deadlyhollow | CHAPTER 14: The Thief (Reply)

Sorry, peeps. Mom's elderly dog died and I just spent a very long weekend 500 miles away helping her get over the suddenly lonely house, the excessive amounts of snow, and the various things that went out of commission in the cold and the snow, like her wireless. In short, I've been AFK. I hang my head in shame. Most of my to-do's for the weekend fell straight out of my head.

And now for CHAPTER 14: The Thief.

In which Harry mistakes his friend Ron for a foot, Hermione explains to Harry that everything happened in The Action Offstage between the end of the last chapter and the beginning of this, and there is No Action Onstage, in order to keep from confusing Harry with Plot or the author with a Writer.

Harry opened his eyes and… he had no idea what had happened.

OMG! The really is a Thief in this chapter. He has stolen Harry’s brain.

No, wait. It’s Harry. Being confused is his natural state.

… He was lying on what seemed to be leaves and twigs.

I love how JKR sustains the Atmosphere of Mystery. Are they, or aren’t they … leaves? (Cue the suspenseful music.) This is clearly an important plot point.

But having brought it to our attention, Harry and the Author turn their attention instead to Harry’s lungs. His lungs felt “flattened,” a description perhaps intended to strike a note of familiarity with all. No? You have never noticed your lungs feeling a bit flattish? Well, to Harry, flat lungs no doubt are as obvious as the flat things-like-leaves that he seemed-to-be lying on.

But with the strength and courage for which he is reknowned, Harry drags himself away from the fascinating mysteries of the leaf-like things and his flattened-feeling lungs because …

Then an object twitched close to his face.

OMG! Another mystery, and an alarming one. Yet Harry deduces quickly that it’s not “some small, fierce creature” but rather…

… the object was Ron’s foot.

There’s no telling where the rest of Ron is. Or why his foot resembles an animal. Is it spattergroit, or simply Harry’s glasses?

Looking around, Harry saw that they and Hermione were lying on a forest floor, apparently alone.

Harry, Hermione, and Ron’s foot? I’d worry, too. But Harry’s first thought is to hope they’re in the Forbidden Forest, so they can sneak off to Hagrid’s hut for tea and cookies. Alas, though, Ron’s body now appears – presumably attached to his foot, although Harry hasn’t managed to see this connection, so we can’t be sure. Physical evidence, in fact, suggests that Ron’s foot is not very close to the rest of Ron, since Harry, who was face to face with Ron’s foot, only now “started crawling toward Ron,” who is evidently some distance away. I always did want to read precise details of the refitting of splinched parts onto a body.

And indeed, Ron’s entire left side is bloody against the leaf-strewn earth. Finally, one mystery is solved. Those things that “seemed to be leaves” apparently are. It’s good to see all that Herbology homework paying off. If they’d stayed for their NEWTS year, the Trio might be learning all kinds of complicated things, like “flower.”

Fortunately, Hermione is present to tell Harry that the blood is because Ron has been splinched. Otherwise, we’d never know. Harry, it turns out, had never known what splinching is. Another subject not taught, or else it’s only covered in “Hogwarts: A History,” which explains why Hermione knows what it is, along with the prescribed treatment, using Essence of Dittany, which of course she has packed along with everything else ever mentioned in “Hogwarts: A History” and the HP Lexicon.

Hermione heals Ron. Harry says: “Wow.” Hermione tells him about the spells she could have used as well, in case Harry needed reminding that whereas he can hardly remember to even use spells unless he’s told, Hermione knows 10 spells to his one, and she isn’t afraid to use them. And to tell us about each one, in detail.

Harry doesn’t know how Ron got splinched, either, since he can’t remember what they were doing just two pages back.

“How did he get hurt? I mean” – Harry shook his head, trying to clear it, to make sense of whatever had just taken place…

And now, in the remote case that any of the 1,852,000 readers of the series are as clueless as Harry, and to prevent anyone hyperventilating from the excitement of actual plot occupying every third page of this chapter, the author rescues us – and Harry – with yet more paragraphs of plot rehash. It’s so handy once again that Hermione is here to tell us what happened at the end of the last chapter, to spare the author having to actually show us or anything. Because Harry missed it all, and Ron was either whining, yelling, or out with an injury, and the readers were asleep.

Eventually, Ron comes back to life and interrupts the plot rehash to say he was unconscious through it all, and right now he feels lousy. Me too! I feel like I’m coaxing a toddler forward, wheedling and reassuring the slow-moving plot to just take One Small Step… that’s it… one little bit of story at a time. There’s a good little plot. Meanwhile, JKR pushes it one step back for every two steps it manages to stagger forward.

The most riveting part of each chapter is her second-hand recounting of the bits left unfinished in the previous chapter. The plot is so fixated on what already happened, it’s practically moving backwards. I’m beginning to feel as lousy as Ron.

Can we give up on Harry as a lost cause, and send him off with Hermione into a very small-print footnote somewhere at the start of each chapter so she can fill him what just happened, while the rest of us get on with it the story?

Getting on with in Chapter 14 consists of the Action Highlight of setting up a tent. This is done under Hermione’s supervision so that they can continue trying to sort out where the plot disappeared to, also under Hermione’s supervision. Good thing Hermione’s in this book, or we’d still be in Chapter Two of Year Two, learning how to use our wands.

It is at this point that Ron, not to be outdone, shows his brilliance by interrupting Hermione just as she’s about to say Vol –

“Don’t say the name!”

Now it’s Ron’s turn to play the Little Professor. He needs more lessons from Hermione, because he can’t explain why, in Book Seven, we’re suddenly worried about saying Vol–’s name. All Ron can say is:

“… it feels like – a jinx or something. Can’t we call him You-Know-Who – please?”

In fact, Ron snaps, we should even show You-Know-Who some “respect.” Harry objects but Hermione shoots him. Er, with a glare. Because it’s time to enter the tent!

To enter the tent where the book will remain for the rest of this chapter and very nearly the rest of the book.

Now we’ll see some action!

Or not. We’ll have tea, and spend another two pages on explanation of what got left out of the previous chapter, if not the entire previous book. Like what a Horcrux is, such as the locket in Hermione’s pocket.

Hermione has forgotten completely about having it, since after all, this book is now about Deathly Hallows, and Horcruxes are passé. In a rare moment of mental function, though, Harry remembers to ask her for it, and obligingly walks us through yet another rehash of his encounters with the diary Horcrux and the ring Horcrux.

That’s in case we actually had begun to think this story was beginning to move forward. Hermione has “Hogwarts: A History”; Harry gets even by recounting the woes of his life whenever a page or two of actual action has managed to get into the pages, despite the author’s strenuous efforts to keep the focus on Harry and his indecisive wibbling, where it belongs.

They spend the rest of the chapter in the tent. This is a thrilling development. They go outside and collect mushrooms for dinner, since they don’t see any tables conveniently spread with food and Hermione, that unnatural female, has failed to pack any for them. Evidently Ron and Harry haven’t thought of taking so much as a sandwich along with them. I have to wonder about their upbringing. Do wizards just wait for people (Mum, elves, whoever) to bring them food? Evidently.

They make Hermione collect the mushrooms and also cook them up. Conveniently, she’s brought a billycan, so I don’t know why she didn’t think about bringing anything to put in it. It’s a thrilling meal; Ron pushes his mushrooms away (playing hard to get again), whilst Harry perseveringly eats them so as not to hurt Hermione’s feelings (except by passive-aggressively choking them down, so we’ll be sure to notice that the Boy Who Lived to Be Clueless is also the Boy Who is Perpetually Angry About Something.).

After this demonstration of their thorough lack of common sense and woodsmanship, they take turns standing watch against potential small, fierce creatures and other nightmarish possibilities, like the ones Harry immediately hears:

… odd rustlings and what sounded like crackings of twigs…

My goodness, how alarming! I’m not surprised Harry has his wand at the ready. He began the chapter lying on things that seemed like leaves and twigs, and now the noises sound like they might be twigs. Either this forest is simply filled with animated twigs, or Harry can’t see the forest for the twigs.

At this point in my reading I began to have a terrible feeling that the clueless Trio, or rather the author, has never been in the woods. I’ve camped a good deal, and like most people who’ve been outdoors a lot, I try not to do it with people who expect me to provide all their meals, or who get nervous because there are sounds in the outdoors.

And we’re not out of the woods yet; the chapter has several pages to go!

Fortunately, Lord Vol-- is as clueless as Harry, and shares another vision with him, so we don’t have to fill the entire rest of the chapter with Harry-as-Frodo feeling lost and confused and fearful and exhausted and sorry for himself, having to be Famous and all.

Lord Vole is practicing his Charity-Burbage hang-them-upside-down routine on someone he conveniently identifies as Gregorovitch the moment Harry joins him for our torture show, already in progress.

On a side note, is there any significance to the trope of people being hung upside down in this series, aside from the obvious possibility of lack of imagination? I’d love to think this a clever Tarot reference, to go with Dumbledore being struck down from The Tower, but that would require Allusion, and Hermione hasn’t yet instructed us to note any subtlety in this book. I’m sure if there were subtle allusions and imagery, Hermione would point them out. In case we missed them.

The conveniently identified Gregorovitch, in Harry’s conveniently timed Voldelusion, conveniently shares with all of us a detailed view of a Dangerous Person. We know he’s Dangerous because of the subtle prose picture of:

… a young man with golden hair. In the split second that the lantern’s light illuminated him, Harry saw the delight upon his handsome face, then the intruder shot a Stunning Spell from his wand and jumped neatly backward out of the window with a crow of laughter.

The crow of laughter is a subtle clue that this is a Bad Person. Harry wishes he could figure out who it was. He spends another page repeating this wish to Ron, to himself, and to us, the reader, in case we didn’t get it the first time.

Then he goes to sleep.