That Old Black Magic

In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Scholastic; 870 pages), the sinister Potions teacher Severus Snape gives Harry a lesson in Occlumency, the art of hiding one’s thoughts from magical prying. “Only Muggles talk of ‘mind reading,'” Snape sneers. “The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure … The mind is a complex and many-layered thing, Potter …” As usual, Snape is right, and in Phoenix Harry’s mind becomes quite a bit more complex–and he acquires a few new layers too.

There is nothing a reviewer could write that would stop a Harry Potter fan from reading Phoenix. Conversely, there is nothing a reviewer could say, short of an Imperius Curse, to persuade a nonfan to read it. (Book critics know much of the Dark Arts but not that much.) The Hogwarts Express is here, and you can either lie down on the tracks or get on board. If you choose the latter course, you’re in for a thoroughly satisfying ride. Just when we might have expected author J.K. Rowling’s considerable imaginative energies to flag–this is the fifth book of a projected seven-volume series–she has hit peak form and is gaining speed.

Rowling knows better than to fix what ain’t broke, and Phoenix begins as the previous books have: the long, hot summer, the hopelessly unmagical, unforgivably bourgeois Dursleys, the longed-for magical summons, the hasty packing and finally–bliss–Platform 9 3/4 and on to another year at Hogwarts. But a lot has changed. Death, which was always part of the subtext of Rowling’s story, burst out into the open in the previous novel, and the atmosphere in Phoenix has darkened accordingly. Voldemort is back, and Hogwarts’ sage headmaster Aldus Dumbledore has organized some of the wizarding world’s heavy hitters–your Mad-Eye Moody, your Remus Lupin–into an informal league called the Order of the Phoenix to oppose the evil wizard and his followers.

Harry has changed too. Rowling could have pussyfooted around the fact that he is now fully 15 years old, but instead she gamely flings Harry into adolescence: he’s physically bigger now but also angrier and more sarcastic, suspicious of his elders and quick to take offense even with his best friends, Ron and Hermione.

The struggle between good and evil is the thundering bass line of the plot, but above it we get the familiar delights of another Quidditch season and the schoolboy angst of the upcoming Ordinary Wizarding Levels (the magical equivalent of the SAT) and the arrival of a female Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. What’s more, along with death, sex made its first appearance in Goblet of Fire (those veelas! that Cho Chang!), and Harry–well, let’s just say again that he’s not a kid any more. And as always, there are glorious glimpses of the wider wizarding world. When Harry visits Mr. Weasley’s offices at the Ministry of Magic, he’s treated to the greatest elevator ride since Willy Wonka, an adventure he shares with a fire-breathing chicken and a flock of bewitched purple paper airplanes, official Ministry memos en route to their recipients. “Level three, Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes …”

In case anybody cares, yes, Draco Malfoy is still a cardboard villain who talks as if he’s twiddling his mustachio. Yes, the Sorting Hat sings another embarrassingly lame song (Rowling, who has learned so much from Tolkien, should have learned to stay away from poetry). But Rowling does so much right that it’s churlish to dwell on her minor missteps. (O.K., one more: Dobby still talks like Jar Jar Binks.) She has shed the clumsy devices–the impostors and the secret identities–that marred the shape of some of the earlier books. Her prose, always a serviceable, unshowy instrument, is stronger and more confident, and she has become a virtuoso plotter, a master at snappy pacing, able to stun and surprise at will.

But what really makes the Harry Potter series great is its dual nature. It’s a fantasy wrapped around a nightmare, an unreal, escapist fiction with an icy core of emotional pain that is very real. In Phoenix, Rowling even kills off a major character, one of the people Harry needs most.

The Harry Potter we meet in Phoenix is a darker, more volatile Harry, and it’s not just adolescent petulance. Harry is showing the mental scars of having been hunted and harried for four straight years, and the rage and fear he feels will strike a chord with any reader, adult or child. “You don’t know what it’s like!” he shrieks at Ron and Hermione. “You–neither of you–you’ve never had to face him, have you?” No, they don’t know what it’s like. But we do.