Rating: WORTHY!
Surprisingly, about half the Potter books begin without Harry taking the stage immediately. This is one of them. Voldemort is now forced to live a miserable existence as some unspecified hobgoblin creature drinking Nagini's "milk" (since snakes are not mammals, one can only assume this means venom), being attended upon by Peter Pettigrew, aka Wormtail. He kills Frank Bryce, the old man who tends the grounds, and Harry sees this in a dream, but soon (and inexplicably, I might add!) forgets the details.
Usually the opening sequence is to jump to Harry (or after a digression, jump to him, and share his misery at being under the thumb of the Dursleys at 4 Privet drive, but here we quickly get to his traveling with the Weasleys to the quidditch world cup, this year between Ireland and Bulgaria. I have to say I wonder why Rowling added all these details. I'm guessing she felt secure enough at this point that she could pretty much do whatever she wanted, and this time indulged herself in a flight of fancy showing all manner of aspects of her wizard world which had hitherto been only notes in a book somewhere. This isn't the longest book in the heptalogy - it just feels like it is.
The problem with this for me was that it makes the book rather tedious and in places, downright boring. Reading the book through once isn't so bad, but when you come back to it for review purposes as I did here, and listened to seventeen audio disks, it's a bit much, even with Jim Dale's inventive and charming voice.
Established writers can get away with endless, mindless rambling unfortunately (Stephen King I'm looking at you). New writers cannot. Indeed, they're censured for it. What this book needed was a fearless editor. Hermione's ill-conceived (by Rowling) digression into saving the elves, for example, could have been omitted completely without the book suffering one iota.
The film makers chose to eliminate all mention of house elves (notably, Winky and Dobby) from this story, so we never get to see a female house elf in the movies, but that said, Rowling pursued the elf component so aggressively in this unnecessarily long novel. It was a bad idea to have Hermione start her own organization, which had the ridiculous initials SPEW. I cannot believe Hermione would ever have come up with a dumb acronym like that. It's an insult to her intelligence to suggest she would, so I didn't get Rowling's thinking here, or her apparent desire to make Hermione the butt of a joke. It detracted both from the character's intelligence and sensitivity, and from the goal she was pursuing here, and it was belittling and demeaning both.
The quidditch world cup was more understandable, but it served little purpose other than to make wizards look really stupid. The death eaters show up and for some reason, even though the decent wizards outnumber them overwhelmingly, they seem to dominate and rule the aftermath, running riot in the camp site and sending up the "Dark Lord's mark" into the sky. Poor Winky is set-up using Harry's wand, and she never recovers from it.
On the topic of wands, I don't get Harry's starkly highlighted carelessness demonstrated in this novel in his losing his wand, and later in his evident lack of care for it which is noted right before it's examined by Olivander. Contrast that with Harry's almost fetishized pining for it when it gets broken in volume seven and you'll see the inconsistency. Plot problems are rife in this series when it comes to wands, and how they work and why they're needed.
Once again at Hogwarts, there's a new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, and once again we get absolutely no explanation whatsoever for why Snape, the best qualified teacher for it, isn't given the position. Oddly, the fake Moody ends-up being the best dark Arts teacher they've had to this point! Certainly he's the only one who has actually taught them about dark arts, which is hilarious hypocritical given who he really is.
The big announcement though, is that Hogwarts will host the Triwizard Tournament - a battle of skill and wits between representative wizards from each of three wizarding schools: Beauxbatons (French for beautiful wands - and which contrary to popular view and to the movie presentation, is not a school solely for girls!), Durmstrang (a mix up of the German words for storm - sturm - and penetrated - drang), and Hogwarts (an English word meaning a pig with malignant skin growths...!).
Why Rowling chose to use German words for a Bulgarian school goes unexplained. Maybe it's because no one would be able to read буря проникнали? Why the tournament has been resurrected this year after two centuries of neglect is also a mystery, but it makes for a fun story and puts Harry in grave peril again, so what's not to like?! Harry is of course selected even though he's ineligible. How that works is a mystery. The three real candidates are Fleur Delacour (French for flower of the heart), Viktor Krum, and Cedric Diggory aka The Batman.
This not only puts Harry at risk for the tournament, but also drives a wedge between him and Ron, who inexplicably thinks that Harry is showing-off and has put his own name in the goblet. The first task, Harry learns involves dragons. Harry very kindly alerts Cedric since he assumes that both the French and Bulgarian candidates will know, but this alert serves only to make Harry look generous. It effectively benefits Cedric not at all since none of them know what they have to actually do. The big plot hole here is the fact that these fire-breathing dragons are confined behind wooden fences! Seriously? Was the editor sleeping, or was Rowling?
Harry is revealed repeatedly as a poor student throughout this series, which to me is inexplicable given how thrilled he initially was to find himself a wizard and a student at a magic school, and how much he adores the school. He's really poor at doing homework, he shows absolutely no interest whatsoever in learning anything about magical history or in talking to the ghosts to find out about their world and maybe, in turn, something about where his parents are now.
He's never shown questioning other witches and wizards, and especially not the teachers, about their lives and their powers. Actually, he's downright disrespectful to the teachers to the point of outright rudeness, as is shown when he demands from Grubbly Plank where Hagrid is at one point in this story. In short, Harry Potter is something of a jerk and a slacker.
He only shows interest in the summoning charm (accio) when he is kicked in the butt by Moody to play to his strengths. Why would he not want to learn a summoning charm for its own sake? Imagine how useful that would be! Yet he shows no interest in it until he realizes it might save his life. Likewise he shows zero interest in any other useful spells. Not that the school teaches them. It seems to me the first order of business should be to teach children the defensive and the healing spells, but we know by now how incompetent both the school faculty and its headmaster are.
The shameful incompetence of Dumbledore is highlighted quite starkly here as Rita Skeeter (in her animagus guise of a mosquito, hence her name) comes and goes from the school with complete impunity. Recall only the year before, an animagus (Sirius Black) was able to come and go as he pleased, yet Dumbledore has done the cube root of diddly squat to set up magical barriers to prevent this ever happening again. I actually agree with Malfoy that Dumbledore is the worst wizard at Hogwarts!
More than this, Skeeter is publishing all kinds of scandal about the school and Dumbledore does nothing - not even writing a letter of complaint to the newspaper! I have to say I agreed with Skeeter in her assessment of Hagrid. I never really liked him, so I am a bit biased, but she is correct in drawing attention to how ill-advised Hagrid is in bringing dangerous animals into his classes.
The Yule ball seemed to me to be another example of where Rowling lards up this story, as though she was loathe to leave out any details from her wizarding world notes. In this case, however, it wasn't one which was so far out of the way that it stuck out like a sore thumb, but it definitely could have had less acreage devoted to it. The thing here which really bothered me was Ron's formal "robes".
These robes are antiquated and they smell, yet Ron and his parents are magicians! Why can they not magic a fix? He can't make them like new? He can't remove the smell? He can't remove the embarrassing lace? His mom, who can beat Bellatrix Lestrange without breaking a sweat, can't transform an old set of school robes into formal robes? She can't transform his old robes into new robes that fit him? None of this makes any sense and is yet another example of Rowling idly and simply laying a very thin magic veneer over the real world. It's so thin it's full of holes and she makes very little attempt to have it make sense.
Rowling is obsessed with robes, as it happens. Everyone wears them even when it's not actually necessary. For example, at one point, Skeeter is described as wearing bright yellow robes whereas in the movie she wears regular clothes. Why wouldn't wizards wear regular clothes? Why would muggle clothes be such a mystery to them unless they really are profoundly stupid people?
Ron and Harry are downright jerks towards Parvati and Padma Patil, yet this is supposed to be funny. I found that a bit strange to say the least, but not as strange has the two of them not having been asked to the ball before Ron and Harry ever got around to it. Were all the boys at Hogwarts racist?! They certainly were mostly white as judged from the movie versions of the books. The worst part here though is Harry's anger management problem. He's upset over Cedric taking Cho Chang to the ball, and so once again he proves what a lousy student he is by virtually ignoring Cedric's advice to listen to the egg in the bathroom. Moron!
I don't get why, in volume 5, Harry is assigned to special ed occlumency classes, but he is never once directed to anger management, which causes him far more problems than failing to block Voldemort ever does. In fact Voldemort's failure to capitalize on his access to Harry is totally inexplicable, but let's consider occlumency. Why only Harry? It seems to me that occlumency should have been job one on day one in Defense Against the Dark Arts classes, yet it's never taught! Again, a huge hole!
At the last minute (his usual habit) Harry finally gets to the bathroom and listens to the clue under water, but he fails to find a spell to help him to breathe until Dobby comes up with the gillyweed (it's different in the movie, where it's Neville who suggests it). Why this had to be done in secret is a mystery. He should have been able to ask for it. Why Snape has no protections on his stores to prevent theft is a bigger mystery, though! Another plot hole. But once again Harry fails to follow instructions and is rewarded for it - being tied with Cedric - again.
One thing I was annoyed with in the movie was what short shrift the maze got. The book has some, dare I say it, amazing things in the maze and yet we get nothing in the movie save for Harry running around blindly. The secret to getting to the middle and back out again in a maze, is to keep one hand on one of the walls and follow that wall. It will inevitably lead you into the middle and bring you safely out. No need for Hermione's magic.
Not that her magic helped much. How the hell Harry ever got to be called a great wizard is as much of a complete mystery as to how Hermione did not. In this case though, her spell gave a direction, but no indication if that path was going to be a dead-end at some point. And none of this helps in a maze where the walls are moving, which begs the question as to how they would ever be expected to find the middle. A better spell woudl have been one that allowed them to walk through the maze walls.
We all know what happens next - the Triwizard cup is a port key and Voldemort is back! The big plot hole at the end is once again Voldemort's blindness regarding Snape, who gave veritaserum to Barty Crouch Jr. How can Voldemort even remotely trust him? But here you have it one more time - despite all these writing problems, Rowling once again hit the best-seller list and kept her readers glued.
