’re “blood traitors,” but because they’re evil scumbags who’ve gotten their kicks by psychologically torturing me in a tag team for decades. If wanting them dead makes me a DE wannabe, so be it.

Voldy makes the standard genocidal maniac speech, saying, “...[I]n your family, so in the world...we shall cut away the canker that infects us until only those of the true blood remain.” The Dull Lord’s clearly been holding out on us. All this time, we’ve been thinking British magicals were anti-technology, while their leader was secretly watching an HBO TV show about vampires. (True Blood is the name of a hit show based on Charlaine Harris’s book series.)

We finally get back to the elephant in the room the body above the table, as Voldemort awakens it and we find out it’s--Charity Burbage?! Huh? Who’s that? He tells us she’s the “muggle studies” teacher at Hogwarts who has committed the unpardonable sin of advocating for the rights of “muggles” and “muggleborns.” The scene gets more contrived as she begs Snape to save her, which of course he can’t do without blowing his cover. Too bad I watched that episode of 24 in which Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) had to commit the apparently cold-blooded murder of a friend to maintain his cover with the bad guys. That was infinitely more effective than this lame drivel, not least because we’d actually met the victim several episodes earlier and seen his friendship with Jack.

Seriously, if Rowling wanted us to care about this woman, she needed to introduce the character no later than the beginning of HBP. The natural time to bring Burbage into the story was even earlier, in PoA, when Hermione took “muggle studies.” Rowling could have shown us what Hermione was learning in this class and used the no doubt ridiculous misinformation disseminated in it to poke fun at the conceited and ignorant magicals. Of course, that presupposes JKR really wanted to write a series that examined the evils of bigotry in a meaningful way, instead of just telling us that some racism is okay, as long as the racists really are superior to the people they’re looking down on--y’know, because they have magic.

Even after all the buildup, Rowling still screws up Burbage’s death scene, by having Voldy just AK her. This causes her body to crash onto the table, for no apparent reason other than to add more drama to an otherwise dull scene. This is an echo of Dumbledore’s death scene, when the AK caused his body to fly through the air. So the AK causes a person to die, instantly and painlessly, which should make them just drop where they are--or continue hanging, in this case--except when it makes their corpse fly through the air or fall onto tables. Um, yeah, right.

After Burbage’s body lands on the table, Voldy calls Nagini to eat her. This made me sad for Nagini, since she probably would have preferred to kill her own food.

It also would have been a lot more effective dramatically if Voldemort had treated Burbage as a kind of piñata for his pet snake, with Nagini repeatedly striking at the woman to bring her down. This would also foreshadow the scene later in which Voldy kills Snape using Nagini, thus depriving critics like madderbrad of their complaint that Voldemort always, without fail used the AK to kill people--except in that one, convenient instance in which his victim just happened to live long enough to give a bystander the information he needed to defeat Voldy. Oops.

A few months after I read the HP books, I started reading Erin Hunter’s Warriors books about feral cats. The first series follows much the same trajectory as HP: Rusty, a prophesied savior, leaves the mundane world of the kittypet (domestic cat) to live in the woods as a Clan cat. There are four Clans: WindClan, RiverClan, ThunderClan, and ShadowClan. Rusty, renamed Fireheart, joins ThunderClan, and Tigerclaw becomes his implacable enemy. Tigerclaw is thrown out of ThunderClan when he tries to murder the Clan’s leader, Bluestar, so he can become leader. He later becomes leader of ShadowClan when it loses two leaders in quick succession through illness. Tigerclaw then tries to take over the forest by uniting the Clans--whether they like it or not--and purging the forest of all “half-clan” cats, i.e., cats with a parent in two different Clans. (This is considered bad because they are assumed to have divided loyalties.)

Several chapters into The Darkest Hour, the climax of the first series, hereafter referred to as “the good DH,” we see the results of Tigerclaw’s obsession with blood purity: While sitting atop a huge pile of bones, he watches like Caligula at the Roman Coliseum as “impure” cats are killed in front of him. He orders Stonefur, Bluestar’s son and a half-clan cat, to prove his loyalty by killing two innocent half-clan kittens. When Stonefur refuses, he is forced to fight one of Tigerclaw’s lieutenants to the death and dies protecting the kittens. His sacrifice keeps the kittens alive long enough for them to be rescued by two ThunderClan cats.

The first chapter of the bad DH seemed boring, silly, and contrived before reading the good DH. After reading the good DH, it looked even worse. It was impossible not to compare the two scenes. These are the reasons The Darkest Hour execution scene mops the floor with the one in Deathly Hallows.

We know the victim. Stonefur is a supporting character, but we’ve still read several scenes with him and known his story for much of the series. And as the beloved son of Bluestar, who has herself recently died fighting evil, his death has special resonance.

He is not a passive victim. Unlike Charity Burbage, who literally just hangs around waiting to die, Stonefur, while a prisoner, still has some freedom to act. He uses that freedom to great effect, which brings me to my next point.

His death is an act of heroic self-sacrifice. He has the choice to save himself by killing the “tainted” kittens, but he prefers an honorable death to living with a soul corrupted by the murder of innocents.

We see that all the heroic cats are not in ThunderClan. Although Stonefur is half ThunderClan, he was raised as a RiverClan cat, and his loyalties are to that Clan. By giving him a heroic death, the author drives home that, although the focus of the series is ThunderClan, there are brave and noble cats in every Clan.

The reader wonders what Stonefur could have done if he had lived. I admit this is a point that might not occur to everybody, but Stonefur’s death reminded me of the major point I took away from The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule’s true crime book about serial killer Ted Bundy.

One characteristic typified his victims: No, not the obvious, much-discussed one that they were all young, good-looking women with long, dark hair parted in the middle. What struck me most forcibly about them was that nearly all of them were extraordinary young women. Far more than just young and attractive, they were, almost to a woman, intelligent, well-educated, kind, and compassionate. An exceptionally high proportion of them were planning careers of service to society’s most vulnerable members, such as teachers for handicapped children or therapists for emotionally disturbed children.

When Bundy murdered them, he didn’t just end their lives and cause indescribable pain to their loved ones. He robbed all of society of the decades of positive contributions these women would have made if they had lived. That is the ultimate horror of murder: Not that an individual dies, which is bad enough, but that everything that individual could have done to benefit the world dies with him or her. This makes all of us the victims of vermin like Voldy and Bundy.

But because Rowling couldn’t be bothered to plan her series even minimally, she didn’t introduce her “noble victim” until right before the moment of her death. That made Burbage’s “brave defense” of “muggles” and "muggleborns” ineffective because we never see it; we only read a passing mention of it. Yawn.