BTT: Headlines

Deb @ 1:13 am

http://btt2.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/headlines/

The news has been horrifying and addictive this week, with catastrophe piled on catastrophe, to a degree that–if I had read this in a book or seen it in a movie–I’d be protesting that it was just too unlikely, too farfetched.

But, topics for novels get ripped from the headlines all the time. Or real-life events remind you of fiction (whether “believable” or not) that you’ve read but never expected to see. Or real life comes up with an event so unbelievable that it stretches you sense of reality.

Hmm … I can’t quite come up with an outright question to ask, but thinking about the theory of fiction and how it can affect and be affected by real world events can act as a buffer between the horrific events on the news and having to actually face that horror. So … what happens when the line between fiction and reality becomes all-too slim? Discuss!

… … …

That has got to be the hardest question yet from the weekly Booking Through Thursday meme!

I know I commented to someone yesterday – right now I can’t recall to whom – that one thing that perhaps makes a catastrophe like that in Japan – or, just weeks before, also the earthquake in Christchurch, NZ – come “closer” to us who live on the other side of the world, than some other world events do, is that it was brought about by Nature. We can sympathize without mixing it up (immediately, anyway) with the question of Who To Blame, which is there whenever war or terrorism is involved.

At the same time, having no one to blame often makes us feel helpless and confused. So with any kind of accident we still tend to get hung up on questions like: Could this not have been foreseen and prevented? And to follow: Did we react quickly enough? Were the right decisions made within the first five minutes/first day/whatever? Isn’t there someone whose head should be cut off (at least figuratively) for not doing a better job…?

I suppose that’s one area where fiction steps in as a buffer. In crime fiction for example, things get sorted out in the end. All damage cannot be healed; and people are rarely raised from the dead; but the reader is not left in the darkness of mystery. Someone was to blame and they usually do not go unpunished.

With fantasy literature – at least most that I read - I’d say these kinds of books usually also have a mythological foundation in that there is a battle between good and evil, which often involves also other beings than just humans and animals. (Elves, trolls etc.) Sometimes nature itself gets involved and take sides – like when the trees/ ents march to Isengard in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Landscapes and climate are used to illustrate moods and spiritual status – like mountains and valleys, ice and water, woods and deserts, or flying vs going down deep under the surface. Like the mines of Moria (Tolkien) or the Underland (CS Lewis: The Silver Chair).  Very little is left to pure chance. Somewhere in the background there is spiritual warfare; powers are at work that go far beyond what can be seen.

The relief that fictional stories of this kind brings us (as does religion) is that there is an end to it. There comes a day when we’ll be able to put the book down and say “phew”.

With authors like JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, their fiction reflects their personal Christian faith, with a deep interest in theology as well as classical mythology (especially Greek, Roman, Celtic and Old Norse, which are all also embedded in our Western culture).

I see the same pattern in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series. She may be simplifying things in some ways, and complicating them in others. But whether one sees her attempts as wholly successful or not: By letting the Wizarding world and the Muggle world (our modern world at the end of the last century) interact, with only a limited number of characters able to move between both, she does bring in the perspective of “unseen powers” at work.

The sixth book in the Harry Potter series (The Half-Blood Prince) opens with a chapter called “The Other Minister” which describes a meeting between the Prime Minister of England and the Minister for Magic in the Wizarding World (Fudge). The latter has a very different explanation of some recent events that have also mysteriously affected the Muggle world. (Muggles = non-wizards.) Like a collapsed bridge in central London, and a hurricane in the West Country.

The Half Blood Prince was released on 16 July, 2005. Rowling had intended to read from the first chapter of the book at her official presentation. The choice of text for the public reading was changed, because only a week earlier, on 7 July 2005, there had been a series of coordinated suicide attacks upon Londoners using the public transport system during the morning "rush hour". Fifty-six people, including four bombers, were killed by the attacks, and about 700 were injured.

Attacks that came just a little too close to the fictive disasters that open The Half-Blood Prince:

The Prime Minister’s pulse quickened at the very thought of these accusations, for they were neither fair nor true. How on earth was his government supposed to  have stopped that bridge collapsing? It was outrageous for anybody to suggest that they were not spending enough on bridges. The bridge was less than ten years old, and the best experts were at a loss to explain why it had snapped cleanly in two, sending a dozen cars into the watery depths of the river below. And how dared anyone suggest that it was lack of policemen that had resulted in those two very nasty and well-published murders? Or that the government should have somehow foreseen the freak hurricane in the West Country that had caused so much damage to both people and property?

And indeed, the explanation that the Minister for Magic gives turns out to be a little different: Voldemort and his Death Eaters were behind the bridge accident, and as for the hurricane:

‘… and we suspect giant involvement.’
The Prime Minister stopped in his tracks as though he had hit an invisible wall.
’What involvement?’
Fudge grimaced. ‘He used giants last time, when he wanted to go for the grand effect. The Office of Misinformation has been working around the clock, we’ve had teams of Obliviators out trying to modivy the memories of all the Muggles who saw what really happened, we’ve got most of the Department for the Regulation and Control of  Magical Creatures running around Somerset, but we can’t find the giant – it’s been a disaster.’
’You don’t say!’ said the Prime Minister furiously.

So with the tragic London events on everyone’s mind, the text for the public reading on the night of the book release was chosen from another chapter. Just one of those times “when the line between fiction and reality becomes all-too slim”, as Deb puts it in her BTT-question…

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I’m publishing the above also in my blog Beyond the Lone Islands, since it is from there that I usually take part in the Booking Through Thursday meme.

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Adding a few extra notes here:

Headlines and distorted news play a very important role throughout the whole Harry Potter series.

Already in the first chapter of the first book (The Philosopher’s Stone) news are “spilling over” from the Wizarding world into the Muggle world:

‘And finally, bird-watchers everywhere have reported that the nation’s owls have been behaving very unusually today. Although owls normally hunt at night and are hardly ever seen in daylight, there have been hundreds of sightings of these birds flying in every direction since sunrise. Experts are unable to explain why the owls have suddenly changed their sleeping pattern.’ ---

‘Well,Ted,’ said the weatherman, ‘… it’s not only the owls that have been acting oddly today. Viewers as far apart as Kent, Yorkshire and Dundee have been phoning in to tell me that instead of the rain I promised yesterday, they’ve had a downpour of shooting stars!…’

(This refers back to when Voldemort/the Dark Lord failed to kill Harry back when he was still a baby. He seemed to disappear after that event. Celebrations broke out in the wizarding world; and owls are the newsbringers of that world.)

In the second book (The Chamber of Secrets) we get to meet Gilderoy Lockhart who loves nothing better than being in the limelight. Until… well. Other even more distorted versions of “truth” are also revealed.

At the beginning of the third book (The Prisoner of Azkaban), the news of an escaped dangerous prisoner (Sirius Black) makes it “across the border” to the Muggle news; of course omitting the fact that the prison he escaped from was located in the realm of magic. Again, things are not exactly as the first might seem.

In the fourth book (The Goblet of Fire), the reporter Rita Skeeter is introduced, working for the Wizarding World’s own newspaper, The Daily Prophet. Her methods of acquiring news turn out to be… unorthodox, to say the least.

In the fifth book (The Order of the Phoenix), we get to know Luna Lovegood, whose father runs the magazine The Quibbler. (Not until the seventh book do we get to meet the man himself.) This book significantly starts with media not reporting the kind of news that Harry is daily expecting them to.

In the seventh  and last book (The Deathly Hallows), a biography of Albus Dumbledore (and newspaper reviews of the same) turns some things upside down for us. Pirate radio broadcasts are also introduced as a way of spreading a different news than those presented by the official media.

Harry Potter and the Detective Perspective

Old classics like Beowulf, Arthurian Legend and Greek Mythology are not the only sources that J.K. Rowling has been drawing from in the Harry Potter books. Especially in The Half-Blood Prince, she also seems to be putting in deliberate clues to make us think of the great classic detectives, like Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey and others.

Dumbledore, in The Half-Blood Prince (HBP), really has a lot in common with Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Dumbledore's use of the Pensieve (the magical devise used to take an objective look at your own or someone else's memories) resembles Sherlock shutting himself up, leaning back and just thinking hard to solve mysteries. Then up and away he goes, disappears in some disguise or other and takes action; and then returns to his rooms again and explains the whole mystery to the astonished Dr Watson - who in between is often sent out on other missions, sometimes without quite understanding the purpose. Harry has a lot of private meetings with Dumbledore in HBP, in which Dumbledore shows him pensieve scenes from Voldemort's past. But another possible candidate for the post of Dr Watson is Snape, whose healing skills are pointed out in HBP, and who also seems to be in Dumbledore's confidence.

Dumbledore's resemblance to Sherlock Holmes was one source among others that misled me to suspect that his death at the end of HBP might have been faked. Because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, after a number of books, grew tired of his hero, and killed him off - but had to revive him again because of angry protests from his readers! I have only one of the Sherlock Holmes books in my own bookcase, but it happens to be The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927), which is the book where Sherlock "comes back from the dead". It has a preface by the author, explaining why he changed his mind:

I had fully determined at the conclusion of The Memoirs to bring Holmes to an end, as I felt that my literary energies should not be directed too much into one channel. That pale, clear-cut face and loose-limbed figure were taking up an undue share of my imagination. I did the deed, but, fortunately, no coroner had pronounced upon the remains, and so --- it was not difficult for me to respond to the flattering demand and to explain my rash act away.

Glancing through the first story in The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes - "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client" - I found that this story alone contains, among other things:

• A note from a client to Sherlock, written much in the same polite tone as the notes from Dumbledore to Harry in HBP.
• A Baron who collects antiques – cf. Lord Voldemort collecting antiques to use as Horcruxes. 
• Watson being given a mission of which he understands nothing, he just obeys the instructions Holmes gives him (as do both Harry and Snape).
• An old book, which has been scribbled in (cf. the Potions book).
• A big glass cupboard with antiques in it (cf. the glass cupboard in Grimmauld Place).
• A woman with "ethereal other-world beauty" (cf. Fleur)
• A "beastly" man (cf. Bill being bitten by werewolf).
• A newspaper announcing a murderous attack upon Sherlock Holmes (the attack was made by "two men armed with sticks"), Holmes making the most of this and pretending to be dying, while he was really recovering quite fast.

The rest of the stories in the book also involve several other things and places that remind me in one way or another of events or persons in The Half-Blood Prince.

Other similarities between Sherlock Holmes and Dumbledore: Sherlock has an evil adversary by the name of Moriarty, turning up every now and again. Dumbledore keeps fighting Voldemort. Sherlock's has a brother that comes into the story now and then - so does Dumbledore. Sherlock has contacts within the Ministry - so does Dumbledore. Sherlock plays the violin; Dumbledore loves music. Sherlock uses shifty caracters to spy for him – Dumbledore uses Mundungus and Snape…

Furthermore, in the Pensieve in HBP we meet an unpleasant character by the name of Morfin. That struck me as a very odd name for a person, even among all the other inventive names that Rowling uses. I think this may be another hint to Sherlock Holmes and the detective perspective - Sherlock used the drug morphine...

What about other classic detectives? G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown is not unlike Holmes, or Dumbledore. He also has a very sharp mind, and has a recurring adversary, a master thief by the name of Flambeau. One of Brown's characteristics is that he's always very polite, even to his enemies. So is Dumbledore.

Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot is also not unlike Holmes, or Dumbledore. He uses his brain to solve problems, and uses his faithful Captain Hastings much the same way Holmes uses Watson. This might seem far fetched, but perhaps not put together with all the other hints: At the same time Dumbledore begins to take him more in his confidence, Harry is made Captain of the Quidditch team…

Titles of Agatha Christie mysteries include, for example:

• After the Funeral (cf. After the Burial, chapter title in HBP)
• Cards on the Table (cf. Sybill Trelawney making predictions using cards)
• The Secret Adversary (cf. The Secret Riddle, chapter title in HBP)
• Halloween Party (seen a few of those, haven't we)
• The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (cf. the mirror Sirius gave to Harry)
• They Do It With Mirrors
• Sleeping Murder (in HP, there is much talk of the potion the Draught of Living Death)
• Why Didn't They Ask Evans (Harry's mother's maiden name was Lily Evans)

But in HBP, Harry is really also doing a lot of detective work on his own. He is not just Watson or Hastings, obeying orders and admiring the mind of the Master. On his own accord he is spying on Draco Malfoy, following him around, disclosing what he is up to… He also engages Dobby the House-Elf to help him. This rather reminds me of Dorothy Sayer's rich gentleman detective Lord Peter Wimsey. He wears a monocle (Harry wears glasses), has no money problems because of inherited fortune (the same goes for Harry), and his assistant is his faithful servant Bunter, who gets to do the more menial tasks, but is at the same time also a true friend (cf. Dobby). By the way, Bunter came into Wimsey's service after Wimsey had saved his life, if I remember correctly (and Harry saved Dobby). There is also a new character introduced in HBP - Romilda Vane, who has a crush on Harry. The love in Lord Peter's life is named Harriet Vane…

Hermione, in HBP always knitting, with a keen eye for what is going on on the relationship front, really also has quite a potential of becoming a Miss Marple - another Agatha Christie detective (who is always knitting).
There are also a number of really suspicious deaths in HBP. There are the many stories occurring in The Daily Prophet in HBP, for example Amelia Bones, whose death was not only described as particularly nasty, but also mysterious, since the room was locked from inside. There is also Slughorn's staging of his murder (or violent removal) when Dumbledore and Harry come to visit.

By the time Rowling was writing The Half-Blood Prince, there were already a lot of discussions about the HP books going on the internet. I suspect she consciously filled the sixth book with both true and false clues, to keep us going while she finished the last one...
In doing so, she is also paying homage to all of the authors mentioned above, because, just like Rowling, they also loved to make use of such things as riddles, wordplay, clever use of numbers, precious jewellry and antiques, disguises, spying… They also all belong to the same world where Harry Potter takes place: a world of castles, aristocracy, boarding schools and orphanages, rich and poor, masters and servants, steam trains and carriages, handwritten documents and dusty libraries. (The Wizarding world in Harry Potter reminds more of 19th century Muggle England than of the late 20th).


In Retrospect:
Along with many other readers, my "detecting" took me a little too far. I guessed that Dumbledore's death at the end of HBP might (like Slughorn's at the beginning of the book) also turn out to be faked, and even Sirius's in the previous book. I was hoping that Rowling would do what Doyle did with Sherlock – revive the fallen hero(es). And in her own way she did call a number of people up from the dead - Dumbledore and Sirius among them - but not quite in the way that I guessed! (They were and remained dead; but still played their part at the end, in helping Harry do what he must do.) And this is one of the things I really admire her for: She is a terrific Recycler – she resuses all kinds of old ideas and stories, but always gives them her own unexpected twist in the end, so that they come out as new!

PS. I am still convinced there are way too many similarities between Sherlock Holmes and Dumbledore for this to be just a coincidence… ;-)
Link: The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (e-text)