Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
J.K. Rowling
Bloomsbury. First published 2003.
Harry is an aggressive adolescent now, raging against his hormones, and this is the fattest and angriest of all the seven books. Whether climbing out of bed, or climbing into it, in a 'snarly-yarly voice' he 'shivers and scowls and grunts and growls at his bath and his boots and his toys'. The set pieces are all there - preliminary scenes in Privet Drive (spiced up this time by a Dementor attack), scenes at the Burrow, the journey to Hogwarts, Quidditich matches, the lessons, the usual antogonisms with Snape and Malfoy, and a sub-climactic showdown at the end of the book with the forces of evil. There are also elements particular to the book or newly introduced in it - the Order of the Phoenix (of which Harry is not a member, only a spectator), Dumbledore's Army, St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, the inside of the Ministry of Magic, Occlumency.
There are, as usual, two overlapping story lines. The larger apocalyptic struggle between Harry and Voldemort moves a couple of convoluted steps forward. The magical bureaucracy refuses to believe the Dark Lord is back, and targets Harry and Dumbledore for ridicule and discipline for insisting it is so. So we have a marvelously hate-able Dolores Umbridge displacing Dumbledore as Headmistress, Rita Skeeter splashing venomous ink about Harry's 'misdeeds' all over the Times-of-India like 'Daily Prophet', Hagrid recruiting, or trying to recruit, the giants in the good cause, the Prophecy, and the final fight in the Ministry.
The other story line is about Harry's own growing pains. He learns some unpleasant truths about his father, 'suffers' an immense crush on Cho Chang, begins to come to terms with his powers and his limitations, and has to face up to sudden and tragic loss.
In appreciating the brilliance of the intricate story telling, and always keeping in mind that the books were actually written for a young audience, it is easy to forgive the many obvious inconsistencies and manipulative tricks that keep the series from reaching the literary levels of, say, the Sherlock Holmes stories. The effect of having to soon cater to a cinematic audience is clear, and the magical curses and jinxes and hexes are now more like the light sabers and laser guns from Star Wars and the Terminator movies. Clearly it would not be possible to sustain the movies without the visual effects.
By the time she wrote this book, Rowling probably had a vast team of editors and researchers to tell her what to write and even, maybe, how to write it. The actual writing is most certainly hers, as probably are the numerous, immensely enjoyable throw-away jokes that scattered throughout the book. However, like all her books, the pace is quite slow in the beginning, and too fast towards the end. Being a large book, all the endless inventiveness rather bored me at the beginning, and I took nearly three weeks to go through it. Gauri, however, finished it in a day, and maybe I did too when I read it a decade ago.
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