Aug 13, 2003 03:10 AM
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(Updated Aug 13, 2003 03:12 AM)
Pity Harry Potter. He is not having a good year. Sent home just weeks after witnessing Voldemort's return and Cedric Diggory's murder, he is ambushed in his own neighborhood by two Dementors, sinister creatures that typically guard the wizards' prison Azkaban and otherwise serve the Ministry of Magic. Harry succeeds in driving them off-- only to be later sent a letter from the Ministry demanding that he appear at a hearing. If he is indeed found guilty of violating wizard law, he will, at the least, be expelled from Hogwarts, his beloved school.
And that's just in the first couple of chapters! Later on, Harry meets members of the titular Order of the Phoenix, a secret society of wizards and witches dedicated to protecting the wizarding world from the evil Lord Voldemort. The Order is several decades old, and some of its members are veterans of the first war against Voldemort. Some of the members, like Remus Lupin, Arthur Weasley, and Molly Weasley will be familiar to fans of the series, while others, like Nymphadora Tonks and Kingsley Shacklebolt, are new.
Harry and his friends soon find themselves embroiled in a two-front war, for the Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge refuses to believe that Voldemort has returned, and instead believes that Hogwarts' headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, is conspiring against him and using the Voldemort story to simply stir up trouble. Fudge sends one of his lackeys, Dolores Umbridge, to try to bring Hogwarts under tighter Ministry control. She is supposedly simply to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts, but she soon also becomes Hogwarts' High Inquisitor. As such, her main job is to silence any stories concerning Lord Voldemort. Obviously, this does not sit well with Harry, and he and she spend a good chunk of the book butting heads. Harry and Umbridge find themselves in a kind of arms race: every time she tries to clamp down on him, he figures out a way to wriggle out of it, or vice versa.
To compound Harry's woes, he is now in his fifth year, and therefore has to take the O.W.L. (Ordinary Wizarding Level) exams, which will determine both his education and career prospects. He also embarks on his very first romance with a girl named Cho Chang.
His friends also experience changes, and Neville Longbottom and Ginny Weasley are both given more to do. It's about time, too: those two had been stuck too long as klutzy comic relief and tagalong kid sister respectively. Ginny is even give a best friend, Luna Lovegood. The expansion of the cast and their roles fits with the expansion of Harry's perspective. In each book, he and the reader learn something new about the wizarding world. Goblet of Fire, for example, had introduced two new wizarding schools and several foreign wizards. Order of the Phoenix provides a look at wizard politics and government.
But not everything is gloom and doom. Rowling has a lot of fun describing the O.W.L s-- and the things that can go wrong when teen-age wizards are taking tests:
''On the whole Harry thought it went rather well.... though he wished he had not mixed up the incantations for Color-Change and Growth Charms so that the rat he was supposed to be turning orange swelled shockingly and was the size of a badger before Harry could rectify his mistake.... Ron had caused a dinner plate to mutate into a large mushroom and had no idea how it had happened.''
Similarly, Rowling describes the antics of the Weasley twins, wizards who find magic very useful for playing practical jokes. She also shows her usual penchant for wordplay, as in the various Latinate spell incantations, or in the occasional personal or place name. Grimmauld Place (grim old place) is an abandoned house that had once belonged to a family of evil wizards. The name Malfoy comes from the French ''mal foi'', which means ''bad faith'', and Umbridge is a variant spelling of ''umbrage'', which is a synonym for ''resentment.''
Newcomers to the world of Harry Potter should not start with this book. It's long and has a huge cast. Also, Rowling has basically dropped her habit of recapping events from the first four books. That's a good move, as the book is nearly 900 pages long as it is. It does mean that a novice is apt to find it confusing.
