“We are all facing dark and difficult times,” Professor Dumbledore warned the
assembled ranks of Hogwarts School at the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet
of Fire (2000). Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix plunges into them.
This fifth book in J K Rowling’s phenomenally popular series seethes with
turbulence. Now a moody 15-year-old, Harry broods resentfully about the
problems caused by his unlucky fate — orphaned as a child when the malign
wizard Voldemort murdered his parents but was mysteriously unable to kill
him. The lightning-flash scar branded on his forehead by that failed attempt
throbs excruciatingly as Voldemort telepathically agitates him from afar.
Closer to home, other irritants abound (passages conveying Harry’s state of
mind are livid with words such as “angry”, “rage” and “furious”). His
friends seem to be inexplicably neglecting him. He has to undergo an ordeal
in a courtroom. Back at school, further injustices rankle. A smear campaign
a newspaper is waging against him provokes sneers and widespread ostracism.
He is banned from playing his beloved sport, Quidditch. Previously running
into trouble because of his impetuousness, he now does so because of his
temper. Even the weather — usually seasonably agreeable at Hogwarts (winters
glittery with frost and snow, summers of periwinkle-blue skies) — turns
nasty.
As Voldemort strengthens his position, thanks to the conceited folly of a
government minister, the political climate worsens too. Popular characters
are felled by stun-spells or torn open by serpent fangs. Hitherto an idyll
of shambolic conviviality, the Weasley family is grievously split by the
defection of its pompous son Percy to the anti-Hogwarts camp. Harry’s first
experience of romance (with a pretty girl Quidditch player) brings
disillusion.
For the second time in the series, he unwittingly contributes to the death of
someone he admires.
Loudly talked up before publication, the love-interest and violent death prove
low-key. Of far more impact is the introduction of a new Defence Against the
Dark Arts teacher. As Potter fans will be aware, this post at Hogwarts has
always been hard to fill satisfactorily. Previous holders of it were a
mutant henchman of Voldemort, a near-psychotic egomaniac, a werewolf and a
homicidal one-eyed shape-changer. Professor Umbridge turns out to be the
most memorably flesh-creeping of all. Squat and pouchy-eyed (looking like “a
toad in a flowerbed”when swathed in her floral fabrics), she has a “horribly
honied” voice syrupy with venom. Gloating over the pain and humiliation she
inflicts with connoisseur sadism, she is a far more terrifying monster than
demon king Voldemort with his red, slit- pupilled eyes and skull-white face.
Sent to Hogwarts by the hostile minister to inspect classroom standards,
Umbridge resembles a nightmare version of Ofsted. Her departure (pursued
from the premises by a poltergeist thwacking her with a sock full of chalk)
should cheer up many staffrooms. Scenes in which she sits in on classes are
little triumphs of caustic comedy.
That Professor Umbridge should provide comedy as well as horror typifies
Rowling’s approach. One secret of her fiction’s success is its
miscellaneousness — something strikingly apparent even in its inhabitants.
Creatures from classical mythology — centaurs, salamanders, unicorns,
hippogriffs, a basilisk and a phoenix — mingle with the fauna of folklore:
elves, gnomes, mermaids and mermen, ghosts, giants, pixies, trolls, goblins
and leprechauns. None is twee or stereotypical. When dragons roar in,
Rowling briskly points out the different breeds’ identifying marks: the
smooth-scaled Common Welsh Green, the blueish-grey Swedish Short-Snout with
long pointed horns, the scarlet Chinese Fireball with its distinctive facial
fringe of fine gold spikes. Around them swarm livestock entirely of her
invention: blast-ended skrewts, nifflers, flobberworms and thestrals.
The diversity of creatures roaming the 2,200 or so pages of Rowling’s series
to date is matched by the diversity of the genres she draws upon. Most
prominent is the school story. The larger part of these novels — each of
which chronicles a year in Harry’s career at Hogwarts — takes place in an
institution fantastically reminiscent of establishments such as Frank
Richards’s Greyfriars or Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers. Hogwarts, with its
towers and turrets and 142 staircases (some of which have an Escher-like
propensity for leading somewhere different on Fridays), is a milieu of house
rivalries, prefects, detentions and dormitories. Chums bond together to
thwart sinister or comic teachers but always respect strict but fair ones.
Secret passages are handy for sleuthing. Quaint servants totter around.
There are arcane rites and hallowed rituals, and feasts in the Great Hall
where ravenous youngsters tuck into lashings of steak-and-kidney pie and
treacle tart. Fires crackle merrily in common-room grates.
Last-minute-of-the-match dramas thrillingly occur on the sports field (or,
to be more accurate, several feet above it since Quidditch is played on
flying broomsticks).
As was highlighted by the hectic speculation about who was doomed to die in
this new novel (recalling the crowds on the New York quays shouting “Is
Little Nell dead?” to boats bringing the latest episode of The Old Curiosity
Shop), Rowling is also working within a format that has affinities with
19th-century serial-fiction. Besides offering a self-contained story, each
novel constitutes an instalment in a longer continuing narrative about Harry
and Voldemort, to which she brings crowd-pulling gifts of suspense and
surprise.
Dickens, the greatest exponent of this genre, is the greatest influence.
Rowling shares his penchant for menaced orphans (Harry is far from the only
one in her books). Like him, she loves intricate family ramifications,
Christmas jollities, giveaway names (Crabbe, Goyle, Peeves) and surreal
streetscapes (Diagon Alley, for instance, with stalls offering barrels of
bat spleen and eels’ eyes and shops such as Flourish and Blotts, purveyors
of wizard stationery). All gaslights, cobwebby chandeliers, begrimed
ancestral portraits and heaps of fascinating lumber, the old house that is
the HQ of the Order of the Phoenix (a resistance movement against Voldemort)
might have been air-lifted out of Dickens’s pages.
A more lurid gothic streak is let rip in the fiction’s welter of snakes,
skulls, revenants, ghastly mutations and vampiric blood- drinking. This
keeps morphing into the more modern sensation-mode of the adventure thriller
(climactic shoot-outs with wands are an aspect of these novels adult readers
are likely to find least compelling).
When Rowling’s series started, it seemed primarily concerned to contrast the
drab world of Muggles (non-magic people, epitomised at their most cloddish
by the Dursleys, who are reluctantly rearing their nephew Harry) and that of
wizards, shimmering with the enchantingly unexpected. Then the focus shifted
to the juxtaposing of two ideologies: the tolerant, diversity-loving ethos
of Dumbledore and his allies and the “pure-blood” creed of Voldemort and his
followers who loathe “mud-bloods” (anyone not of untainted wizard descent).
As liberalism and totalitarianism clash, under gaudy guises, values to the
fore are bravery and, increasingly, self-control, stoicism and
ready-wittedness.
Double agents, spies and turncoats lurk everywhere. The first four books each
end with the discovery that a trusted figure is a deadly enemy. This latest
novel introduces a different kind of complication with the revelation that
both Harry and Dumbledore are riven with doubt about their motivations and
decisions. This growth in moral and psychological complexity goes along with
an outstanding feature of these books — their ability to show their
characters growing up. Harry’s adolescent storminess and self-consciousness
(on a first date, “he was suddenly horribly aware of his arms and how stupid
they must look swinging at his sides”) are just the latest instance of
Rowling’s flair for convincingly following her central figures on their
journey to maturity.
Scenes where her characters face OWLs (Ordinary Wizarding Level exams) are
acute about the mentality of 15-year-olds and also deftly entertaining.
Humour is an especially appealing component of Rowling’s fictional world.
Neatly witty touches are constantly applied (wizards sealing parcels with
Spellotape). Among knockabout comedy and Just William-ish floutings of
authority, there’s sharp satire (that seems personally heartfelt) of media
excess as exhibited by Gilderoy Lockhart, the publicity-hungry author of the
autobiography Magical Me, or Rita Skeeter, a scandalmongering journalist.
At the opposite extreme are eerily symbolic elements such as The Mirror of
Erised, which entrances people into paralysis by tantalisingly reflecting
their most unattainable desires. Adding a particularly fine chill to the
later novels are the Dementors, with their clammy, rotting grey hands and
empty eye-sockets. Sucking hope and happiness away and leaving only
miserable memories, they aren’t merely guards of the wizard prison, Azkaban,
but grim spectres of depression.
Rowling stocks her broad and varied fictional world with a cornucopia of
detail — as is vividly evident in the spread of commodities available in it.
Weird and funny specimens of inventiveness are on display: collapsible
cauldrons, colour-coded owls for mail delivery and confectionery such as
Bott’s Every-Flavour Beans (tastes range from chocolate and marmalade to
spinach, liver, tripe and earwax). Among the merchandise on offer in one
emporium, along with Frog Spawn Soap and Hiccough Sweets, are Nose-Biting
Teacups. Anyone sniffy about Rowling’s remarkable achievement should be
slipped one of them immediately.
HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX by J K Rowling
Bloomsbury £16.99 pp766
