Canon Thoughts: Prisoner of Azkaban

What this episode covers

In my series called Canon Thoughts, I’ve given my comments about books one and two of the Harry Potter series as well as about some of the early interviews which Rowling gave back in 1999 and 2000. I’ve also given my take on Crimes of Grindelwald. Now it’s time to talk about Prisoner of Azkaban. Ah, what do I say about book three? Many fans call this their favorite book of the series. I would definitely list it in my top three. So what makes this book so special? First of all, the book is the most tightly plotted of the series. Later books are plotted very well, certainly, but those books are also at least twice as long. There’s a lot more time in books four, five, and six for tangents and descriptions of day-to-day life at Hogwarts. Don’t get me wrong, I love that part of the stories. It’s one of the reasons why the Harry Potter books are so much more enticing than the Fantastic Beasts films. We all want to live at Hogwarts. We want to take classes and try out for the Quidditch team and struggle with homework and eat in the Great Hall. We don’t really feel that way about the world of Newt and Tina. In fact, I really don’t like the Wizarding World of those films very much at all. Hogwarts? Give me my letter! Prisoner of Azkaban, like the two books before it, has a lot of the extra stuff is removed and what’s left all feels important to the building mystery. A look at the Day to Day calendar of the book on the Lexicon website is very revealing. Nothing much happens between February 12 and just before exams in May. The same can’t be said for the later books, where every month is filled with activities and in which the book’s mystery is clouded by so many extraneous but fascinating events. I don’t see this as a flaw in the later books at all; but strong editing is a definite plus to the plot of book three. This is particularly great because it gives us a very clear idea of book three’s function in the overall saga, in the plot of the entire Potter series. The purpose of book three is to fill us in on what happened twenty years ago because we can’t understand the events of the present without a thorough understanding of what happened with the Marauders and Snape during the first rise of Voldemort. The book introduces us to James Potter, Lily Evans, Peter Pettigrew, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and a young Severus Snape.