Shami Chakrabarti, voted by LDV readers as our Liberal Voice 2007, has just been on Radio 4’s “A Good Read” – a programme where a host and two guests nominate a paperback each and discuss whether they liked each others’ choices.
Chakrabarti’s choice was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, a book she said had many dark parallels to the war on terror, with kangaroo courts mirroring Guantanamo, owl intercepts getting perilously close to wiretaps and a generally unpleasant High Inquisitor making life uncomfortable for all at Hogwarts.
The book found favour with guest presenter Kate Moss (whose own choice was What was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn) but wasn’t much liked by Carol Klein (who chose Graham Greene’s The Comedians)
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7 Comments
I heard that. Shami went down several notches in my estimation, for her execrable taste in reading matter.
What’s so good about Harry Potter? I can understand kids having them glued to their hands but adults? There are loads of much better written magical books for adults…
Yeah, I’m with the other girls on this one. I fully admit to having had a huge Potter phase within recent memory, but it was killed stone dead by Order of the Phoenix, which is a 200 page book in nearly 700 pages… I suspect Shami chose it because it’s a book many will be familiar with and she would thus be able to make her political point easily, rather than that she actually likes the book (this is my fond hope anyway).
I liked the book. I liked most of them.
They are good books. There are better written books, better plotted books and more intellectually stimulating books, but in the end the HP books tell a good story, and tell it well, while also giving the reader things to think about. For a children’s book (or any book) that qualifies as a good review.
There are so-called “literary classics” which are just so many piles of steaming horse manure that I can’t understand why they even received that title.
In the end it comes down to individual taste. Why denigrate Shami, or assign ulterior motives for choosing that book? Maybe she really does like the HP books, maybe she has different tastes and looks for different things in a book than you do?
You’re absolutely right, maybe she does.
But to equate the overlong, badly edited Order of the Phoenix with the tightly plotted and beautifully paced Prisoner of Azkaban… /Some/ of the HP books tell a good story and tell it well, but OotP tells a mediocre story badly.
Martin, would you like to let us know which “literary classics” you consider to be piles of steaming horse manure? And why?
I enjoyed the comment of Peter Carey on Radio 4 the other day, to the effect that describing a book in terms of plot is like describing the Sydney Opera House in terms of its wiring diagram. It’s worth noting that Peter Carey has won the Booker twice. Joanne Rowling has never even been long-listed, nor has she won the Carnegie Medal for children’s literature (unlike the excellent Philip Pullman, who has been long-listed for a Booker and won a Whitbread, both for The Amber Spyglass.)
Don’t you mean ‘guest presenter Kate Mosse’ (not Moss)?