June 12
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000)

The Harry Potter novels are known for having a mystery-like plot, in which the unanswered questions pile up with hidden clues, only to be resolved with surprise revelations at the end. For those who might read the book but haven't yet, I promise not to spoil any of that. Actually, I'm not going to say much about the story at all, and the large part of this "review" will be lengthy digressions on other topics (which I know is what many of you prefer anyway).

This is the fourth book in the series. The first three my sister owns, and I've read each of them a couple of times. A recent TV commercial for the upcoming movie (of the third book) reminded me that there are two more that I've yet to read. I checked the King County Library's online catalog and was amazed to find that they carry 262 copies of this book -- not to mention an equally abundant supply of the other four books in the series, plus audio, large-print, and numerous translated versions for all of them. Of the 262, most were checked out, in transit, or otherwise unavailable, but among those remaining was one on the shelf at my local branch, so I went down and borrowed it.

I like the Harry Potter books. I think their astounding success is well-deserved. Some critics praise the way in which traditional story-telling for children has been modernized. That makes little difference to me. Having grown up in the era when computers existed but hadn't yet been reduced to household size and when the most popular children's books were a few decades older than myself, I still find it more jarring than comforting when I'm reading along and out pops a reference to some modern item like a video game. It doesn't please me, but it doesn't offend me either.

The one thing -- perhaps the only thing -- that I find dreary about the Harry Potter books is the obsession with "quidditch", the fictional sport roughly equivalent to our soccer (which non-Americans call "football") in which wizards chase the balls while flying around on broomsticks. Each book has at least one episode in which we are made to share the boys' breathless excitement as they follow along a quidditch match. This sort of thing would be boring for any sport. (I like baseball, but I have no desire to read a detailed account of a game in any novel.) It's that much worse for having to pretend that quidditch actually makes sense. Not only are the rules fictional, they're stupid. The scoring system is so poorly designed that the game is unplayable. It is easier to accept that wizards fly on brooms than it is to believe that any successful sport would have evolved the rules that Ms Rowling presents to us.

In this book, the obligatory quidditch match is got out of the way early. The first incident of consequence (aside from a prologue) is that the boys attend the final match in the quidditch World Cup (Ireland vs Bulgaria) which this year is being hosted by England, where Harry lives. Here the first of the new characters are introduced, and the events unfold from there. For me, that makes the book slow to get into, but once the World Cup is over and Harry goes on to school it's fine.

As for the rest of the story, only a couple of points. I confess that I thoroughly enjoyed all the adolescent drama about who would take whom to the school dance. I love that stuff. Some of my friends have remarked that my taste in television shows is that of a teenage girl (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson's Creek, Felicity, etc.). I suppose the same applies to books.

Another thing I enjoyed, less typical for me, was Hermione's forays into abolitionism. Normally, I tend to cringe at any plot that even hints at moralistic political analogy, but somehow this one appealed to me. I'm not sure which entertained me more, her enthusiasm for the cause or everyone else's indifference.

Only one word was completely unknown to me, serried. When I read it, I was out of the house, away from my dictionaries, so I took a note but didn't look it up until later. The dictionary tells me that serried can either mean crowded together or having notched ridges. In my note I neglected to include a page number, so I can't check back in the book to see which one was intended. It's not entirely clear, but I think the two meanings are of separate derivation. The latter looks like it might be a simple corruption of serrated. For the former, there is also a verb, serry, meaning to crowd together, but Merriam-Webster labels it "archaic", which means it's no good for Boggle under my house rules.

The book I read is identified on one of the front pages as the "first American edition". The spellings are all Americanized (center, color, etc.), but there are still British colloquialisms in the dialogue. The only one I can recall right now is that on several occasions someone is called a "prat", but I'm sure there were others. I vaguely recall Pete telling me that the publishers produce both a British and an American edition, so that each group of readers can have its own familiar spellings. The American edition also includes the more significant change that what was originally called the "philosopher's stone" -- an item which figures prominently in the first book -- was renamed the "sorcerer's stone". This might not have been necessary if the stone were not also part of the book's title. Apparently, the marketing department concluded that the notion of the philosopher's stone is not sufficiently present in the American cultural consciousness for American buyers to recognize it as a magical item, and a book with "philosopher" in the title might sound boring to them. (Now that I think of it, I'm sure my mother would sooner pick up a book about philosophers than one about sorcerers, but no doubt she's an exception.) The sorcerer's stone gets a passing mention Goblet of Fire, so I guess they're continuing to preserve the distinction through the series.

Another word that caught my eye may or may not have been a Britishism. At one point, someone has a friend in another country with whom he (or she? I don't recall who it was, but Hermione would be a good guess) exchanges letters. I've always heard this sort of person called a "penpal", a term which I've seen in the comic strip Peanuts, but in the Harry Potter book it was a penfriend. In Merriam-Webster, there's no mention of penfriend.

On a couple of occasions, the word for one who flies was spelled flier, which looks wrong to me. I want to see it as flyer, as in Radio Flyer, the brand of toy wagon. In the past year or so, I've occasionally seen the flier spelling for the sort of paper advertisement that is mailed or handed out, and it looks even more wrong to me in that context.

One other curious thing I noticed in this book is that contractions like didn't, hadn't, and in one case even hasn't, are commonly hyphenated across a line break before the -n't. I'm in favor of this, because it's logical and makes for more attractive typography (especially with a long word like shouldn't), but in my days it was considered non-standard.

One of Harry Potter's two sidekicks is the aforementioned Hermione Granger. A scene in this book directly addresses the question of how to pronounce her first name. Perhaps it's not a question at all. Certainly anyone who sees the movie before the book will never have had to wonder about it. I've known all along that the proper English pronunciation is "her-MY-o-nee" but that hasn't stopped me from continuing to hear it in my mind as "HER-mee-o-nee". That is, I model the -one ending after abalone rather than anemone as it should be (but not, heaven forbid, telephone!).

In general, feminine Greek names tend to be accented on the antepenult, even the if spelling suggests the opposite -- Penelope, Eurydice, Andromache, Terpsichore. The goddess Aphrodite is a prominent but rare exception. (Most of the other exceptions fall into one of two patterns: those ending in the suffix -eia (eg, Iphigeneia, Cassiopeia), or those in which a consonant cluster between the final syllables moves the stress to the penult (eg, Electra, Ariadne).) To pronounce an accented "i" with the long "i" sound betrays the Greek but is standard in English. We see the same pattern in Calliope.

The original Hermione is a character in Greek mythology. She is the daughter of Menelaus, king of Sparta, and his queen Helen, who abandons her daughter to elope to Troy with Paris. (Yes, that's right. The famous Helen of Troy, most beautiful woman in the world, was the mother of a nine-year-old.) Hermione figures in some of the stories of the Trojan War's aftermath. As a result of disagreement within the family, she was betrothed both to the son of Achilles, who is named Neoptolemus in some stories and Pyrrhus in others, as well as to Orestes, son of Agamemnon. Eventually she ends up with Orestes. (Those familiar with the house of Atreus will recognize that he is her first cousin.)

Later writers have grafted romantic intrigue onto this love triangle. Racine wrote a play titled Andromaque, in which the title character, Hector's widow Andromache, must decide between her past allegiance to the defeated Trojan family and her interest in securing her future by embracing the Greeks -- more precisely, by embracing one particular Greek, Achilles' son Pyrrhus, who has fallen in love with her. To make the decision more difficult, Racine has resurrected Astyanax, son of Hector and Andromache, so that instead of being murdered by Odysseus during the sack of Troy, as the classical accounts say, he is alive and might succeed to the throne of Epirus if only his mother will wed Pyrrhus.

Pyrrhus's interest in Andromache infuriates Hermione (who in the other stories is his fiancée) who is in love with him. This, in turn, frustrates Orestes (who in the classical stories is her other fiancé) who is in love with her. As Hermione's passion for Pyrrhus changes to anger and then hate, she turns to Orestes and asks him to murder Pyrrhus.

When Rossini adapted Racine's play into an opera, he and his librettist moved the focus away Andromache's intospective quandary in favor of the noisier (extrospective?) subplot of Hermione and Orestes. Thus his opera is titled "Ermione". Rossini is traditionally more famous for his comedies, so Ermione has been largely unknown, but in recent years it is creeping back into repertoire as a sort of smaller-scale Guillaume Tell.

I have never seen the Italian name Ermione spelled with an accent mark on the "i", which strongly suggests that it is pronounced like "err-me-OH-nay", which perhaps explains my desire to mispronounce the name of Harry Potter's friend.

Another character, new to this book, is Viktor Krum, whom we meet as the star of Bulgaria's World Cup team. "Krum" is not, as you might expect, simply a humble-sounding name with a suitably Slavic spelling. It is, in fact, a name of renown in Bulgarian national legend. Krum was the great leader who founded the most celebrated of the four manifestations of Bulgaria, a curious phoenix-like nation with a habit of vanishing and reappearing in another place and time.

Like so many European races, the original Bulgarians -- or "Bulgars" as they are called in the earlier eras -- were from Asia. The first Bulgaria was formed when a group of them migrated east and in the fifth century founded a prosperous state on the north shore of the Black Sea. There they came into contact, and conflict, with the Byzantines, through whose records we know about them.

In about 560 A.D., these Bulgars went to war with another Eurasian nation, the Avars, and were famously annihilated. I say "famously" because although it's obscure history today, a couple centuries ago the Bulgars and Avars were a staple part of the cultural vocabulary. It's not so much that people knew their real history as that the names were familiar and metaphorically meaningful, as Huns and Vikings are for us today. Voltaire makes reference to Bulgars and Avars early in his story Candide, by way of satirizing the militarism of certain states in his own day. His readers would have known not only that the Bulgars nation was wiped from the face of the earth, but also that the Avars attacked the Bulgars on the invitation of the Byzantine emperor Justinian, and after their victory they went on to trouble the Byzantines far more than the Bulgars ever had. And yet within a century the Avars, too, for a brief time the most powerful nation in Europe, also collapsed into nothingness.

After the decline of the Avar empire -- some recent historians suggest that epidemic disease was a contributing factor -- a collection of formerly subject peoples in its eastern provinces gathered together and started calling themselves "Bulgars" again. Early in the 9th century, this new nation migrated westward along the Black Sea shore and founded a new Bulgarian nation not far from the location of the current one.

At about the same time, another group of Bulgars, from the original Asian home, migrated south, converted Islam, and formed a state on the lower Volga. This state is the Bulgaria of Islamic literature, sometimes known in the West as "Eastern Bulgaria". (As far as I known, neither Volga nor vulgar is etymologically related to Bulgar. I think the Russian word boyar is related, but I'm not certain of that.)

The contemporary western Bulgaria was Krum's Bulgaria. According to the histories it was Krum who gathered the disparate western Bulgarians into a unified nation, and it was Krum who not only fought against the hostile Byzantines but created the system of law and government which allowed the Bulgarian kingdom to survive and prosper for another five centuries.

These histories are suspect, of course, and what I'm recounting here is closer to the traditional version than what I believe to be accurate. For example, I don't think the first Bulgar nation was completely exterminated by the Avars, just as I don't think that Attila was a sadistic madman, but in such matters the myth is often more relevant than the reality.

After the Byzantines, no one was much interested in telling Bulgarian history until the early 19th century, when the seeds of nationalism -- planted a generation earlier by Napoleon's army -- began to sprout in Eastern Europe. It is no accident that the pioneering work in the history of the nations of eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia) coincides with the heyday of nationalism. For intellectuals of the early 19th century, the great task of the day was how to instill a sense of national identity in people long accustomed to being a motley collection of communities grouped within a large empire. Addressing this task was a primary motivation of every intellectual art, including literature and history.

(It's worth noting that Eastern Europe is not the only place where this occurred. Another region in a similar condition was the eastern shore of North America, where a motley collection of separate colonies had recently become free of the British Empire and been thrown together in the interest of collective security. Once the federal government was established and had survived its early crises, the task at hand was to invent a national identity. The history of the United States was thus invented at roughly the same time as the histories of eastern Europe. Admittedly, since then American history has been more thoroughly re-examined than has, say, Polish or Hungarian, but the national myth persists. To this day, a full century and a half -- one-third of our history -- is virtually non-existent in the American national consciousness. Who among my American readers can tell me even two things that happened in America between 1620 and 1770? It is almost as if America did not exist during that period. And indeed, as conceived by our nationalist historians, it did not.)

That's not to say that the historians were completely dismissive of accuracy. It's just that all of their research into the past was shaped by the desire to discover the national identity which their faith told them was already there. Thus the people of the southeastern Balkans, speaking a Slavic language, adhering to an Orthodox Christian faith, and ethnically not much different from their equally miscegenated "Greek", "Serb" and "Turk" neighbors, discovered that they were in fact "Bulgarians" -- the long suppressed descendants of the glorious medieval empire founded by Krum, brought to its zenith by Simeon, and eventually defeated by the Ottoman enemy.

Vasil Zlatarski, the dean of Bulgarian history, credits Krum with a great many things. Some of these are certainly true. There is little doubt that he was the leader who united the people and founded the nation, and there is strong evidence that he created the legal and political structure of the state. On the other hand, Krum's supposed political philosophy, favoring a central government over the aristocracy of the boyars, or welcoming Slavic people as equal members of the nation rather than discriminating in favor of the ethnic Bulgars, are more dubious and probably tell us more about the 19th century than the 9th.

9:07:14 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

With that last letter from Geof Riggs, there were a few things I intended to mention but forgot.

One is that I've gradually come around to support Geof's favorite vice-presidential candidate, John Edwards, for the Democratic running-mate. That's largely because I now believe -- I wasn't so sure before -- that the political climate is ripe for the Democrats to try to make a serious attempt to recapture the "values" theme, which the Republicans claimed with Reagan and secured even more firmly under Clinton. There's a lot more to it than that, so I hope I'll get around to elaborating some day. (I still haven't gotten around to my recap of what the Democrats need to absorb from the defunct Howard Dean candidacy....) Edwards is the best vehicle for such a strategy, on account of his conspicuously being the only candidate who is perceived to have run an entirely positive campaign (which in turn was due to the fact that, unique among the Democratic candidates, he had reason to believe that he was preparing the ground for a run in 2008 or 2012).

A few comments on the other names tossed about: The notion of a Kerry-McCain ticket is finally dead, I gather. It was a silly idea.

Don't believe any of the journalists who tell you that choosing Gephardt as running mate is a strategy for winning the swing state of Missouri. Gephardt is from Missouri, and Missouri is a swing state, and that's as far as many in the press are prepared to analyze. The smarter ones know better. They know that Gephardt is no help at all to Kerry in Missouri. Gephardt is from the St Louis area, which always votes Democratic anyway. The rest of the state always votes against St Louis candidates. You almost never see a statewide election in Missouri won by anyone from St Louis, which is why Gephardt never ran for the Senate. Choosing Gephardt is about winning blue-collar votes in Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, not Missouri.

Edwards, for all his talk about being for the working class, didn't poll well among working-class voters. In the primaries, paradoxically, Kerry always scored the blue-collar votes, while Edwards got the college graduates. Edwards' southern background is also relatively unimportant. Most of the Southern states aren't going to vote Democratic anyway. Being Southern might help a little in Missouri and southern Ohio, but that's about it. The strategic point of choosing Edwards would be to appeal to the slice of middle-class undecided moderates, a swing group not localized to any geographic region and thus useful in all of the close states.

The point of choosing Indiana Gov Evan Bayh would be a deliberate message of ideological balance, as Bayh is reputed to be a conservative Democrat. The point of choosing Bill Nelson or Bob Graham, both Florida senators, would be to win Florida. Of the two, I like Graham better.

The other thing I forgot to add in responding to that letter, was to follow up on REG's question of what better plan there is for Iraq, if one doesn't care for the President's or for REG's partition idea. On that topic, I very much liked the comments by Gen Anthony Zinni (former commander of CentCom) at a Center for Defense Information dinner. Yesterday I read it again, before passing on the link to REG and Geof in a follow-up email. I still think it's the best short analysis I've seen of the problem of America's occupation of Iraq.

Come to think of it, there are several retired generals who speak a lot of sense on Iraq. I grew up in an anti-military culture. Even now I hardly know anyone with military experience, and my social group tends to look down on the military as an institution. In spite of that, I have to admit that as a group, retired generals seem to be smarter about America's situation in Iraq than any other group. On the whole, I'd rank them above historians and academics -- and they're way ahead of politicians or journalists.

10:27:03 AM  [permalink]  comment []