Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (the second one)

The second leg of the Harry Potter marathon is a well-made sequel, offering readers who enjoyed the first book more of the same while introducing enough variation and development so that it doesn’t feel like a total rehash. As in the first installment, I continue to greatly admire the seemingly effortless grace of J.K. Rowling’s writing at the sentence level, but to find her lack of any variation in emotional pitch a bit anesthetizing.

I also complained last time of the paper-thin main characters, and this continues to be a problem in the second book. Harry himself, it must be said, shows some modest improvement with his little impulse-control problem. He occasionally makes an effort this time around not to respond to provocations, and from time to time he physically restrains his buddy Ron, who continues to operate on an emotional hair-trigger. But more often they just egg each other on. Typical hijinx: having missed the train to school, these two lads do what any other sensible 13 year old would do – steal dad’s car for the eight-hour drive and crash it into a tree on the school grounds. For this, they are punished with a stern warning.

Meanwhile, there is a new character in the person of a craven media whore who becomes a professor at the Hogwarts school. He is a one-note character whose single personality trait is beaten entirely to death. I’m inclined to forgive this, though, in that the concept of “media whore” is probably a bit subtle for the younger Harry Potter readers.

The plot of Chamber of Secrets relies on the principal characters showing an almost pathological refusal to discuss obvious crises with the adults who have the power to make things better. At first blush, this comes off as kind of extreme and unbelievable, but in the light of the school-shooting horror of your choice, it is perhaps not so unrealistic. Hogwarts is unfortunately not the only school where the silence of students has led to catastrophe.

The Plot Thickens

With the basic setup already established, Chamber of Secrets has to live more on the strength of its plot than did Sorcerer’s Stone. And in many ways, it turns out, the plotting of Chamber is rather deft. It is a well-shaped whodunit that misleads you with a number of likely suspects before unveiling a solution that is genuinely surprising without being completely random. The plot is also technically elegant, in that every character, incident, and episode in the book is sooner or later tied back into it.

The plot is unfortunately also inelegant, in the sense that things too often happen merely because the plot requires them to. Rowland lets her magical milieu make her lazy about establishing a reasonable logic of cause and effect. At one point, Harry and Ron are saved from certain death by the unexpected reappearance of that car that they stole earlier in the book. Why? How? I dunno. It's Magic. At the book’s climax, all sorts of weird stuff happens to save Harry’s bacon, apparently because he is “loyal.” What? Why? How? I dunno. It's Magic.

I hope I didn't give away too much in that last paragraph by implying that Harry's bacon gets saved. You know this is a seven-part trilogy, right?

Next: The Reading List will continue with the Harry Potter series. Eventually. But not for a season or two. In the meantime, we’ll be taking on the prototype of the modern novel, Don Quixote! It’s the warm and enchanting tale of a minor Spanish aristocrat who discovers that he is actually a powerful wizard, and is whisked away to a school of magic to develop his talents! Or something like that.