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perverse_idyll (perverse_idyll) wrote in hp_beholder,

pt 2
His more jaded and critical view of Scrimgeour is equally insightful, and Scrimgeour's pragmatic employment of him, as both a dupe and a sexual outlet, implies that the new Minister has got Dawlish's measure. I like this portrait of an irascible, overbearing Scrimgeour, thwarted by Dumbledore's refusal to join forces and unwilling to abandon his post despite all the signs pointing to his impending doom. The detail about the crushed wire-framed glasses makes his death horribly vivid. All of your details are emotionally memorable and saturated with a fatalistic aura. I love the whole description of Scrimgeour's flat, the long, dusty hall and distracting doors, as paranoid and symbolic of the man's temperament as Crouch and his randomly chosen Floos flaring green in the dusk. Your handling of atmosphere throughout is spellbinding, and adds enormously to the desolate sense of futility and longing and crumbling certainties. The demoralizing of John Dawlish is executed with grace and inevitability, and the fact that he's self-aware enough to know how much is due to his own spinelessness, his lack of a genuine moral center, just kills me. The ending is, in a sense, poetic justice visited upon a man who can't withstand the emptiness of the universe on his own. Without someone else's example before him, without a focus for his devotional impulses, without someone standing fast between him and the void, Dawlish was bound to fall into the enemy's hands. The ending is his nightmare come true. This very fact implies that he was, to some degree, right to be afraid. The structures have failed; the good have been o'erthrown. His Confunding is therefore merciful, because as heartbreaking as it is that he longs for something and can't recall what haunts him, at least it spares him the knowledge of what he has become.

Dawlish ends submerged, a-drift in all he's lost and all he's betrayed. The fear that drives him at the outset, the looming Darkness he believes is threatening to swallow up the civilized world, is personally prophetic. The Darkness does consume him, and it doesn't spit him out; in darkness he stays, confused, not knowing what he seeks but searching compulsively.

I've just flailed incoherently all over your story, but I don't feel I've managed to convey at all how it made me feel. It's an astonishing feat of ventriloquism, walking the fine line between the character's perspective and the reader's omniscience. It chronicles the moral vacuum growing inside Dawlish, and although even the Death Eaters find him too insignificant to be worth destroying, the tale of his loss of faith is extremely moving. I read it last night, and I ached and marveled through every word. Even lesser people, the ungifted and confused and dangerously subservient, have a right to their stories. You've written a beautiful one for John Dawlish, and I'm so glad to have had the chance to read it.