“I am Mary Lennox. I fell asleep when everyone had cholera, and I just woke up.”
Not a very cheery start, is it? And so a sour-faced, sullen orphan Mary is whisked away from her birthplace India to stay with her guardian, Mr.Archibald Craven at Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire.
The manor is a sprawling place surrounded by gardens and desolate moors. Mr.Craven is a reclusive widow and often travels abroad leaving Mary in the care of his unbending housekeeper,Mrs.Medlock and a cheery l’il chambermaid,Martha. In an attempt to pep up the sickly child, Martha regales Mary with stories of her younger brother Dickon. Dickon is a true child of nature...he can talk to animals, spend hours alone on the moors and make anything, absolutely anything grow. Almost a nature-sprite.
Martha also tells Mary about a Secret Garden in the grounds which has been kept locked for the past ten years. No one knows where the key is and even if they did, it would be useless.....since Mr.Craven has forbidden anyone to enter the garden.
By a sheer stroke of luck (or is it thanks to a red-breasted robin?), the now steadily improving Mary discovers the lost key and promptly enters the long-shut garden. Despite the air of seeming lifelessness, Mary sees that there is hope for renewal. With the help of her newly-made friend Dickon, she is soon spending happy-hours digging and planting and growing happier and healthier in the garden.
In the midst of all these developments, she is still disturbed by a mysterious crying she often hears in the manor. She soon finds out that it is Mr.Craven’s crippled son, Colin. The frail child stays in bed, is never visited by his dad, throws tantrums and is convinced that he is going to drop-dead soon! Used to bossing over the household, he meets his match in an equally pugnacious Mary. She snaps him out of his melancholy, befriends him and lets him in on the secret of the garden. As time passes; Mary, Dickon and Colin have some good sprightly fun doing honest labour and watching the garden come alive.
I read ‘THE SECRET GARDEN’ in the Classic Starts version. Simple, abridged…a fresh way to introduce the classics to kids (and useless adults like me). Adding to the charm were the brilliantly shadowed pencil-drawings by Lucy Corvino. It was a charming, light read. You empathize with Mary’s lonliness...get a little impatient with Colin’s moping...and wish that you were exactly like Dickon.
You cannot NOT love a Potter movie. Watching Rowling’s world recreated in painstaking detail exactly the way you imagined it, is always a fun ride. And yet….. being a Potter-purist might leave you a tad miffed where ‘Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince’ are concerned.
So
we have a teenaged Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) flirting with a muggle-waitress (apparently, in a bid to dull the shock of losing Sirius and have some semblance of reality in his life). But before things can get off the ground, Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) whisks the reluctant hero off onto the first of many tasks to come. A retired professor Slughorn (Jim Broadbent) is reinstated as Potions Master. But what about Snape (Alan Rickman), you ask? Hovering like a malevolent bat, he seems to have much more sinister things up his cloak than usual.Soon, Dumbledore is taking Potter along on trips down Voldemort’s memory lane (courtesy, The Pensieve). These flashbacks, coupled with one elusive memory involving Prof.Slughorn might hold all the clues necessary to bring about the destruction of Voldemort.
So yes, in essence things are moving along at a desired pace. You get glimpses into a young and even then, eerily-evil Voldemort’s life. Harry discovers a Potions textbook of an old student who goes by the pseudonym of ‘The Half-Blood Prince’ and uses it to do splendidly well in potions. There’s sufficient romantic angst what with Ron (Rupert Grint) snogging a tremulous (and irritating) Lavender Brown at regular intervals, much to Hermione (Emma Watson)'s impotent anger. Harry skitters around his new-found infatuation for Ginny Weasley(Bonny Wright). A grown-up Draco(Tom Felton) looks paler than usual, thanks to an impossible task set to him by The Dark Lord. And the Death-Eaters led by the deliciously sadistic Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham Carter) and an icky Greyback are wrecking havoc in Muggle and Wizard World alike.
Harry is at his wittiest-best…a tad cocky but endearing nevertheless... Ron plays his role of the blustering bloke with ‘an-emotional-range-of-a-teaspoon’ to the tee….Snape is his usual crisply-loathsome self. And Dumbledore is a joy to behold…as always.
On the downside, vital characters (Hermione, Tonks, Lupin etc) look like scenery while Ginny gets centre-stage. If you haven’t read the book (really?!?)….it won’t make a spot of difference. But if you have…well, get prepared for some serious revamping.
In all, spell-binding to watch for the special effects and sheer grandeur of the sets. More screen-time for a few favourites would have been nice. But in the end it’s Harry Potter…and for the loyalty you owe the wee-Potter lad… just for that…you go and watch and keep the whining to a minimum.
“I am Mary Lennox. I fell asleep when everyone had cholera, and I just woke up.”
By a sheer stroke of luck (or is it thanks to a red-breasted robin?), the now steadily improving Mary discovers the lost key and promptly enters the long-shut garden. Despite the air of seeming lifelessness, Mary sees that there is hope for renewal. With the help of her newly-made friend Dickon, she is soon spending happy-hours digging and planting and growing happier and healthier in the garden.
