the three-year summer
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Ch. 1-6
I sent a small update on Friday, please read it here if you missed it.
As I mentioned last time, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out in 2000, while Order of the Phoenix came out in 2003. Potter fandom called this period the Three-Year Summer. It was the longest gap in publication in the series (which is actually shocking?? good job JKR). Fanfiction flourished, and the sheer amount of time for speculation—plus the burgeoning internet venues for communities to gather to share it—meant that this book was forced to contend with very different expectations, differently formed and expressed, than any that had come before.
I remember vividly how surprised and annoyed people were to return after the three-year summer to find Harry a sullen teenager, “all-caps Harry.” But reading the books straight through now, it feels like such a natural response. The first chapter begins in stifling heat, and the subsequent chapters in this section all deal with tiny, enclosed spaces: the long scene in the Dursleys’ kitchen; Harry’s locked bedroom; 12 Grimmauld Place, crammed between two other flats; the narrow, claustrophobic house itself, stuffed with old crap and with too many people inside. The world grew so large in Goblet of Fire, and now it has been forced back down to size, Harry shoved into a childhood space in which he no longer fits, until an explosion becomes inevitable.
He’s paralleled very directly with Sirius, who is likewise trapped back in his childhood home, one that seems to have been as hateful and abusive (emotionally, if not physically) as Harry’s. Sirius’s behavior, too, is seen as irrational and immature by other members of the Order, particularly Mrs. Weasley, but his simmering rage paired with Harry’s outbursts asks us to read them both on the same terms. It’s not just being kept out of the loop, or just having major decisions made on their behalf, or just lurking fear of permanent exile from the wizarding world, or just being trapped all summer with reminders of neglect and abuse they thought they’d escaped: it’s a combination of all of these things that would push anyone, man or boy, to a breaking point (and certainly a man who was in prison for a decade and thus might not be expected to have the most well-developed emotional coping mechanisms). It’s a combination that no one else around them can entirely understand.
Sirius’s description of his family’s loyalties makes explicit an undercurrent that has long been present in the books: there were plenty of people who didn’t support Voldemort, but fundamentally agreed with him.
“[The Blacks] weren’t alone, either, there were quite a few people, before Voldemort showed his true colors, who thought he had the right idea about things… they got cold feet when they saw what he was prepared to do to get power, though. But I bet my parents thought Regulus was a right little hero for joining up at first.”
Until now, wizards have existed on a very clear binary: prejudiced Dark Wizards like the Malfoys also directly supported Voldemort, while Good Wizards fought against him. Bad Wizards had to lie to get back into society after the war, and Good Wizards accept the lies but continue to view the liars with suspicion. Now we see there is a vast middle ground, the position that Dumbledore implied Fudge holds at the end of the previous book. It’s sort of impossible not to draw the comparison between today’s far-right movements and the more traditional conservatives that suddenly object to their party’s racist, sexist, xenophobic politics when spoken with the blunt crassness of a Johnson or a Trump: the problem isn’t what they’re saying, it’s how. So it is with the Blacks, with Fudge, and one suspects, with a hefty portion of the wizarding world. It’s difficult to imagine how the strictness of the Statute of Secrecy could have endured in a culture that on the whole genuinely respected Muggles and saw them as equals. It seems clear now that the extreme secrecy perhaps isn’t (entirely) an illogical plot-hole, but indicative of a deep and enduring strain of prejudice in the culture at large.
Meanwhile, the Ministry’s absurd regulations about out-of-school magic use strike again, once again maddening in their arbitrary nature and unwillingness to take circumstances into account. It’s really weird that the government gets to control who gets expelled from school, but I guess it makes sense in a society as cloistered as the wizarding world. Someone who can’t be trusted to exercise their magic abilities safely and (apparently more importantly) secretly is theoretically a danger to everyone, and thus the government’s business. Given that Harry has broken (or been accused of breaking) the Statute of Secrecy three times in four years, it doesn’t seem like a super sustainable system.
It also seems like a rule with such dire automatic consequences ought to require a little more investigation in cases like Harry’s, where his first strike wasn’t even actually his doing. But that’s probably not exactly what’s going on here. It’s implied, through Mrs Figg’s description of the surveillance Harry has been under, that Dumbledore feared the Ministry was trying to entrap Harry and possibly hoping for an excuse to expel him. Hermione’s description of the media apparatus that has been deployed to discredit him in advance—before he can go on record about his experience with Voldemort, I assume—feels spot-on. Everything in the wizarding world is just way too interconnected, way too tied up in the Ministry (which is apparently led by an unelected official!). There are no independent schools, no independent press, not even an independent court system. And Harry is beginning to see exactly why that is very, very bad.
Next time: Chapters 6-13.