Half-Blood Prince: Page 286
Demelza Robbins, what Hogwarts doesn't teach, Harry's Michael Scott-like leadership, and the scaly monster that erupts in Harry's stomach.
Good morning, and happy Friday! Here’s the bad news: I won’t have much time to write over the next several weeks. Here’s the good news: I’ve already scheduled issues of Potter Pages to go out every Friday morning at 8:30, so you won’t even notice. If you like what you’re reading, subscribe, and make Friday mornings even better! Today we cover page 286 of Half-Blood Prince, and what a page it is. Enjoy!
There are only a few characters in the Potter series whose names are automatically associated with light-hearted, amusing scenes, but Demelza Robbins is one of them. She’s always in the middle of Ron being stupid, or awesome Quidditch wins; you’re never worried that you’re going to turn the page and find “Demelza fell to the ground dead.” Page 286 of Half-Blood Prince starts on one such light-hearted, amusing scene.
It’s Quidditch practice, and Ron has basically been deteriorating all day. His technique has gotten so bad that by the end of practice, in an attempt to make a save, he punches Demelza in the mouth, and that’s when the page starts.
Landing at Demelza’s side, Harry quickly announces that he’ll fix the damage; he points his wand at Demelza and says “episkey.” It’s just a stroke of luck that he knows the spell; he’s just learned it recently, when Tonks had to use it to fix his Malfoy-induced broken nose. It’s strange, though, that he didn’t know it already, because it’s such a fundamental, elementary spell. Hogwarts has a weak spot in this area. They need to offer a class called “wizarding essentials,” or something like that, that encompasses all other subject, but rather than teaching grand magical theory and practice, just teaches the spells that keep the lights on at night.
In first-year Charms, for instance, students learn how to make things fly; why aren’t they also learning the simple spell that can heal cuts, bruises, and broken bones? For that matter, far more time should be devoted to basic, essential spells: things like “reparo” and “accio” that aren’t exactly educational, but are just nice for students to know. I don’t remember where Harry learns “reparo;” I know he learns “accio” again by accident, when he sees Mrs. Weasley use it to confiscate Fred and George’s ton-tongue toffees. Again: Hogwarts needs wizarding essentials. It could even be a sort of rotating lecture circuit, with all the professors featured. Learn the basics of how to relate with Muggles; how to deal with angry magical creatures; how to make potions that cure stomach-aches or repair dented walls.
It might be that “episkey” is a particularly difficult spell that Harry wasn’t going to learn until 6th year anyway, except it seems pretty easy to pick up. It’s not like the Patronus charm, which Harry has to practice a bunch of times before he gets it right; he sees it once, casts it once, and it works perfectly. It is, you might say, a wizarding essential.
Anyway, after casting it on Demelza, Harry chastises Ginny for calling Ron a prat. He picks a strange way to do it, though; he says “don’t call Ron a prat, you’re not the Captain of this team.” When you think about it, a captain’s badge isn’t a free pass to call people prats; it’s still just as rude. Harry doesn’t seem annoyed at the particular words that Ginny used. Rather, he’s upset that she’s trying to take on a leadership role and give advice at all, which is a strange thing to be upset about. Obviously, it would be one thing if she was trying to usurp his role and take the team in her own direction, but she’s not doing that at all. She’s just reinforcing what he’s saying for the rest of the team, and Harry’s response is to say “no reinforcement!” Come to think of it, it’s a lot like how he handles the heavier moments in the series, the battles and the journeys and the quests; he’s always turning down help, sometimes for very little reason. It’s like that episode of The Office where Michael drives around handing out gift baskets. At first, when Dwight offers to help, Michael says “no...this is my quest.”
Ginny, of course, has a fantastic response ready: “Well, you seemed too busy to call him a prat and I thought someone should...” Ginny isn’t going to let Harry’s nonsensical leadership theory stand in the way of her all-star banter, as well she shouldn’t. After hearing what she says, of course, Harry has to force himself not to laugh. He knows she’s exactly right, even though he has this strange idea that the team hearing it will somehow be damaging. He somehow doesn’t realize that it’s far better for a team to laugh at itself than to keep negative emotions bottled up until they come out in a way that’s unproductive. So Harry just brings the team back into the air and practice continues.
We learn in the very next sentence that “it was one of the worst practices they had had all term, although Harry did not feel that honesty was the best policy when they were this close to the match.” This is another one of what I’m starting to notice are becoming a pattern: Harry’s Doug Heffernan moments. He seems to somehow believe that he’s a step ahead of everyone else in almost everything that he does. Obviously, in many places that’s true — he’s probably the best quidditch player that we see in the series, he knows the castle better than almost anyone besides the Weasleys, for a variety of reasons he knows Voldemort better than almost anyone else — but he seems to extrapolate this to other areas of life, and come to believe that he’s just perceiving things on a higher level than everyone else.
The only explanation for what he says on this page is that Harry believes that the team, somehow, won’t realize that it’s just had one of the worst practices Harry has ever seen. Most of the players have years of quidditch experience; even the ones who don’t have already seen the team play a lot that term. There was literally an accidental punch in the face. But to Harry, no one has noticed. They’re still waiting to hear from him before they decide how practice went. He can paper over the entire mess of a practice with a few encouraging words.
“Good work, everyone,” Harry says. “I think we’ll flatten Slytherin.” He says it “bracingly,” which has already ruined the point of his whole speech: if the team needs to be braced, did it really do a good job?
There’s one element that we haven’t gotten to yet that works a little bit in Harry’s favor: Harry is sixteen years old, he’s captaining a quidditch team for the first time, and the team is in a little bit of a rebuilding year. For his first five years at Hogwarts, the team was a dynastic powerhouse, with the same six-player core. No one talks about how unbelievable the Gryffindor quidditch team was for the first five books, but they win two Cups, probably should have won two or three more, and don’t even graduate a player until Goblet of Fire. It’s the kind of young core a varsity coach can only dream of.
Now Harry’s in a completely different environment, something he’s never experienced before: he has to build half a team from scratch. His only dependable players are he, Ginny, and Katie; Ron has some experience, but he’s clearly still figuring things out. Harry has a new chaser, two new beaters, and a keeper on whom he can’t depend quite yet. He’s never dealt with anything like it before, but not only that, he’s never even seen anyone else deal with anything like it. So it’s fair to cut him some slack, as a sixteen-year-old first-time captain who’s in a completely unfamiliar situation.
He also manages — somehow — to do a fairly good job lifting Ron out of his funk. When he and Harry are alone in the locker room, Ron announces that he “played like a sack of dragon dung.” For one, that’s a fantastic expression, and one that’s weirdly sophisticated and formal for a sixteen-year-old describing his quidditch performance. For another, he’s clearly not in the right mental space to play well, and Harry instantly recognizes that. He lets loose “a relentless flow of encouragement,” and Ron, while not completely recovering, starts looking marginally more cheerful.
What sometimes gets lost is that Ron genuinely is a solid keeper, and it really is just nerves; Harry isn’t lying at this point. Ron puts together a solid tryout, and Gryffindors have already seen him win the cup the previous year. In fact, it’s almost surprising that Harry still makes Ron try out for the team. To Gryffindors, Ron is almost a folk hero after book five, and surely, Harry would have faced backlash if he’d replaced him. It also brings up a question: hasn’t Ron proven himself to himself by now? Surely, if anything was going to dispel his quidditch uncertainty, it was book five, when he dominated the Quidditch Cup over Slytherins bellowing a rude song at him. Ron gave the quidditch performance of his life in book five, and it should be an inflection point for his career. Instead, for some reason, he seems to have forgotten how capable he was only a few months before. It’s the same sport — do the same thing. You’ve proven you can.
This takes us to the earth-shattering moment on the page (just when Ron was feeling more cheerful, too): Harry pushes open a tapestry to take a shortcut up to Gryffindor tower, and he and Ron find themselves looking at Ginny and Dean “locked in a close embrace and kissing fiercely as though glued together.”
Just for a start — what a description. It’s so physical and visceral, so passionate and almost violent. They’re locked together, kissing fiercely. They do sound a lot like fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds (not, honestly, that I would know), so points for Rowling there. What’s even better, in terms of emotional description, is the paragraph that comes next, which is so gloriously fantastic that I’m just going to quote it in its entirety.
It was as though something large and scaly erupted into life in Harry’s stomach, clawing at his insides: Hot blood seemed to flood his brain, so that all thought was extinguished, replaced by a savage urge to jinx Dean into a jelly. Wrestling with this sudden madness, he heard Ron’s voice as though from a great distance away.
I can feel that. You can feel that. We’ve all had our own “crush kisses someone else and scaly monster erupts in stomach” moment; I don’t know about you, but mine involved “Despicable Me 2,” a missing metro card, and an aced math test. I just cannot get enough of the writing here. Often (well, once), when I’m asked what my favorite sentence of all time is, I cite a line from the opening of Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved:”
“The air was thick and hot, like wandering into a steam bath.”
Now that’s a great sentence. The air was both thick and hot, not just like being in a steam bath, but like wandering into a steam bath. It’s an awful lot of meaning to pack into twelve words. But now, reading this page, another one of my top sentences must be:
It was as though something large and scaly erupted into life in Harry’s stomach, clawing at his insides: Hot blood seemed to flood his brain, so that all thought was extinguished, replaced by a savage urge to jinx Dean into a jelly.
The suddenness, the violence, and anger: you can almost see Harry stagger and his vision go red. You can practically feel the emotions flooding his brain. Then, for a little kicker at the end of the sentence, you get a surprise British-ism; rather than wanting to jinx Dean “into jelly,” Harry wants to jinx Dean into a jelly. That’s one of my favorite elements of the series: you can have a poignant, violent, or jaw-dropping scene, and right in the middle of it, a pivotal character can start talking about snogging or crumpets or dragon dung. You find all of these wonderful British-style descriptions: people brandish things, they say things “tartly,” they wear trainers and cloaks.
What’s also important, though, is that this scene sets up a lot of the rest of the book: this is when Harry realizes that he’s completely into Ginny, when Ron realizes that he needs to get out there and prove Ginny wrong while also getting revenge on Hermione for kissing Krum two years before, and when both Harry and Ron seem to finally snap to it and realize that this — romance and drama — is going to be a key element of their year, whether they like it or not. Neither of them is particularly happy about that. To them, it’s just a distraction from the more interesting areas of quidditch and Voldemort.
Of course, when all is said and done, Harry and Ron will have turned out incredibly lucky in love: both were with the person they would end up marrying by the end of high school. As far as these things are concerned, I really only have one question: out of Coote and Peakes, who ended up with Demelza Robbins?
I think it is interesting to that magical education largely fails to teach students the most basic, practical spells that would be useful in everyday life; a failing shared by the muggle primary education system. It has become a common 'meme' in our non-magical world that students are reliably taught that "The Mitochondria is the Powerhouse of the Cell" but do not know how to do their taxes or balance a checkbook. I think that JK is on point with this parallel in the magical primary education system.