SUPPORT US 11. THE CHRISTMAS PIG

SUPPORT US

If you liked this issue of The Rowling Library Magazine, please consider supporting us with a small monthly donation.

For only $2 per month, you can become a Patron - even though for some people $2 may be not much, it means a lot to us.

And all our patrons also receives The Daily Prophet two times a week in their email inbox, with the latest Harry Potter news and commentary, which means that you are paying less than ¢30 per Daily Prophet edition.

Our current supports - to which we are really grateful - are:

Paulo Setti, Lisa Shipowitz, Sophie V, Geoffrey Tixier, Dana, Mary T Rochelle, Shirley Joyce, Beatrice Groves, Marty Ryan, Anthony Franz, Sean McLennan, John Granger, Annie A., Marlica, Paola Campana Aguilar, Cindi Shannon, Lyn Arey, James Greenhill, Alvaro Palomo Hernandez, JeffJ, Sherri Rawstern, Rena Klein, Josephine Glazov, Renjie Fu, Mary Beth Murphy, John Livingston, Stephanie Varnell, Susan Sipal, Kenneth Montfort, Vicky McKinley and Suzanne Lucero.

BECOME A PATRON

“Best Rowling book in years”

J.K. Rowling’s first children’s novel since Harry Potter was published this month, and it is the most enjoyable book by the author in the last decade. It is a feel-good book, full of surprises, which will delight adults and children alike, not only for the original story, but also for the imaginative scenery, characters and objects that interact with the main characters. The Christmas Pig tells the story of Jack and the love he feels for Dur Pig, a stuffed toy pig who has been with him since he was a toddler. After losing him on Christmas Eve, Jack will embark on a great adventure to save Dur Pig with the help of The Christmas Pig, a brand new replacement for Dur Pig.

Together they will explore a new

world and go, deeper and deeper, into the Land of the Lost, to save Dur Pig from a dark fate and get him back to the Land of Living. It is in this magical journey that takes place almost throughout the whole book where Jack and The Christmas Pig will encounter Things and visit different towns. All of the inhabitants of these towns have something in common: they are material and abstract things that people lose in the real world. But the journey is not easy, since the Land of the Lost has Loss Adjustors, a group of Things that maintain order and are now after Jack, a human who is not supposed to be there. J.K. Rowling shows again, with this book, why she is considered one of the greatest storytellers of her time. She excels again in world building, and younger and older readers will be surprised, chapter after chapter, by the original ideas that she introduces in this world that Jack and his friend visit. The world Rowling creates is not complex but it does not underestimate children: it is a world with clear logistics that the protagonists must follow, carefully crafted to serve the story and not its readers. Older readers will find these world rules with a mix of humour and moral sense. If one dares to compare The Christmas Pig to Rowling’s

“novels for adults” (Strike novels, for example), the use of simple writing stands out as a way to attract younger readers, but this is not to the detriment of the story.

The beginning of the book may seem slow until the adventure starts, but it is a needed pace to make a proper character introduction and to lay the foundations that will be used later. After the first quarter of the book, the pace increases when the main characters go into a non-stop journey, and the rhythm of the book remains like that until the very end. The occasional slower scenes that may appear later are needed to balance the story, and are fairly enjoyable as well, because the writer has already won the reader’s trust at that point.

Young kids will be able to read the book on their own, since Rowling’s writing is aimed at this specific audience this time. But for those who prefer a bedtime reading with their parents, it will bring up interesting conversation topics since the book touches on some real world concepts explained by these lost Things themselves (including how they were lost or forgotten by their owners). Moreover, those long time readers of J.K. Rowling’s works will find familiar passages and themes that they may want to connect to the Harry Potter books. It is hard to tell if those references are there on purpose, but there may be some gratification in thinking that Rowling must have noticed and enjoyed them privately while she was writing them.

The different places these protagonists visit are a thrill for imagination. It is difficult to think that animation studios would not fight to adapt the story for the big screen, where The Christmas Pig would fit perfectly due to its nature.

Parents around the world may have a difficult time every night, once a chapter is finished and their children must go to sleep. The Christmas Pig will keep readers turning pages with a great and imaginative story, filled with cliffhangers at the end of most chapters that will leave kids asking for more. If some reviewers said that The Ickabog lacked Harry Potter’s magic, they can rest assured that The Christmas Pig has all the magic that J.K. Rowling can provide, and that’s more than enough.

nods or CoinCidenCes?

Some passages of The Christmas Pig will trigger memories on those readers who are very fond of the Harry Potter series. Are these scenes and dialogues a nod to the Harry Potter books, or just a mere coincidence?

Jack arrives at a new school and somehow he is the chosen one.

“After just one hour with Holly as his reading partner, Jack was no longer the quiet new boy. He was the boy Holly Macaulay had chosen, the boy Holly Macaulay called ‘my mate Jack’ when she saw him at the packed lunch table later. The rest of his class was impressed. They wanted to talk to him now.”

The story of the three Compasses and the Tale of the Three Brothers.

‘There were once three compasses,’ said Compass, ‘a big one, a medium-sized one, and a tiny one. The big one led the way up a mountain, and the medium-sized one steered a boat across the sea, but the tiny one got dropped in a vegetable patch. And the moral of that is, “never make friends with a radish”.’

When Power is telling the story of how he was “sucked down” to the Land of the Lost, it is not hard to think his master could have been the very same Lord Voldemort.

“‘Together, we ruled an entire COUNTRY! To keep me, my master kept the PEOPLE [...] in their proper places, which is to say, ON THEIR KNEES! [...] But THEN, a boy like YOU dared CHALLENGE my master in PUBLIC! And THAT CHILD [...] gave the PEOPLE courage to REVOLT!’”

While Jack and The Christmas Pig are on the run, they use a long and sloppy tunnel to cross the Wastelands and reach the City of the Missed. Similar to what Harry, Ron and Hermione do to enter Hogwarts in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

“The threesome continued down the steeply sloping tunnel in silence for a long time, until finally they reached a door in the rock, beside which hung a thick rope.”

is it possible to knoW When The ChrisTmas Pig is set?

As it happened with the Harry Potter books, J.K. Rowling does not give an exact timeframe for The Christmas Pig. But there may be a way to try to, at least, set time boundaries for this story. It is in Chapter 46 (“Power’s Plan”) when we have a clue. It is there when Memory says: “Sixty-nine years ago, [...] my mistress and her sister, Amelia Lousie, went to see a movie called The Fugitive”.

The Fugitive is a 1993 film, starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones. The first thought is to think the book is happening 69 years after the release of the film, in 2062, but that would be wrong. As the Christmas Pig explains in Chapter 20, “Time’s different in the Land of the Lost. They say an hour in the Land of the Living is a whole day in the Last of the Lost.”

There are two options from here. Thinking that Memory was lost right after her mistress watched the movie (which seems to be the most possible scenario), or was lost recently (which wouldn’t make sense since she seems to have been in the Palace for a long time now). If Memory was lost right after her mistress watched the movie, it means that 69 years have passed in the Last of the Lost. Sixty nine years are 25.201 days, so that means 25.201 hours in the Land of the Living.

So, 25.201 hours is roughly 1050 days. The Fugitive was in cinemas during August 1993: 1050 days later would be July 1996, which is not possible since this is happening on Christmas Eve. But of course, Memory could have been lost in December of 1993, and that would work.

With only these facts it seems impossible to know when The Christmas Pig is set. At least we know that the story is taking place between 1996 and… 2062.