DID YOU GET YOURS?

For Famous Young Wizard, a Darker Turn (MICHIKO KAKUTANI, June 21, 2003, NY Times)

A considerably darker, more psychological book than its predecessors, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" occupies the same emotional and storytelling place in the Potter series as "The Empire Strikes Back" held in the first "Star Wars" trilogy. It provides a sort of fulcrum for the series, marking Harry's emergence from boyhood, and his newfound knowledge that an ancient prophecy holds the secret to Voldemort's obsession with him and his family. [...]

Because Harry is often in an irritable mood and spends much of the opening chapters brooding about his problems, "The Order of the Phoenix" gets off to a somewhat ponderous start.

There is also less humor in these pages than in the earlier books, and fewer Quidditch games; magic has become less of an art and more of a means of war. The benevolent headmaster of Hogwarts, Dumbledore, is curiously absent - or distant - for large portions of the book, and so, for that matter, is Harry's Falstaffian friend, Hagrid, the school's gamekeeper. Instead, Harry and his pals, Ron and Hermione, must contend with the noxious omnipresence of Dolores Jane Umbridge, the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher and a government spy, who conceals beneath her fluffy pink cardigan the cold heart and bureaucratic soul of a Grand Inquisitor.

Harry finds himself subject to a series of alarming, Kafkaesque dreams - filled with long corridors and closed doors - while the grown-up members of the Order of the Phoenix, a secret society organized by Dumbledore to combat Lord Voldemort, find themselves battling incompetence, denial and cover-ups by the Ministry of Magic. Dread hovers over the novel, as everyone awaits the next move of He Who Must Not Be Named and ponders the loyalties of others, like Ron's brother Percy; Sirius's petulant house elf, Kreacher; and the perennially nasty Potions professor, Snape.

What Ms. Rowling is trying to do in the novel's first half is to delineate both the increasingly grim world in which her characters find themselves after the return of Lord Voldemort in the series' previous installment (Year 4: "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire") and the awkward emotional changes her characters are going through as they grow up, something rarely addressed by this sort of children's story, which usually leaves its heroes frozen in a single snapshot in time. The themes of self-sacrifice and betrayal sounded in previous volumes are amplified here. New light is shed on Harry's relationship with his awful Muggle (i.e., nonmagical) relatives the Dursleys, and as Ms. Rowling has said in recent interviews, a character close to Harry dies.

If the world were to end today, what would extraterrestrial archaeologists one day make of the tens of thousands of children with lightning bolts drawn on their foreheads from last night's book parties?

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-FEATURED AUTHOR: J.K. Rowling (NY Times Book Review)
-ARTICLE: Countdown in Times Sq.: 3-2-1, It's 870 More Pages of Potter (N.R. KLEINFIELD, June 21, 2003, NY Times) Posted by Orrin Judd at June 21, 2003 5:34 AM