The maturation of the mandrake plants in the background of the story is the funniest thing in the book. I love every update we get about them. I worked at a Harry Potter exhibition right after college, the touring one with props and costumes from the movies, and the mandrakes were my favorite prop. They are cranky babies who scream until people die! I love it.
Anyway…
I realize now how ridiculous it was that I spent half of the last newsletter talking about blood, and didn’t even connect it to the idea of the Heir of Slytherin—but I didn’t quite make the connection myself until now. I’m increasingly thinking of this book as the mirror of Half-Blood Prince in its fixation on secrecy and lineage—but we’ll see how that idea holds up when we get there (someone remind me if I forget). For now, we have yet another inheritance: Harry’s Parselmouth ability, which everyone considers confirmation that he is indeed the Heir of Slytherin. It’s interesting that what wipes away this black mark carried in his blood is, ultimately, friendship: the crowd of Hufflepuffs who were most openly suspicious of him apologize and declare him innocent because they know he would never hurt Hermione. Harry really does have terrible luck with the petrifications up to that point, though, and no one can entirely blame the Hufflepuffs for noticing the obvious pattern that Harry knew—and indeed, had had some kind of public run-in with—everyone who had been petrified before that time.
This is an action packed section, beginning with the Quidditch match at the end of Chapter 10, and barreling straight through the students’ first try at dueling, using the Polyjuice Potion, Harry becoming a pariah… amidst all this, his encounter with Riddle’s diary (confusingly, clearly ‘diary’ in the British sense of a planner or datebook—I wonder why ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ had to go for American readers, but that was fine?) seems like a passing blip, the fact of the journal itself quickly overtaken by what he learns from it—that is, the reason for Hagrid’s expulsion. Interestingly, Riddle is repeatedly compared to Percy Weasley, who also has been popping up with surprising frequency in this book compared to the first, a sort of background irritant who on the one hand is never defined beyond being a rules-obsessed prig, but on the other, really seems to be the only brother bothering to look out for poor Ginny at all. (I’m an unabashed Percy Fan at the moment, because I definitely would have turned out exactly like him if I’d grown up in the Weasley family.)
And with Hagrid, we get our next face-to-face encounter with the Ministry of Magic—indeed, with the Minister himself. And he is… useless. There’s some hope earlier in this section that the scales of justice will at last be balanced: they find out Arthur’s been fined for the incident with the car, but Ron eagerly plans to pass a tip along to his dad about Lucius Malfoy’s hidden store of Dark Arts paraphernalia. But then in comes Lucius Malfoy, very not arrested, and still with the power to oust Dumbledore in spite of Cornelius Fudge’s objections. Fudge is explicit that he’s arresting Hagrid just to be seen to be doing something, and we learn very shortly thereafter that Hagrid is innocent anyway. The Ministry looks feeble and easily swayed by money and power, more interested in gesture—sending Harry a scolding letter back in Chapter 2, packing Hagrid off to Azkaban—than in justice through finding out what actually happened with Harry, or sending someone to investigate the Chamber of Secrets.
However, Harry is explicitly not on the road to being a cop just yet. He’s openly horrified by the Ministry’s conduct towards Hagrid. Told to choose his classes for the next year, he’s at a loss. Percy Weasley (there he is again!) counsels him to choose based on what he wants to become when he graduates, but Harry has no idea what that is. The description of him and Dean Thomas, another Muggle-born, essentially choosing their courses at random really suggests that Hogwarts is strangely ill-equipped for dealing with students from Muggle backgrounds, despite the fact that they have clearly been around forever. Then again, perhaps that’s by design. The board of governors of Hogwarts are evidently a pack of bigots, or people cowardly and complacent enough to just go along with the presence of open bigots like Malfoy. None of the structures of power we encounter can be trusted—except, of course, the now-absent Dumbledore.
Next time: Chapters 16-18 and a summation.