Umbridge a Death Eater?

This will show you how really attentive a reader I am -- I just realized, as I re-read the first chapter of The Order of the Phoenix for the 20-somethingth time, that Dolores Umbridge sent the Dementors to Little Whinging to kill Harry Potter on that hot summer night.


She wasn't playing around. She took it upon herself, without any consultation with Cornelius Fudge or anyone else, to send the most heinous of magical creatures into Surrey to kill an innocent 15-year-old boy who had committed no crime but witness the rebirth of the Dark Lord and return to tell about it.


Woweee.


I mean, these Dementors meant business. They arrived, attacked and were ready to perform the Kiss on Dudley, an even more innocent bystander in all this, without wasting any time at all.


We only learn at the end of the novel that it was Umbridge who, on her own initiative, sent them to attack Harry but, in retrospect, this action says a great deal about this delightful lady.


She could not have known that Harry was so capable with the old Patronus Charm. We can't give her the benefit of the doubt by arguing that she sent the Dementors to force Harry to perform magic so that the Ministry would then have some grounds to snap his wand and expel him from Hogwarts.


She was trying to kill him.


Why? For upsetting Fudge? For making him look bad?


Is it possible that Umbridge is actually a Death Eater who is simply never identified as such? That she is acting on the Dark Lord's orders, trying to kill the Boy Who Lived after Voldemort failed to do so in the graveyard?


If she isn't a Death Eater, Doesn't her decision to try to have the Dementors kill Harry seem like a bit of an over-reaction under the circumstances? To kill Harry just because he represents the only real evidence available that Voldemort has returned?

In real life, the Dursleys would be considered child abusers

A scary story appeared today on the CBC News website (cbc.ca) on May 30, 2014 under the headline: 

London, Ont., couple charged after boy, 10, found locked in 'squalid' house

Boy's aunt and uncle face charges of forcible confinement

For fans of Harry Potter, the story sounds eerily familiar:

A couple in London, Ont., face charges of forcible confinement and failing to provide the necessaries of life after their 10-year-old nephew was found malnourished and locked in a bedroom of a house that police describe as "filthy" and "squalid." Police said they found the boy locked in a bedroom that has an ensuite bathroom. Police believe the boy had been confined there for 18 months to two years. The boy, who police say was underweight and suffering from malnutrition, was taken to hospital. He has since been released from hospital and is in the care of the Children's Aid Society. The couple facing charges have a biological child who was also living in the house at the time. That child, whose age and gender have not been released, is also now in the care of the CAS. Police said there is no evidence that the couple's biological child was confined inside the house.

How often was Harry left locked in his tiny bedroom by his uncle and aunt, with only short breaks to go to the bathroom and with only the most basic of meals provided through a flap in the door, while his cousin Dudley enjoyed complete freedom?

Now, granted, Harry was only confined for a couple of days at a time, not for 18-24 months like the poor child in the news story but, when you think about it, locking a child in a bedroom for any extended period of time is abuse and a pretty serious offense.

It's a wonder none of the neighbours in Little Whinging ever called the authorities on Vernon and Petunia Dursley!

A brutal, brutal experience

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.