Harry Potter, teen rebel

Notice I didn't say "darker," as plenty of critics already have and more no doubt will. Yes, someone close to Harry does die in this book, and a few other troubling things occur. Harry is growing up, which means he's coming to see the world and the people who inhabit it -- including himself -- as more complicated than he ever imagined. Sometimes that means finding darkness where you least expect it, but it also means that virtue, strength and tenderness turn up in the most unlikely places, too. Great kids' fantasy novelists know that if childhood is an adventurous quest, then adulthood is its goal, and there's no real tragedy to getting there -- unless you think children are precious dolls that need to be kept in a bell jar, untouched by life.

The people who do believe that sort of thing may be well-intentioned, but they can also be wolves in sheep's clothing, as is the case with Dolores Umbridge, the villain in this particular go-round. Because Voldemort, the series' Big Bad, tends to stay behind the scenes, each Potter novel has a smaller antagonist who can be defeated by book's end. With the aptly-named Umbridge -- an educational "reformer" and agent of the Ministry of Magic, sent to wrest control of Hogwarts away from Dumbledore -- Rowling has created her best bad guy yet.

A middle-aged lady bureaucrat with a concealed sadistic streak, Umbridge wears pink fluffy cardigans, collects commemorative plates with frolicking kittens painted on them and speaks in a soft, sweet voice. She takes over as this year's Defense Against the Dark Arts instructor (a position as perilous as drummer for Spinal Tap), with the intention of not teaching the students anything at all. Hers is "a carefully structured, theory-centered, Ministry-approved course of defensive magic," that consists only of reading an exceptionally dull textbook. When the children protest about not getting to actually practice the spells, she replies, "You have been introduced to spells that have been complex, inappropriate to your age group and potentially lethal. You have been frightened into believing that you are likely to meet Dark attacks every other day."

Of course, "Dark attacks" are scarcely unknown at Hogwarts, but as far as Umbridge is concerned they never happened and theory is all the students need to pass their exams, "which after all, is what school is all about." This would be hilarious if it weren't so scary. When Harry protests, he gets detention, for which Umbridge has designed a particularly nasty punishment, and slowly, by issuing countless decrees, Umbridge begins to take over the school. Though there's a typically fiendish Voldemortian scheme to be thwarted in "Phoenix," learning how to cope with the likes of Umbridge, an ordinary evil, is in some ways the most interesting challenge that Harry and his friends face during their fifth year.

Umbridge's presence also suggests that not all the foes Harry will confront as he matures will be in the glamorously infernal mold of Voldemort or spiteful nuisances like Draco Malfoy. She represents political evil, both as the classic tyrant figure of boarding-school fiction and an emblem of the growing fissures among the wizards themselves. Even Dumbledore has a thing or two to learn about the shortcomings of the magical world's social order in this novel.

Perhaps the most daring thing Rowling does in "Phoenix," though, concerns Harry's mother and father. Traveling from a child's idealized view of your parents to a more accurate one is surely one of the most difficult passages for any adolescent, and it's rendered even trickier here because that perfect image is all that the orphaned Harry has left. He discovers quite a few more significant truths in "Phoenix" -- about Voldemort, about himself, about Dumbledore and even about his unassuming young classmate, Neville Longbottom -- but what he learns about his father seems of an entirely different order. Rowling steps briefly out of the conventions of the genre to send a shiver of reality through her imaginary world. It's a sign that wherever she takes us next, we can't expect the old rules to apply anymore. But that, after all, is what growing up is all about.

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