I'm in the middle of reading The Order of the Phoenix. I find this one of the most difficult books to read that I have ever encountered.
J.K. had gotten us well-hooked by the time she wrote this, the fifth book in the series, and we have learned to care very deeply for her characters, especially Harry, Hermione and Ron.
So it's really tough to read a book where Harry in particular is so battered and abused, so isolated and alone, as this one. And J.K. pulls no punches. Not only does Harry suffer so badly in The Order of the Phoenix, she also makes sure he is very well aware of the unfairness of it all.
In North American football, we'd call it "piling on".
First, there are the Dursleys. Not only is Harry stuck in Little Whinging, alone with the a family of the worst kind of Muggles, he is also completely isolated from a wizarding world that he knows must be changing as a result of the return of Lord Voldemort.
And yet, for some reason, no one from that wizarding world is bothering to contact Harry or keep him informed.
Then come the Dementors, the revelation that Dumbledore has arranged to have Harry watched (without telling Harry about it), Harry's expulsion from and later re-instatement to Hogwarts and finally his rescue from Privet Drive. But he's not taken to his beloved second home, The Burrow; he's taken instead to a dingy row house in London that is completely foreign and unwelcoming.
Things don't get any easier. Harry finds out he has been undermined and attacked by the Ministry and the Daily Prophet, that he has been deliberately kept in the dark on what's going on with Voldemort, that his god-father is desperate and lonely and potentially no longer trustworthy to have Harry's best interests in mind, and that his mentor is completely avoiding him.
Things will be better when I get to Hogwarts, Harry tells himself.
Not so fast, young man. At Hogwarts, he comes face to face with the fact that known Death Eaters who are actively supporting Voldemort are still at large, their kids have been put into positions of authority over him at school, and the Ministry itself has installed its own operative into the school, seemingly for the sole purpose of torturing him both physically and psychologically.
Plus school work piles up, Hagrid is nowhere to be found and Snape is even more vile toward him than usual.
Yikes and yikes.
I'm nearly three-hundred pages in and I don't think Harry has gotten a single break yet. Even his Quidditch captain is furious with him for receiving unjust detentions and missing practices and now he has to worry about his friend Ron falling to pieces as Gryffindor's new keeper.
It's like Rowling sat down to write this book and thought: My characters, and my readers, are now old enough to deal with reality. In fact, they're old enough to deal with a world that is much more rotten than some people's reality.
And she doles misery out in massive proportions, especially to Harry.
It makes for a very, very difficult read. We suffer through every page with Harry and his friends. We experience the injuries and the injustices right along with him and we suffer with and for him.
It's an interesting choice by J.K., to be sure, to make us and her character suffer so. But, once the choice had been made, she certainly committed herself completely to it and wrote this book with an intensity that one rarely experiences in literature.
I find that I read The Order of the Phoenix very quickly, whenever I return to it, simply because I want to help Harry find a way out of all of this suffering as soon as possible.
It's a testament to Rowling's effectiveness as a writer, I think, and to her uncompromising dedication to making these books memorable.
No comments:
Post a Comment