The year is 2000, and the world is eagerly anticipating the release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling’s fourth installment in the popular fantasy series. With overall sales rising worldwide through 1998 and 1999, there was an increased publicity for the novel as yet unmatched by the previous books. For what may well have been the first time, Harry Potter was in culture’s spotlight. A movie based on Philosopher’s Stone was in production at the time as well, and would begin filming that September. Within four years of that first novel’s publication, J.K. Rowling’s rise to stardom was only just beginning.
Yet it was this fourth novel where her overconfidence began to get the better of her. Perhaps it was the increased scrutiny, or a bit more power over the text than she would’ve had when Philosopher’s Stone was published. You have to raise an eyebrow at the length of Goblet of Fire, which was nearly double the length of Prisoner of Azkaban and only around a hundred pages short of the previous three installment combined. She claimed, in an interview at the time, that she knew it would be a longer book needing as much time as thought necessary to tell the story. [1] But the novel’s problems run much deeper than that; the plot’s bare bones rest on shaky foundation, propped up purely by the charms of her characters and the ending’s return of Voldemort. It’s carried along, as well, by a change in the overall format hardly warranted this early on into the series’ popularity. All too soon, Rowling has become incapable of being told “no”.
I confess, I never did like Goblet of Fire very much, book or film. Ask the ten year old version of me which Harry Potter they liked the least, and whilst I’d maybe teeter on the edge of choosing Philosopher’s Stone for a minute, chances are high that I’d settle for this. Back then, though, I mostly just found it dull – well, admittedly I still do, but these days I possess a better attuned writer brain and rewatching the film has me mentally sticking a knife into its corpse every five seconds. Structurally, it is termite infested.
But with my Prisoner of Azbakan essay I tried to process some of the good that Harry Potter has brought into the world, both with its story choices and in inspiring me. In order to give the series its fair due, or else to put J.K. Rowling on trial for its murder, someone has to inevitably play defense; now, though, it’s the prosecution’s turn, and the evidence is a bit stacked against her. There are a multitude of common criticisms leveled at J.K. Rowling’s prose, many being entirely fair, some a bit of a stretch – again, in the previous essay, even though I made note that the ingredients of her writing were borrowed, those elements combined made the heart of the series something unique. Harry Potter has its own style, and that style is part of why it went on to become so beloved. Its flaws, though, are just as inherent to that style as its virtues, and for years many like me have been blind to them.
So if my last essay was the begrudging case for why Rowling may actually be a good writer, never fear, because this one is the case for the opposite. In order to untangle the massive, nuanced, and ultimately tarnished legacy that J.K. Rowling has built for herself, we have to understand just how fundamentally mediocre her writing is, even though this refused to stand in the way of her fame and in some ways contributed to catapulting her into the public eye, all off the backs of a few half-decent children’s books. Her current actions and the views she espouses, online or otherwise, are off the table for a moment here – we must first dive headlong into the muck of Goblet of Fire, and dissect the trainwreck of plotting within. God help us.
The Goblet of Fire, or Why Polyjuice Potion Should Really Be Illegal By Now And Not Within Theoretical Reach Of Underage Students
So Voldemort is back. To get this out of the way now, I have no qualms regarding the graveyard duel. In the film as well as the book, it’s probably the most effective sequence in the whole story. Even so, “effective” is doing a bit of heavy lifting in that sentence; it’s very much a good scene in spite of the plot that comes before it, and its potential impact is somewhat diluted by the building blocks that Goblet of Fire possesses. We all knew Voldemort would return – his resurrection was a certainty from the opening pages of Philosopher’s Stone, and I highly doubt many were surprised when it eventually happened. It was a shock, perhaps, to see it only four books into the series, but it would’ve come to pass at some point either way. So it’s a massive shame, then, that even though it manages to achieve some semblance of effect, it had to come in the weakest of the seven books.
Of course, deciding which Harry Potter book is the worst is a bit like choosing the least flavourful slice of toast. The spread on top will give it some taste, but the bread beneath it is bland and inconspicuous. Even so, Goblet of Fire is aiming for too much. It wants to be epic, action-packed, exciting – and in doing so completely misses what made the first three books enjoyable. The strengths of Harry Potter, as few and far between as they are, lie not in its slapdash drawing of a Hero’s Journey and the high-proportioned stakes, but in its ability to be a fun, young adult fantasy serial, anchored all the time by Hogwarts, a school for wizards, as its central location.
The best way I can explain it is this: the previous three stories are as much about going to Hogwarts, attending classes and doing homework, as they are about the main thrust of each plot. Even though the premises get increasingly darker, the structure doesn’t change. Harry and his friends learn – in class – things that eventually help them in the course of the novel’s progress. Without Flitwick’s Charms class, Ron would not cast wingardium leviosa on the troll’s club; it’s in Prisoner of Azkaban where Professor Snape tries to get Lupin’s Defense Against the Dark Arts class to twig that their teacher’s a werewolf. But even more so crucially, these lessons help inform and add depth to whichever problem Harry is forced to solve that year. Buckbeak’s attack on Malfoy, for instance, is the catalyst for the former’s execution, feeding straight into the rescue of Sirius Black by the end.
Goblet of Fire breaks this format into a million tiny pieces. At most, we get Harry learning the summoning charm, which the film doesn’t even bother to show him practicing because it’s so insignificant. What purpose does the disguised Crouch Jr. demonstrating the Unforgivable Curses serve, either? Harry doesn’t make use of them, meaning it’s simply exposition for when Voldemort employs all three later. The rest of the plot is taken up by the inane Triwizard Tournament, an event that departs from the norm for most Hogwarts years – the series suddenly grinds to halt and forgets to be about Hogwarts, focusing in on making teenagers complete extremely dangerous tasks for little reason. We are treated to one of the roughest bits of plotting ever devised, whereby Voldemort utilizes the tournament to bring Harry to him, as if his internal spy couldn’t just capture him in the night.
In other words, Goblet of Fire constitutes a tone shift. This isn’t a bad thing in and of itself – in fact a change-up was probably necessary down the line, as Deathly Hallows will later prove – but to come at this precise moment makes the whole thing jarring. Consider, for a moment, what a different version of the story would be like, one which stuck to the school novel aesthetics of its previous installments: a novel similar to that of Chamber of Secrets, incorporating the horror, classroom focus, and everything Hogwarts the location has to offer, but ending with the return of Voldemort as per before. To put it another way, something which sticks to the established format but subverts it at the conclusion, bringing the newly risen Dark Lord into the thick of things.
Maybe this sounds like nitpicking. For all the more recent criticism Harry Potter gets for not being terribly original, though, it’s the school life aspect that Rowling writes the best. Even though the characters are growing up, there’s still an emphasis on their classes and learning – and sure, even wizards going to school is hardly a new concept, but no matter the author, however good or bad, taking something and making it their own still produces a certain unique style. This is ultimately what I like the best about transformative works such as Harry Potter – I don’t care about the influences that led to it, so long as they’re acknowledged, but I enjoy seeing how different writers can apply their own stamp to an old, potentially stale, idea. Rowling doesn’t acknowledge the history of fantasy much, though, and almost seems embarrassed to be writing in the genre itself – admitting on multiple occasions that the genre isn’t even one she especially likes. [2] [3] Whether through overconfidence or insecurity, she abandons the ideas upon which Harry Potter was built, and throws a tournament into the mix that defies all logic and merely frustrates the reader.
Alas – the book is published, it inevitably becomes a hit, the film producers get to work on making its screen adaptation a reality. The worst book becomes the worst film, quite naturally of course, yet still in weirdly different ways to the source text. Everything from acting choices (what on Earth is Roger Lloyd-Pack doing?) to the set design drop the ball here, and it coalesces into a big, dull, blob of mush. The production is weighed down by a mediocre book written out of misplaced confidence, but a good adaptation was still possible even if its issues were baked in page-deep – with “good” used here in the sense of maintaining the novel’s feel, rather than story quality. It did not happen.
At the heart of this problem is the fact that, although I’ve always found Goblet of Fire to be weak, it still served as a source of inspiration for my own writing, alongside every other Harry Potter book. How can a writer whose pride was their fatal flaw, with a style so dry it’s practically the Sahara, be the reason I’m sitting here today writing this essay? It was never enough to just enjoy Harry Potter for me – no, I had to love it so much that when Rowling’s bigotry unearthed itself, there was baggage for me to unpack. Looking over the series now and I just see paragraphs of lifeless prose that the child version of me was somehow enthralled by.
Maybe that is the reason, though – as children, we do not possess the skills to ascertain good and bad, at least not as much as adults. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series may have claimed to grow more mature as its target audience aged with it, but that is only true in its themes, premise, and the occasional expletive; the actual construction of her words remained at the level Philosopher’s Stone began with, decent for the ten-year old I used to be, but ultimately something I would grow out of. As a starting point, it’s not too bad, but only as that: a starting point, nothing more. Harry Potter took me in and pushed me down a path that’s dominated my life ever since, but I know those days of considering it a great masterpiece are behind me. There is nostalgia looking back, if not for the series as a whole then certainly for that childlike wonder I so often had. It’s a feeling I am bound never to recapture.
Goblet of Fire rests in the deepest of graves – poorly written, poorly adapted, endlessly irritating and boring to boot. A good version is impossible with the Triwizard Tournament intact, and these days one is unlikely to happen. Perhaps its film adaptation is fitting that way – with the books sinking further into irrelevance, the movie franchise rises to supersede its influence. And if anything about Harry Potter must live on, the memory of a structurally rotten film coupled by its longer and tiresome source might just about be the most fitting fate our culture can saddle Goblet of Fire with. It is killed as mercilessly and without fanfare as Cedric Diggory, and may it become just as unimportant.
Hyperfixation Station 
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