Word: dursley
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...suppose this equates me with the likes of the piggish Dudley Dursley, but I am a Muggle and proud of it. Just wading through the pages of J.K. Rowling’s first volume was toil enough: Quidditch and Hogwarts and Gryffindor are words in another language that I have no interest in learning. (I’m already expecting hate-mail from everyone who worships Rowling or her fictitious characters, accusing me of being everything from a philistine to a cynic...
Aside, perhaps, from that lightning-bolt-shaped scar on his forehead, Harry Potter will seem familiar to anyone who has ever read a decent fairy tale. Harry, 11, is an orphan who lives with his aunt and uncle, Petunia and Vernon Dursley, and their son Dudley. Is it worth pointing out that the Dursleys are as dreadful as one might expect of people named Dursley--they make that step-family of Cinderella's seem merely ill-tempered by comparison--and that young Dudley is a fat, spoiled bully who keeps breaking Harry's glasses...
...soon as Author Priestley's readers learn that William Dursley's study is "a cozy higgledy-piggledy" and that he plays a high-spirited gambit at chess, they will doubtless be better prepared than Author Priestley's hero for what follows: a treasure hunt, for pitchblende, to Faraway Island via Manhattan, San Francisco, Tahiti. A transoceanic treasure hunt is a new sort of theme for Author Priestley but it is well suited to his fondness for sketching minor characters. Faraway is as full of them as a suburban telephone directory. William Dursley has three traveling companions: a retired naval officer...
...about everyday matters like sex, communism, the cinema, debauchery, patriotism, honesty. The ramblings of Author Priestley's invention are limitless. They make Faraway what one of Author Priestley's seafaring men might call a "scrumdoolious" chronicle, even more higgledy-piggledy than the study which is still waiting for William Dursley after 450 pages of cozy adventuring...
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