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Harry Potter and the delightful novel by the great and wonderful writer
''Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix'' |
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Reviewed by John Orr June 2003 When J.K. Rowling is someday asked to visit Stockholm to pick up the Nobel Prize for Literature, it won't be just because her Harry Potter novels managed to get millions of families reading together instead of rotting their brains out watching TV. It'll be because of the great humanist values of her books, which shine like beacons to the hearts of all those who embrace them. Children who absorb this delightful series will not grow up to be racists, ageists or sexists, they will not grow up to blindly trust government or other bureaucracies. They won't blindly follow leaders; they will watch the parkin' meters. Like children who loved ''Tom Sawyer'' and ''Huckleberry Finn,'' they will grow up to respect the humanity in us all. Case in point is Rowling's latest, ''Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,'' whose major conflict can be summed up as The Forces of Good vs. The Evils of Bureaucracy. Oh, sure, Lord Voldemort is lurking about, and eventually shows up for a great wizard's battle with Headmaster Dumbledore (who disses He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named by calling him "Tom"), but the main fight of ''The Order of the Phoenix'' is against the foolish pols and paper-shufflers of the Ministry of Magic, who refuse to believe that Voldemort is, in fact, back. When last we saw our boy hero, at the end of ''The Goblet of Fire,'' Voldemort had magically regained use of his own full body, instead of surviving as a mere parasite. Harry witnessed the event, narrowly escaped being killed, and managed to get back to Hogwarts to warn the world.
Especially the minister of magic, Cornelius Fudge, who has convinced himself that Dumbledore wants his job and is just stirring up trouble to get it. Harry asks his godfather, Sirius Black, '''How can he think Dumbledore would just make it all up -- that I'd make it all up?' '''Because accepting that Voldemort's back would mean trouble like the Ministry hasn't had to cope with for nearly 14 years,' said Sirius bitterly. 'Fudge just can't bring himself to face it. It's so much more comfortable to convince himself Dumbledore's lying to destabilize him.''' Fudge takes action against his imagined enemy by forcing Hogwarts to accept one of his staff, the toadlike Dolores Jane Umbridge, as this year's Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. Umbridge starts out horrid and gets worse, as new decrees come in from Fudge almost daily to give her more power, eventually naming her the High Inquisitor, who can fire other teachers and take away privileges from the students -- including quidditch! Before long, that aspect of the book begins to look very much like Germany in the 1930s, when the Nazi party was coming to power and doing all it could to limit education, and to abuse people it didn't find sufficiently Aryan: Jews, Romanies, blacks, intellectuals, the handicapped. The students are shocked to learn Umbridge plans to teach no practical magic, merely theory. Even Hermione Granger objects: ''How can Dumbledore have let this happen,'' she says, ''How can he let that terrible woman teach us? And in our O.W.L. year, too!'' (Ordinary Wizarding Levels are tests given to fifth-year students to help them plan their last two years of school and prepare for eventual careers in the magical world; worse than S.A.T.s, they've been known to drive witches and wizards to distraction.) But Sirius knows the answer: ''Fudge doesn't want you trained in combat ... he's afraid Dumbledore's ... forming his own private army, with which he will be able to take on the Ministry of Magic.'' Dumbledore, of course, is doing no such thing, but he has founded the Order of the Phoenix, an adults-only congregation, which is doing what it can to prepare for the battle he knows is coming with Voldemort. Harry, Hermione and their friend Ron Weasley, who have all fought Voldemort or his minions in the past, know they have to do something on their own to prepare Hogwarts students. And they do; read all about it in the book. It's great. In a time when our own, non-magical world is tottering on the edge of conflagration; when our own government, in a panic, creates the Patriot Act, which takes away Constitutional rights that had existed happily for 230 years, this book couldn't be more apt. And then there's the matter of Harry Potter himself, who in this book is quite the cranky teenager. But, who can blame him? By the end of ''The Goblet of Fire'' he had, essentially, saved all of humanity, for the fourth year in a row, and what happens to him? He gets shuffled back for another miserable summer with his nasty relatives, the Dursleys. When he finally is allowed to be with other wizards and witches again -- including Ron and Hermione -- he finds they have been together all summer, having a fine old time preparing to fight Voldemort. He shouts a lot. ''I SUPPOSE YOU'VE BEEN HAVING A REAL LAUGH, HAVEN'T YOU, ALL HOLED UP HERE TOGETHER!'' And, when the school-list letters arrive, he learns that both Ron and Hermione have been made prefects. And he has not. ''Cranky teenager'' doesn't begin to describe it. Why Dumbledore doesn't really talk with Harry, and why Harry has been kept out of the loop for so long, becomes one of the key mysteries of the book, and a significant part of Harry's character curve. Because it becomes clear that while Harry is another year older and has seen and done amazing things, he is still prideful to the point of stupidity, as Prof. Snape has pointed out every year. And while Snape, as always, is hateful to Harry, he still -- as always -- does things that are vital to Harry staying alive. And toward the end of this book, we realize that Harry needs those summers with the Dursleys not just for the reasons explained to him again and in more detail this time by Dumbledore, but because he will need to learn what Snape has to teach him if he is to survive what is coming in books six and seven. And we the readers? We have to survive the years it will take J.K. Rowling to write those last two books in this amazing, unprecedented series.
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