Harry Potter, teen rebel

No, Hogwarts isn't a hotbed of drugs, smoking and sex (at least not yet). But J.K. Rowling's rich and huge new installment unmistakably brings our bespectacled hero into adolescence.

By Laura Miller

Jun 23, 2003 | It's official: Harry Potter has become a teenager. The chief sign of this isn't his newfound interest in his pretty classmate, Cho Chang, though there were stirrings of that in J.K. Rowling's fourth Potter novel, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," published three years ago, and there are further developments on the same front in the just-released "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." Sexual awakening may be what adults think coming of age is all about, but Rowling is still treating that subject with great delicacy, as befits a writer who has so many loyal readers under the age of 10. Instead, she focuses on what those readers probably consider the hallmark of adolescence, at least if they have older brothers and sisters: Her hero (and theirs) has become sullen and grumpy.

To be fair, Harry has good cause for this new moodiness: After foiling the Dark Lord Voldemort for the fourth time at the end of last term, he's spent yet another summer cooped up with his loathsome Muggle relatives, the Dursleys, nearly cut off from his friends for mysterious official reasons. And once he's reconnected with the magical world, he discovers that the Daily Prophet, the newspaper of record for wizards and witches, has for months been studded with little digs at him and Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Some members of the wizard community -- namely, the higher-ups over at the Ministry of Magic -- do not choose to believe that He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named is back. As the most visible heralds of this unpleasant news, Harry and Dumbledore are being subtly discredited.

Sure, this is unjust. But does Harry have to snap and rage at his best friends Ron and Hermione -- even at his faithful owl, Hedwig, for Heaven's sake? He does, because he has also arrived at that wretched moment when a young person is not fully ready for adult responsibility and yet no longer feels confident that the Powers That Be know what they're doing. He's 15, and wears his identity like a cheap, itchy, off-the-rack suit, too tight in some spots and hopelessly baggy in others. No wonder he can be so crabby. Yet as impossible as Harry sometimes seems in "Order of the Phoenix," he doesn't completely lose our sympathy. He's Harry, after all, and like family members all over the world, we learn to hold on until the squall passes and we've got our boy back again.

What we also have are the customary delights of Rowling's fiction: favorite characters and new additions, Hagrid's latest pet monster, Fred and George Weasley's newest pranks and their father's charming enthusiasm for Muggle tech. (He gets to take the Underground at one point.) Particularly ingenious is the "Room of Requirement," which can only be found when you really need it, a division of the Ministry of Magic known as the Department of Ludicrous Patents, and a tabloid touting its search for the Crumple-Horned Snorkack, a beast even wizards consider to be mythical.

In an interesting twist, this is also the book in which Harry proves himself decidedly British. If the early Potter novels were about finding one's courage, in "Phoenix," our hero has to figure out the value of self-control. The threats posed by temper and recklessness figure greatly in this book, not only for Harry but for his godfather, Sirius, as well. That's a rare notion in American pop culture, which is always exhorting us to follow our hearts, throw caution aside and let loose with our righteous anger. (Maybe that's why we seem like a nation of teenagers.) In Rowling's view, Harry has gained some power at last -- as his cousin Dudley has learned to his chagrin -- and that means understanding the importance of picking his battles.

If Harry has hit his awkward age, Rowling the writer has already passed through it. "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," her first long novel, was a somewhat lumpy affair; though ultimately winning, it suffered from her lack of experience with the form and her rush to meet her publisher's deadline. If that book was the work of a born storyteller still sorting out her technique, "Phoenix" is the smooth product of a natural at the top of her game. "Phoenix" is even longer than "Goblet," but it never idles or slackens. There's less reliance on startling tricks and reversals and more attention to the underlying organic structures of art. Rowling's hold on the steering wheel doesn't wobble, either. You can feel that she knows just what she's doing, weaving in the threads of the series' larger themes as they grow deeper and richer.

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