The Dumbledore Question
Having just begun Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (this in order to clear up a few references in the subsequent volume, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which I've already read--don't ask why I've read them out of order), I'm reminded of my most burning question thus far (btw, welcome to the end of this sentence):
Why did Dumbledore trust Snape?
I kept believing that he must have known something Harry and the rest of the doubters did not. I trusted Dumbledore's judgment. Is a reader supposed to conclude that a man sensitive enough to speak Mermish couldn't possibly have the kind of attenae needed to tune into Snape's evil ways?
Not that this has weighed heavily on the part of my mind devoted to children's sagas. It hasn't. Mainly, I continue to marvel at how taken people are with the Harry Potter books while I continue to be taken with Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Harry and Hermione and Ron are loveable but not as deeply loveable as Pullman's Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry. Lyra's so-called compass and Will's knife, and their worlds (Oxford and otherwise) are deep and rich and wondrous. Very few children I've met on paper are as loveable as Lyra. She is a heroine figure.
At a party once, I asked children's literature expert Alison Lurie why she thought Harry Potter had caught on so. Since I asked her not as a blogger but as an affiliated staff writer, I won't quote her answer here. Suspect it's all right to say that she addressed the issue of money. (Bonus tangential non sequitur: here she is in the Guardian on the Chronicles of Narnia, whose reach Pullman approaches. N.B. Pullman's trilogy is the anti-Narnia, Christianly speaking.)
Why did Dumbledore trust Snape?
I kept believing that he must have known something Harry and the rest of the doubters did not. I trusted Dumbledore's judgment. Is a reader supposed to conclude that a man sensitive enough to speak Mermish couldn't possibly have the kind of attenae needed to tune into Snape's evil ways?
Not that this has weighed heavily on the part of my mind devoted to children's sagas. It hasn't. Mainly, I continue to marvel at how taken people are with the Harry Potter books while I continue to be taken with Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Harry and Hermione and Ron are loveable but not as deeply loveable as Pullman's Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry. Lyra's so-called compass and Will's knife, and their worlds (Oxford and otherwise) are deep and rich and wondrous. Very few children I've met on paper are as loveable as Lyra. She is a heroine figure.
At a party once, I asked children's literature expert Alison Lurie why she thought Harry Potter had caught on so. Since I asked her not as a blogger but as an affiliated staff writer, I won't quote her answer here. Suspect it's all right to say that she addressed the issue of money. (Bonus tangential non sequitur: here she is in the Guardian on the Chronicles of Narnia, whose reach Pullman approaches. N.B. Pullman's trilogy is the anti-Narnia, Christianly speaking.)
posted by Elizabeth Manus at 9:33 PM
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