Welcome to the Caribbean, Love!

I'm all excited about Book 7, again, thanks to a post fernwithy made today called "Harry Potter and the Secondary Character Theory." In the course of discussing why various people's scenarios about a favorite secondary character coming to the fore in the climax of the last book aren't likely to happen, she listed some of the open plot points that need to be paid off:

The battle with Voldemort has been set up with many subordinate battles. We know that he has a huge interest in Hogwarts and the Horcruxes are largely related to it, but we know Harry is leaving... what happens there? We have no idea what's going on with Snape, not really--I can't think of many Snape scenarios she could do right now that I would reject out of hand. Peter Pettigrew is tantalizingly placed and has a blood debt to Harry; what's up with that? What is the Black family connection? Harry is now their heir, and there's the whole probable identity of R.A.B. and the stealing of items from the house has been covered. How's that going to play out? What about Percy? Is she going anywhere with his defection from the family? In other words, JKR has a lot of balls in the air that are directly related to the main conflict

Indeed she does! An aspect of Rowling's writing style that has long struck me most forcibly is her tendency to nurture along her plot and thematic threads over many books, rather than resolving them and turning to new ones. I have often and often had the experience of opening a new book in the series expecting it to build on threads left dangling in the previous book, only to see those threads put on the back burner and left to simmer while other threads are carefully established and then left open in their turn at the end of that book. Then the next book after that may go back and pick up the threads from one or two books back, something I have been calling the "skip-a-book syndrome."( Read more... )