Returning to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix after almost 20 years was an interesting experience. Since reading the novel when it was first published I have seen the film version several times, so it is that version that dominates my memory. Broadly speaking the film is true to the spirit of the book, and many of the cuts made to accommodate the running time are for the better.

Order of the Phoenix is in some ways misnamed (as of course are others in the series – Goblet of Fire is really not about the goblet at all, which makes one brief appearance and plays no functional role in the novel; the deathly hallows are a wild goose chase which bear little relevance to the struggle to track down the horcruxes. But I am getting ahead of myself!). It’s not really about the Order – neither Harry nor his schoolmates are members, and they are excluded from knowing much if anything about its wider membership, activities or purpose. Off-screen the order is no doubt busy recruiting and trying to disrupt the work of the Death Eaters, but we hear very little about this. Sticking firmly to Harry’s point of view, we instead focus for large parts of the novel on the fairly mundane minutiae of boarding school life – lessons and homework (incidentally, I noticed that each lesson follows the same pattern – the teacher sets a task, often by writing magically on the blackboard (no fancy whiteboards for Hogwarts!), the children then complete the task throughout the rest of the lesson either reading or practising a spell. The amount of teaching done is minimal – only Professor Binns, the ghostly History of Magic teacher, delivers lessons in the former of lectures, and these lessons are universally considered deathly dull.)

This is Harry’s year fifth year at Hogwarts in which he is due to sit his first set of exams, and for long periods this becomes a traditional school story in which the pressures of homework, avoiding fights with bullies and the first stirrings of teenage hormones combined to make Harry an extremely grumpy teenager. The point about this being a traditional boarding school story needs to be emphasised, because Rowling sticks rigidly to the conventions of a genre that many of her younger readers will be unaware of – the novels of Angela Brazil, Enid Blyton and others. You see this reflected in what Rowling doesn’t mention as much as what she does – the children never use the bathroom (despite their importance in plot terms within several of the novels) or shower at the start or end of the day; teenage romances are described very hesitantly, and while girls are allowed in the boy’s dormitories we find out in this novel that any boy trying to go up the stairs to the girls’ dorm finds the stairs transform into a slide – a little nod to the slippery-slip in the Faraway Tree?

The food served in the Great Hall is (I suspect) the diet of Rowling’s childhood – sausages and mash, liver and onions, pork chops, Yorkshire puddings and treacle tart. Not a pizza or pasta dish in sight. There’s even one incident where someone uses a dial-phone, which I am certain younger readers around the world would need to have explained to them but would look something like this. 

The opening of the novel is very similar to Deathly Hallows – Harry is collected by a group of Order of the Phoenix members who escort him on broomsticks to a safe location, in this case the Order headquarters in Grimauld Place. I always enjoyed Rowling’s ‘dad’ joke puns like this – Diagon Alley and Knockturn Alley being two other obvious examples – and Grimmauld Place is a fine addition to the Potterverse, the ancestral Black family home, haunted by the screeching portrait of Sirius’s mother and their horribly grumpy house elf, Kreacher. As in The Chamber of Secrets, Harry is accused of breaking wizarding laws by using magic while under-age – (the Ministry’s ability to detect the use of magic to a precise location, but not work out who did it, is one of those discrepancies that younger readers won’t care a damn about). This time the Ministry’s response is a lot less understanding, and the fascistic tendencies of the Wizarding World (we never hear about elections of any kind, for example) come to the fore. Harry is cleared at a full hearing of the Wizengamot, despite the obvious attempts to convict him. The Minister for Magic, Cornelius Fudge, refuses to believe Voldemort has returned to his powers, and is doing everything he can to undermine Harry and Dumbledore.

As part of this campaign Fudge appoints Dolores Umbridge to the role of teacher of Defence Against the Dark Arts. Umbridge is one of children’s literature great monsters, and I found the scenes were she tortures Harry extremely uncomfortable. Harry just accepts his ‘punishment’ in silence. I worry that this sent the wrong message to the millions of young children who saw him as a role model – children should be taught that if an adult hurts them they should tell someone in authority they trust, not just allow the abuser to continue and hurt others. It’s a rare misstep for Rowling who almost always teaches children to do the right thing in these stories. Fred and George’s resistance to Umbridge’s tyranny is one of the highlights of both the novel and the film, and shows that bullies can be stood up to.

Harry is having increasingly troubling dreams in which the connection between him and Voldemort is becoming all the more inescapable. While dreaming he sees the corridors of the Ministry of Magic through Voldemort’s eyes, and comes to realise these are not just dreams when an attack on Mr Weasley occurs in real-life as well as his dreams. Lessons with Snape in Occlumency, to try to close his mind to external intrusion, go disastrously badly, and are abandoned.

Phoenix is often described as the transition novel in the series, when Rowling stopped “writing the stories for children and start writing them for everyone, as Mark Twain did when he moved from Tom Sawyer to Huckleberry Finn and Lewis Carroll did when he moved from Alice in Wonderland to Through the Looking-Glass”. This quote is from the Stephen King review where he describes the “process — mostly subconscious — that began with volume 3 (Azkaban) and hit warp speed in volume 4 (Goblet of Fire). By the time we finish The Order of the Phoenix, with its extraordinary passages of fear and despair, the distinction between “children’s literature” and plain old “literature” has ceased to exist.”

In the same review King memorably described Order of the Phoenix as “The Catcher in the Rye, minus the dirty words and the drinking”. Certainly Harry is at his hormonally grumpiest in this novel, and that, combined with the novel’s length (it is the longest of the series, and that’s saying something) and the absence of any significant action for large parts of the school year, means it drags at some points. This is all forgotten in the novel’s extraordinary climax, in which all the elements Rowling has been putting into place during the slow build up finally pay off. The battle scenes in the Department of Mysteries, sadly truncated in the film version, end in tragedy. In many ways this has been a wasted year – the prophecy is not that important in the wizarding war, certainly not a weapon as it is described at several points, and most readers will wonder what Voldemort has been up to since coming back to life at the end of Goblet. The final scenes of the novel are anti-climatic, with a return to the Dursley’s and a conspicuous absence of any counselling for a clearly traumatised Harry and friends.

It’s important to always remember these are novels written principally for children. Rowling chose – subconsciously or otherwise – to age the novel with her readers and her characters, meaning that at moments there is a tension between her story-writing instincts – to increase the tension and horror in the novel – and the setting. Magic can always be invoked to make any problem disappear (where are the time turners when you need them!) so when magic finally proves futile, and a good shotgun or pistol would be much more effective, the suspension of disbelief comes under increasing pressure. There is much for younger (say 8-12) readers here, moments of slapstick and silliness (Flitwick is often the target of these jokes, and the novel also sees the introduction of the wonderful Luna Lovegood) but the darkness is closing in, and there is worse to come.