An apology to Steve Kloves, screenwriter of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
- 20 April 2010
- Gerard Wood
I think perhaps I owe Steve Kloves an apology for my review of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince last year. Titled Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Movie I felt at the time that more than any of its predecessors this sixth instalment in the series had suffered from the compression of a sprawling work of fiction - some 600 plus pages of multiple interwoven plot lines - into two and a half hours of screen time.
At the time I'd only just finished listening to Stephen Fry's superb narration of the novel (filling the void on my journey from home to work and back again) so it was fairly fresh in my memory as I wrote the review and what struck me then was how much of the Half-Blood Prince was missing from the screen adaptation. In the review I said that one gets the impression Kloves was so daunted by the amount of material covered in the novel and the almost impossible task of adapting it to a single movie, that he threw away his quill, picked up a wand and cast a reducto spell so that all that remained of Rowling's mammoth novel is a little dust.
Obviously I wasn't all that motivated to watch the movie again, but a copy on Blu Ray came my way quite recently and I gave it a go and was genuinely surprised by how much better it is the second time around. What struck me this time was not what had failed to make it from the page to the screen but how cleverly Kloves has identified the essence of the novel and brought it to the screen, which is the height of good adaptation. The movie is a lot darker than I recalled, far more atmospheric and with less of the teenage angst and adolescent relationships of Harry, Ron and Hermione than I objected to in my review.
I stand by my view that too little of the most interesting background material on Snape and Voldemort made it to the screen, but on the whole Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is considerably more than a half-baked movie.
As I've already mentioned Stephen Fry's name, I'll make one last observation for those readers out there who, like me, struggle with J.K. Rowling's prose: listen to Fry's narration of the Harry Potter series. There's no denying that Rowling is an oustanding story teller - her tales of the boy wizard have captured more imaginations more fully than any other writer in living memory - but she is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a great writer. Her prose is, well, bloated and quite frankly in need of a bloody good edit. As a reader, what I object to most is her need to qualify almost everything her characters say with an adverb that robs them of a voice of their own. Rowling quite simply does not let her characters' words speak for themselves.
Stephen Fry's narration and voice characterisation on the other hand bring the characters and dialogue to life so effectively that the limitations of Rowling's prose are forgotten and we are recalled to the inescapable fact that she is, indeed, an outstanding story teller.
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