Still absolutely wizard
Christopher Nicholson
HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE by J. K. Rowling Bloomsbury, £14.99, pp. 636 We missed the midnight opening, but early on Saturday morning my 11-year-old son and I hotfooted it to our local W. H. Smith's. We were both startled by our first sight of the book. The size! Han)' Potter and the Goblet of Fire is a hulking great affair, its 636 pages making it more than twice as long as any of the previous three volumes. Given that it's only a year since the last Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling has clearly been working at a furious pace. Whether she could sustain the invention and suspense, and sheer fun, of the first book, Hany Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, has always been an intriguing ques- tion. The second, Hany Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, was largely an exercise in consolidation, but the third, Hany Potter and the Prisoner of Azka ban, brilliantly directed readers back to the core of the story — that of a young boy whose parents are murdered and who has to survive in the world by his wits and skill. It was implied, quite movingly, that Harry's special gifts were due in part to the love given him by his mother and father. However, during the denouement of Azka ban, Rowling did something rather unwise in novel-writing terms, by employing a deus ex machina in the form of a device called a Time-Turner. This meant that Harry could change the course of history, travelling back three hours to prevent a disaster which had already occurred. The device was unwise because the question immediately occurred: why couldn't the Time-Turner be used to undo the death of his parents? At a stroke, the basis of the story seemed to have been undermined.
Thankfully, the Time-Turner plays no part in Harty Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but we do have a clever mix of old and new material. The leading characters are back — Harry's chums Hermione and Ron, the school's wise headmaster Albus Edumble- dore, the satanic Lord Voldemort and the rest (I am assuming that by now most Spec- tator readers will have at least some idea about Hogwarts) — and we are also intro- duced to plenty of fresh faces. Among them is a cardboard cut-out German, Pro- fessor Karkoroff, and a treacherous news- paper reporter, Rita Skeeter, the depiction of whom surely reflects Rowling's feelings about the way in which her own life has been dug over by the tabloids.
Rowling does not offer subtle characteri- sation and indeed, despite the length of this novel, seems to have no interest in psy- chology; even Harry lacks psychological depth, always behaving to type. In compen- sation, the writing is full of good humour. The horses which only drink malt whisky; the discovery of a talon in what is supposed to be beef stew; the grandfather clock which identifies the whereabouts of the various members of the Weasley family, its hands pointing to such headings as 'lost' and 'in prison' — there are lots of little details like these in the new novel. I partic- ularly enjoyed England's failure to qualify for the Quidditch World Cup after being beaten 390 to 10 by Transylvania. Poor old Wales was knocked out by Uganda.
Harty Potter and the Goblet of Fire has been promoted as the novel in which Harry discovers girls, but the atmosphere through- out remains astonishingly chaste. Although Harry is now 14, he seems younger, and anyway he is just too busy fighting evil to think about sex. All we get, therefore, is a long and slightly tedious account of a ball in which the boys have to find dance partners. By Adrian Mole standards, the hormone ooze level is negligible. When, a few lines from the end of the book, Harry at last receives a kiss, Rowling carefully specifies 'on the cheek'. It will be interesting to see what she does about this in the next three volumes, by the last of which Harry will be 17. No unplanned pregnancies, I fancy, but something more romantic — Harry and Hermione walking off-stage hand in hand after a final triumph over Voldemort.
That, surely, is how it should be, because in many ways the Harry Potter stories, set in an exclusive boarding school to which ordinary children are denied access, are extraordinarily old-fashioned. They're a marriage of Billy Bunter and Tolkien; a wonderfully successful marriage, it must be said, and one only has to glance at Tolkien to be grateful for Rowling's lightness of touch. She is also marvellous at the busi- ness of making one want to turn over the next page to find out what happens, and the climactic ending of Harry and the Gob- let of Fire is managed with great aplomb, although it contains one utterly bizarre misjudgment, which occurs — and I am giving nothing away here — when Harry is in mortal danger. Suddenly we read the line: 'Let the police come, he thought des- perately. . .' This jolted me right out of the groove of the story. The police?! I visu- alised our boys in blue marching on to the scene, equipped with truncheons and walkie-talkies, to arrest the Dark Lord. Just putting on those handcuffs, if we may. . . thank you for your co-operation... if you could accompany us to the station.... But that was only a moment; the next I was back inside the story.
The novel is definitely a little too long, and with an ever-increasing cast of charac- ters there are times when the plot seems over-complicated. Perhaps J. K. Rowling was writing under too much pressure to meet her publisher's deadline. On the other hand, the verdict of my son, who had finished Hairy Potter and the Goblet of Fire by Sunday lunchtime (we had a blissfully quiet Saturday), was categorical. 'Good,' he replied, when I asked what he thought of it, and that 'good' came in the kind of pro- foundly satisfied tone someone might use after inspecting a diamond to see if it was fake and concluding that it was real. I think that the novel is pretty good too; a few flaws, but a real diamond. We're both look- ing forward to the next one.
'Get a load of this, guys! — Enigma, Colditz and now Hastings.'
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