First: I love the title and the mind-broadening properties of the eponymous plum. Second: I was struck by how much sense this pairing makes. Dotty but free-thinking Xenophilius certainly sets an example to Dumbledore of the perfect camouflage behind which to hide his power and his perceptiveness: act daftly enough, and they'll think you're harmless. Xeno is a proto-hippie in jester's motley, an intellectual gadfly in a scholastic stronghold, a perpetual student floating on goodwill and boundless credulity and mind-altering plum juice. His naïvete and openness are very appealing, and I can see why he'd be both an affront to academic starch and a dangerous temptation to Albus.
The description of Beauxbatons is wonderful, a cross between Greco-Roman symmetry and art nouveau swirls in which Xeno can spot orphic clues to presumed kindred spirits, like the 'believer' he's convinced insinuated a Snorkack into the golden mean. And this phrase – the beautiful, spiral library, each strand of bookshelf reaching up into the heavens like sweet pea and honeysuckle around a cane – is gorgeous enough to make a booklover giddy.
I love how Xeno's overwrought, ingenuous, romantic sensibility runs through the language of the story, making everything tremble with surprise and hidden possibility (hidden perhaps due to an international conspiracy, but always there for a heart willing to seek it out). The narrative manages to mock him gently without dispelling the sense that he's capable of intuiting not merely the fantastical and absurd but certain elusive truths about the nature of reality. I love the line about him fishing for plimpies when his parents were killed; it's both poignant and silly in a way that's unique to the Lovegood name, and it pins that moment indelibly in my mind.
The glimpses we get of Horace are equally delightful, illustrating his opportunism at an age when it's still amusing and charming rather than manipulative or sleazy. His unapologetic assessment of his defects and the ways in which he counteracts them are very winning; I love his lack of self-pity and his industrious good cheer in pursuit of his latest conquest. He balances Xenophilius' bohemian mysticism with a sybaritic common sense and provides Xeno with the opening for his best line: "The trouble is, Horace, you're entirely anyone's." Of course, it's worth noting that Horace makes his overture only after the great Dumbledore has shown an interest, but I suspect it's also his way of being a friend.
The portrait of Dumbledore as a man wracked by a sense of responsibility, desperate to downplay his decisive role in Grindelwald's defeat, is touching. It's easy to see how a mercurial spirit like Xeno's, combined with pale flyaway hair and a tendency to hang on his every word (and perhaps the assistance of a dirigible plum or two), would leave Albus enraptured but would also inflame his ever-present and oversensitive burden of guilt.
Thank you, MA, for this lovely little tale seen through the eyes of an unusual protagonist whose voice must have been very tricky to get right. I thoroughly enjoyed it and in fact read it twice for its generosity, humor, the romantic/satiric portrait of an earlier postwar world, and the fascinating versions of familiar characters in their youth. *applauds*