Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Audio CD)

As his fifth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry approaches, 15-year-old Harry Potter is in full-blown adolescence, complete with regular outbursts of rage, a nearly debilitating crush, and the blooming of a powerful sense of rebellion. It's been yet another infuriating and boring summer with the despicable Dursleys, this time with minimal contact from our hero's non-Muggle friends from school. Harry is feeling especially edgy at the lack of news from the magic world, wondering when the freshly revived evil Lord Voldemort will strike. Returning to Hogwarts will be a relief...or will it?

The fifth book in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series follows the darkest year yet for our young wizard, who finds himself knocked down a peg or three after the events of last year. Somehow, over the summer, gossip (usually traced back to the magic world's newspaper, the Daily Prophet) has turned Harry's tragic and heroic encounter with Voldemort at the Triwizard Tournament into an excuse to ridicule and discount the teen. Even Professor Dumbledore, headmaster of the school, has come under scrutiny by the Ministry of Magic, which refuses to officially acknowledge the terrifying truth: that Voldemort is back. Enter a particularly loathsome new character: the toad-like and simpering ("hem, hem") Dolores Umbridge, senior undersecretary to the Minister of Magic, who takes over the vacant position of Defense Against Dark Arts teacher--and in no time manages to become the High Inquisitor of Hogwarts, as well. Life isn't getting any easier for Harry Potter. With an overwhelming course load as the fifth years prepare for their Ordinary Wizarding Levels examinations (O.W.L.s), devastating changes in the Gryffindor Quidditch team lineup, vivid dreams about long hallways and closed doors, and increasing pain in his lightning-shaped scar, Harry's resilience is sorely tested.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, more than any of the four previous novels in the series, is a coming-of-age story. Harry faces the thorny transition into adulthood, when adult heroes are revealed to be fallible, and matters that seemed black and white suddenly come out in shades of gray. Gone is the wide-eyed innocent, the whiz kid of Philosopher's Stone. Here we have an adolescent who's sometimes sullen, often confused (especially about girls), and always self-questioning. Confronting death again, as well as a startling prophecy, Harry ends his year at Hogwarts exhausted and pensive. Readers, on the other hand, will be energized as they enter yet again the long waiting period for the next title in the marvelous, magical series. (Ages 9 and older) --Emilie Coulter

The problem with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth volume in Rowling's boy wizard series, is that it is simply too long. Rowling teases her readers for over 600 pages, setting the stage, as it were, for a fabulous final 150 pages that rocket beautifully to an as-always satisfying conclusion/cliffhanger, but to have to make one's way through all the detritus that she asks readers to wade through before the story really gets moving is just not on. Surely at this point in the sequence, Rowling could skip the tedious verbiage that comes with recounting Harry's summers with his odious relatives, the Dursleys, and some, not all, of the day-to-day details of life at Hogwarts. When Rowling concentrates on the story, she truly has the ability to transport her readers into a magical imaginative world but it's becoming obvious that what J.K. Rowling is desperately in need of is a good editor and she's clearly being let down by the major houses that publish her.
What's happening to Harry? After another nasty series of Dursley attacks, he's attacked by those soul-sucking ghouls that readers were introduced to in The Prisoner of Azkaban, the deadly dementors. Whisked away by magical means, he finds himself in a hidden house in central London, the crumbling home of his godfather, Sirius Black. There Harry is reunited with Ron and Hermione as well as some old and familiar faces—the Weasley clan (though sans Percy who has left the fold and taken up digs with the ucky Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge), Mad-Eye Moody and our old friend Lupin. Put on trial for using magic to defeat the Dementors, Dumbledore, as per usual, rescues Harry and it's off to Hogwarts.
Of course, the storyline is propelled forwards by the on-going return of You-Know-Who, aka He Who Must Not Be Named, aka the Dark Lord, Voldemart and his fiendish Death Eaters, and Dumbledore has been busy gathering together the Order of the Phoenix in order to monitor his nasty progress. What throws things off is that Fudge, fearing that Dumbledore wants his job, is so insecure that he won't take seriously the news that Voldemart is back and, worse luck for Harry, he particularly wants to make sure that nothing funny goes on at Hogwarts. Fudge makes his presence felt in the toad-like personage of Dolores Jane Umbridge, Defense Against the Dark Arts instructor who quickly becomes High Inquisitor at Hogwarts, and before the end of the book, its Headmistress too.
There are the requisite Quidditch matches (boring) and the various encounters with the colourful array of Hogwart facility members including Harry's buddy Snape—nasty as always—and there are the continuing antics of those mugs, the Weasley brothers, to get through yet again. Rowling likes the sound of her own authorial voice too much and should learn to cut to the chase. Readers have to sift through yet more boy-girl teen stuff as Harry might or might not be interested in Cho Chang—Rowling seems to have forgotten that Harry isn't the only teen in her trio but Ron and Hermione get much shorter shrift here.
What is interesting is Harry's connection with the Dark Lord. Rowling, for the most part, gives us some interesting plot twists here though it really is incredibly tedious for readers to be told about every flare-up of Harry's lightening bolt scar. His ability to see through Voldemart's eyes and his fascination/repulsion aspect of this ability is well-thought out and nicely described. It's interesting as is Harry's new insights into the relationship between his father and Snape. But Rowling seems unsure of how she wants us to feel about Harry—either that or she's trying to undermine our connection to the boy wizard because her focus on solipsistic striking out in anger whenever things aren't going his way seems hugely exaggerated in this book. Rowling, like Harry, seems unable to decide whether he should be a leader or an outcast, and his flare-ups don't really help us understand what is happening to Harry. Not really.
One thing about this book that does seem to indicate a move forward is Rowling's ability to control the book's humour element—there are still those bits of bathroom humour that we are treated to in each of the books—but here there is some very fine satire, especially in the portrait of the ever-hysterical Umbridge and her pink reign of terror. Rowling is to be specially commended on letting readers see that fine line between comedy and tragedy in the black humour elements of Order of the Phoenix. But readers will get the point that she's toad-like, JK, if you tell them once or twice.
That's the problem with the Order of the Phoenix—no one is editing JK. We don't need to be told that Umbridge is toad-like over and over and over again. We have a sense of Hogwarts and the routine there—do we really have to have the password repeated again and again to get up into the Gryffindor Common Room? We know this stuff. This is a series that takes place in more or less the same place in each and every book.
I won't tell you who dies, what happens to Harry and his nemesis Voldemart or whether or not the magical world has been split in two by the end of Order of the Phoenix. I don't believe in spoiling things for readers. But this is a book that will take perseverance. It's long, often unwieldy and certainly doesn't have the fine nuances that were part of Rowling's gimmick in the first three books. This is a better book than Goblet certainly—there isn't quite as much Quidditch, thanks be—but it's no Azkaban. I think it's the hype that is keeping readers interested in Harry Potter—not J.K. Rowling. It's good marketing and the movies that have caught young readers' attention. And that's okay if it will get them to read a 766-page book. But they do deserve better crafted fiction than Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I'm just not sure that J.K. Rowling is capable of giving it to them.
Jeffrey Canton (Books in Canada)
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.