Hogwarts Professor

I asked Brian Basore — who has forgotten more about Lewis Carroll and his Alice books than I have ever known or will ever know — if I was nuts in thinking there are a lot of Wonderland and Looking-Glass pointers in J. K. Rowling’s The Christmas Pig. He bought a copy, read it overnight, and wrote me to say, “I’m overwhelmed by the hat-tips to and echoes of Alice in Christmas Pig.” Which made my day, of course (every reassurance I’m not losing my mind is received as a boon). I’m working with him on a post about this ‘intertextuality’ or ‘literary allusion’ that I hope to have up soon, but today, as a kind of rest-stop from the heavy lifting of the first three Christmas Pig posts I’ve written, I want to focus on one thing Brian told me as an aside: “It shocked me to read that things, not animals, can speak on Christmas Eve. It makes her story work, but I’d never heard that before.”

This made me think of three ideas, all of which I’ll share after the jump: (1) the foundation story of the ‘Night of Miracles and Lost Causes,’ (2) the difference between how a sacred artist makes things and how God creates, and (3) what Rowling, Carroll, and perhaps several or all the other story-tellers who have thing-characters that aren’t human  speak aloud mean by this prima facie absurdity in their stories. I have given this side-trip on the journey to grasp Christmas Pig’s artistry and meaning the provocative title ‘The Magic in Things’ to play off the ‘The Magic of Things’ essay by Rowling published on Christmas Eve in The New York Times. Join me after the jump to see if there is any other connection between this post and that essay! [Read more…]

As mentioned in yesterday’s post, Rowling has read aloud more than one chapter of The Christmas Pig. I learned today from The Rowling Library, our most dependable source for news about The Presence herself and about Rowling, Inc., that she had been filmed reading Christmas Pig‘s thirteenth chapter, ‘The Night for Miracles and Lost Causes.’ The reading above is from the The Rowling Library YouTube channel.

You might think this is no big deal and that would be understandable. Serious Potter Pundits, though, would raise an eyebrow at the mention of chapter 13. This is because Irvin Khaytman, author of Dumbledore: The Life and Lies of Hogwarts’s Renowned Headmaster and who writes at Mugglenet.com as ‘hpboy13,’ long ago revealed that Rowling always drops an essential event and clue about the finish in the thirteenth chapter of her books. For a detailed review of his argument on this score with respect to the Potter books, go here. In brief, he says:

In the Potter books, Chapter 13 is always a turning point. Two things always happen in Chapter 13. First, we learn about a magical item or specific type of magic that ends up being the “how” of the central mystery. Second, we are misdirected with a false suspect, but (with hindsight) we actually find evidence of the real culprit. In the first four books, there is a third element: Draco Malfoy gets bested by Harry and co.

This is brilliant work, frankly, and I have to think it was discussion like this on fan sites about the villain always appearing on Halloween in the first four books that had Rowling abandon the plan for the last three. It’s obvious that our noting that the killer in each Strike novel appears in the center chapter, often in some kind of disguise, has not become sufficiently well known because she has persisted through Troubled Blood.

I don’t know if Mr. Khaytman has explored the Strike books’ chapter 13s; his work on the Strike novels has not as a rule been as insightful as his exploration of patterns in the Hogwarts Saga was (though, disappointing as articles like this one might be, that’s to judge at a very high standard — hpboy13 and Beatrice Groves are the staff writers at Mugglenet worth reading, full stop). If he has not explored the Strike chapter 13s, I hope one of our serious readers will look for a pattern.

I bring all this up only because Rowling chose to read The Christmas Pig’s chapter 13, ‘The Night for Miracles and Lost Causes.’ It is the beginning of Jack’s adventures in the Land of the Lost though it takes place entirely in his bedroom. In this chapter, the seven year old boy learns that his beloved toy DP is in the Land of the Lost, about the Loser, and that on this night, Christmas Eve, if he is brave enough, he can enter a world known only to small Things, big Ideas, and human capacities that have been lost. He accepts and, in the next chapter, shrinks and gets lost after a run-in with Toby-Cerberus.

At the very end of chapter 13, however, the Christmas Pig delivers his “one condition” for helping Jack, a condition he does as a ruse to fool the boy about his real aim. “The old Matchbox car began to say something, but the Christmas Pig threw him a nasty look and the car fell silent” (46). We’re not told what he’s done until DP spills the belly beans on the Island of the Beloved (229-230). The marker, though, is dropped in chapter thirteen, just as Mr. Khaytman’s theory predicts it would be.

Though not a turning point in the sense that we use that phrase in our discussions here of ring composition, Christmas Pig‘s chapter 13 certainly is a big shift in the story, in which we learn of and about the world we will soon enter. To repeat myself, I hope a HogwartsProfessor reader will either find what hpboy13 has written on this subject about Casual Vacancy, The Ickabog, and the five Strike novels or, if he has not written that up, that our serious reader will take a look and write us a Guest Post on the subject. The pattern is clearly more than a tick or one-off restricted to Harry Potter.

The audiobook version of J. K. Rowling’s The Christmas Pig available via Audible is a delight. I have listened to it on an almost endless loop since October and have yet to tire of the ensemble cast, the special effects, the music, or the narration. Jim Dale and Robert Glenister work their magic as solo readers and each is a marvel who has brought fresh appreciation of Rowling-Galbraith’s work each time I listen; the audio version of Christmas Pig, though, because it is supported by a full production company is almost the equivalent of ‘hearing it staged,’ the story appears so vividly in the mind’s eye. If you haven’t listened to it yet, as I say to readers of Cormoran Strike who are unfamiliar with the Glenister interpretations, “You really don’t know the story until you’ve listened to it.”

I understand, however, that many people do not care to join Audible, an Amazon outfit (which is to say, “one more tentacle of the octopus devouring all commerce and bookstores especially”), and do not have the Galleons on hand to buy the ensemble cast production straight up. I wonder if libraries have copies yet on CD or mp4 players for the blind. Regardless. today I found a place online where, with just a little patience and flexibility, anyone can listen to the whole book for free. Links to that after the jump! [Read more…]