Rowling didn’t take us in this direction either. I’m inclined to think that this is unfortunate because it would have been a better direction than the one she did take. But then, I happily concede that this is only one of a broad spectrum of directions that would have been better than the one that Rowling ended up taking us. Many of the others are probably every bit as good. Some are probably better.

But this one at least explores some kind of an explanation for one of the biggest Never Answered Questions in the Potterverse.

Evidently so far as Rowling is concerned, this is a question that has no answer. Or, at any rate, what she gives us instead of an answer sounds more to me like an excuse.

Since this is by way of being a companion piece to ‘The Changeling Hypothesis’ above, I have no intention of deleting it. Even though it is hosed. And for that matter, it isn’t conclusively hosed. For the most part Rowling simply ignored the issue. But don’t expect a lot of parity with DHs if you choose to read further.

My original prediction was, indeed, premature. It was also, post-HBP, obviously wrong. Or at least mostly so. I honestly thought that Rowling was playing the “redemption” card. Evidently she was doing nothing of the sort.

When the first draft of this piece was written (Easter weekend, 2005), I will admit there was no certainty that Ms. Rowling was going to choose to go here. But all of the major elements were in place for it, and given the most likely deployment of some of the basic types of elements already hinted at in the text of the series, as it then stood, it was difficult not to feel as if one was obliged to at least consider the possibility.

And, no, I was not talking about Snape’s true loyalties or whether Miss Granger was going to reappear at the end of the summer having finally gotten a decent haircut and a makeover, and proceed to give her fans a definitive answer to the ’shipping wars.

(Although I certainly had come to my final conclusion regarding the first of these questions, and the second was more or less definitively answered over the course of HBP after all.)

No, I was talking about the ultimate solution of the conflict between Harry Potter and the Dark Lord.

At that point, in some respects there seemed to be a good deal less to this problem than first met the eye, and there also seemed a great deal less real mystery regarding the ultimate resolution of this conflict than Rowling had attempted to inject. Was there any reader of this series, any reader at all, who seriously believed for a minute that JK Rowling would permit Voldemort to win?

Of course not. The one great uncertainty was not whether or not Harry would ultimately manage to defeat Lord Voldemort, but whether Harry would manage to defeat Lord Voldemort and survive. There had been endless debate on this issue from the first interview in which Mrs Rowling mischievously tossed out the suggestion that he might not.

Up to the end of Book 5 there was comparatively little in the text to say for certain whether she intended to take the question of Harry’s survival in one direction or the other. With HBP she introduced a very real possibility that his survival could quite legitimately be in doubt.

The commonest argument, that; “these are children’s books! She can’t kill the hero! Her young readers would be upset!” was a totally unconvincing line of defense. And useless for any kind of prediction.

Child heroes have died at the end of “their” stories before this, and with their deaths presented as the greatest of all possible victories, too, on a steadily recurring basis, and, to the best of my understanding, no one has burned Hans Christian Andersen in effigy for it yet. Nor is Andersen the only author to have made a habit of killing off the young viewpoint character of the story, or book, or series of books deliberately intended to be marketed to children at the end of the last installment (although Andersen is certainly the most consistent about doing it). It can be done, it has been done. The only question was whether or not Rowling would choose to do it too.

But by that particular point in the story arc; five books into a series of seven, it had to be admitted that while we were certainly still missing any number of details from the backstory, and the young hero still had several difficult life lessons yet to master before he would be ready for the final confrontation, the majority of the main puzzle pieces appeared to have probably already been turned over to us. The then-forthcoming ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ already had already a strong feel of being an “answer” book. By which I mean that it had the feel of being the book in which we would finally get a good many answers to questions that had already been asked. (After the event: boy howdy!)

And I thought that while Rowling might very well throw us still another variety of non-standard magic to which we had not yet been properly introduced, and that we would probably learn a bit more about the greater wizarding world, she wasn’t likely to be tossing us (the readers, that is, not necessarily Harry, the character) a whole lot of brand new concepts. We could all pretty well anticipate what direction she is likely to be taking us by that time.

****

Well, I obviously wasn’t as on-target in this estimation as I thought I was.

And that goes double, in spades, for DHs.

Particularly as regards the matter of new concepts. She did throw us some new ones in HBP and even more in DHs (not all of them, imho, necessary). And she took several matters into a number of totally unanticipated detours. Indeed, she completely discarded and dismissed any number of the elements that she had spent most of Book 5 putting into place, and hauled us off in a different direction entirely.

And then, in book 7, she did it again.

Which was the underlying reason for so much of the readers’ dissatisfaction with Book 6, and even more of the same for book 7. We thought we knew this story, and then she went and told us a different story and tried to pretend that it was the same one, when we could tell it isn’t.

I had also not anticipated that she would abruptly reverse several of the major underlying assumptions that she had been at great pains to foster over the first five books; nor that she would taunt us with the revelation that she had sold us a series of school stories about a teenage dropout.

But, back at that still fairly innocent point, it had seemed to me that she already shot herself in the foot if she really wanted to retain any mystery about the end of the series when she had exercised the sheer, amateurish bad taste of hinging her whole storyline on something as tacky as a Prophecy. She was inexperienced and unpublished when she did it, but she claims to have drafted out the whole outline for the whole series at that time, and that she has not materially departed from that outline, however many smaller details and events may have shifted about or changed (or expanded!) in the course of writing it.

Prophecies are such bloody *stupid* plot devices. And they generate stupid plots. Or they manage to exponentially dumb down plots that weren’t stupid to begin with. Anyone over the age of 20 who thinks that tossing a Prophecy into their story is a “cool” idea needs their head examined. Apart from the rare instances where the function of the Prophecy is to make a May game of everyone, or the even rarer instances where a Prophecy is made and everyone goes “Wibble, wibble, wibble,” and then drops the subject until the last chapter, and the story’s basically over and the Prophecy either came true or it didn’t, but no one really cares, the only thing I can ever recall seeing a Prophecy contribute to a storyline is a crude glossing over of lazy plotting.

Let’s face it; you cannot really squeeze a lot of ambiguity out of “...And either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives.”

That’s either/or, cookie. Writ large in letters of fire. Not both. And we already know that Voldemort is not going to win.

And in the event it turns out that it wasn’t even the truth. It wasn’t that neither could live while both survived, it was that neither could die while both survived. Or not so long as both of them survived in Harry.

And any attempt to inject additional interpretations into the statement usually appeared to be the kind of over-complex wankfest which may make for interesting mental exercises and word games, but are vanishingly unlikely to actually be deployed by an author who is exceedingly well aware that she needs to keep the principles of the story accessible to 9-year-olds.

Which, in the end, is pretty much what she gave us. After falsely raising our expectations to anticipate something more.

****

I have to grudgingly admit that without the bloody Prophecy, most of Riddle’s subsequent actions and motivations regarding Harry Potter become incomprehensible.

Mind you, I’ll have to say that I was relieved to learn in her website update of May 2005 that yes, she was playing ‘Macbeth’, and the damn Prophecy was supposed to be self-fulfilling. I guess if you are determined to “embrace the cheese” you might as well flaunt it.

And, in any event, in HBP she managed to toss a very large spanner into my assumptions regarding the whole either/or situation, too. She did a good job of making it look as though it may very well turn out that it would have to be “both” in order to permanently take out the Dark Lord.

****

However, none of the above tells us squat about how the conclusion was going to be brought about, or what was likely to be done about addressing the real problem threatening the continuing safety of the wizarding world.

Because by that time it ought to have been obvious to any reader that the biggest problem that the wizarding world had was not Voldemort. And getting rid of him was not going to solve it. To all appearances, Voldemorts are the result of the underlying problem. They are not the cause.

Tom Riddle was just exercising an opportunistic determination to take advantage of the situation. He himself was almost completely unrelated to any of it. He was a total outsider. In fact, he was an virtual non-sequiter.

In which case, what was Rowling’s point? I don’t understand the message that the lady was attempting to send. Something was being lost in translation, and I suspected that for all that we had been deliberately given the impression that we now knew all there was to know about the young Tom Riddle, we were still missing the crucial piece of information which would snap it all into focus and make it clear what we would have to do to deal with him.

Post-HBP it was also finally unmistakable to any reader that the wizarding world that Rowling presents is practically the antithesis of one of Elizabeth Goudge’s slightly-flawed little earthly paradises. This is emphatically not the hidden valley of ‘The Little White Horse’ with a villain who can simply be bought off by giving him what he really wants, and to which he has a perfectly valid claim.

Now that we’ve finally got a good look at it, it is glaringly evident that the whole wizarding government, and the society which supports it, is hopelessly corrupt.

And getting rid of Voldemort isn’t going to do a thing about that.

The whole British WW is a nasty little dystopia on close to the same general magnitude as the society depicted in Orwell’s ‘1984’, and while Rowling seemed determined to rub our noses in that fact, on every conceivable opportunity, she gave us absolutely no indication that she had any more intention of fixing any part of it than Orwell did.

I mean, really! What have we got here? This is a world that its government established by engaging in a partnership with Dementors in order to control its citizenry!

Hold that thought.

****

This is a society which is ruled by fear. In fact the wizarding “world” was *created* out of fear. It was a rational fear, to be sure, given western Europe in the throes of the Reformation, but nevertheless, its foundation was fear. And in 300 years that hasn’t changed one iota. The underlying motivation of the entire wizarding world is STILL fear. In fact the whole sorry lot clutches at its fears as if they were its only hope of order and salvation.

Not courage, not honor. Not cleverness or wisdom. Not even cunning and ambition, and certainly not loyalty and hard work. FEAR.

And that kind of atmosphere attracts predators. Voldemort and his Death Eaters are predators.

Voldemort and his followers prey on fear. Tom Riddle’s entire justification in life seems to be to create panic. He and his followers’ every action was calculated simply to make people afraid of them.

Even in DHs after the Ministry fell and they had taken control, they were not really running the Ministry. Established sympathetic-minded Ministry wonks like Umbridge were doing that, and running it to what were their own agendas. The DEs may have taken positions in the Ministry in expectation of future advancement. They would give the Ministry wonks a nudge here or there, often via an Imperioed puppet who was already in position, but they certainly didn’t hang up their masks and all settle down to actually run the government.

They specialize. Their sole occupation seems to be to wantonly inspire fear, and to cause pain — thereby creating more fear — and to harvest it. Very much as the Dementors themselves do. Up to DHs we never heard of any action undertaken by the Death Eaters which would enable them to do anything so sordid or pedestrian as to turn a profit. Indeed, more and more they come across as a self-supporting foundation exclusively dedicated to the manufacture and distribution of top-grade terror. Phobos & Demos Incorporated. Lord Voldemort, CEO. The European Union is their marketplace.

And frightened people do horrible things.

Particularly to anyone that can be identified as the Other.

Them. Not Us.

The Giants, one of the elder races, have been expelled and forced into a social system that is both unnatural to them, and is gradually destroying them. They now number less than one hundred, and from the general attitude of wizards, the sooner the last of them kill each other off the better. The Goblins, for all their recognized intelligence and skill are 2nd-class citizens. The House Elves are enslaved outright. The Centaurs, credited as being wiser than average, and the Merrows have both withdrawn behind their own barricades which they jealously guard, and with good cause, for they cannot reasonably expect any better treatment from wizards than the rest of the wizards’ “allies”. Any other magical race of Beings — nature spirits of various sorts for the most part — seem to live completely at the discretion of wizards. And for about the first hundred years or so of Seclusion many of the Muggle-born were largely abandoned to their fate amid the fields of alien corn. And over the 300 years that the wizarding world has existed, the whole situation has only become steadily worse. Producing an environment in which predators like the Death Eaters and their allies can flourish.

Clearly the “fatal flaw” was inherent in the foundation of this secret world and has only continued to perpetuate itself.

Ghod knows the Muggles of the Potterverse don’t exist in anything resembling an earthly paradise, either, but at least they didn’t make a formal pact with (a race of?) soul-sucking demons in order to establish what passes for a civil justice system.

And just what does pass for justice in the wizarding world? Where the Muggle’s Great Britain is (one assumes) founded upon a common-law system which presumes the innocence of the accused and all wrongdoing ideally must be proven by the State, in the wizarding world one is packed off to Azkaban without trial, often for no reason beyond that of expedience, or as a public gesture to enhance the Ministry’s image. Not only during wartime as Sirius Black, Stan Shunpike, and others experienced, but also in the middle of peacetime as Hagrid did, and even Albus Dumbledore could not gainsay it.

Indeed, it begins to read less as though the guilty are being consigned to prison for their crimes, than that the Ministry is identifying “expendables” for the purpose of “paying tiend”. And by DHs this was extended to apply to over a full quarter of the population.

I speculate that at the wizarding world’s inception, the wizarding leaders effectively made a pact with the Dementors. And, demon or Dementor, what does the bargaining chip in such a pact always traditionally consist of? What do such creatures want from humans?

****

The inception for this particular article was an essay posted in 2004 on the LiveJournal of a fan going by the name of no_remorse.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/no_remorse/37105.html

This essay knocked a few of my prior assumptions loose, and forcibly reminded me of some details that I’d been steadily either dismissing or overlooking. After the eventual release of HBP, it was reluctantly bourne in on me that my original assumptions were not necessarily wrong, and my epiphany likely to be illusory. But even if incorrect, the conclusion was still worth exploring.

And at least one component of that epiphany I still could not dismiss.

It finally, abruptly (and, I’ll admit, rather reluctantly) became evident to me that there was a good chance that the Dementors were not, as I had been assuming, merely the series’s nebulous nasties from Central Casting. Symbolically, the Dementors appeared to be the key to everything that is wrong about the wizarding world today, and which has probably been wrong with it from its beginning.

And the problem may be extended beyond the merely symbolic.

As has been pointed out in the text of the books, the Dementors are the “natural allies” of Dark Lords. And, in what appears to have been Rowling’s original intention, since its inception, the wizarding world seemed to have periodically been plagued with “Dark Lord” candidates. And I really don’t think that in the days before wizards cut themselves off from the wider “human” society, this was so likely to have been the case.

No. In the days that wizards were simply magical humans, the problem was Dark wizards, not Dark Lords. And the wizarding world has had ample experience in dealing with Dark wizards. Indeed, with HBP it became evident that the term “Dark wizard” in day-to-day usage, may mean nothing more impressive than the wizarding equivalent of felon, and is less indicative of the type of magic used by such a wizard than the fact that he makes a habit of considering himself above the law, and behaving accordingly.

But apparently the MoM just doesn’t send a team of Aurors out to shut down a potential Dark “Lord”. Not if their response to the former Tom Riddle is anything to go by. Somehow Dark Lords appear to be something that the wizarding world just does not have any kind of a handle on dealing with — which sends it into a gibbering panic.

Very much like the reaction of someone who cannot cast a Patronus when confronted by a Dementor, if you stop to think about it.

And whether Lord Voldemort is in the usual style of Dark Lords, or was redefining the term as he went along, he seems to have gone out of his way to reinvent himself as a Dementor surrogate. (Hold that thought. We will be taking a closer look at it before we are through.)

****

All of which leads one to belatedly wonder whether Dark Lords may indeed be something comparatively new on the block.

A separate wizarding “world” has only been around for some 300 years.

And, after all, if there is no separate wizarding world, then there will hardly be a tradition of magical megalomaniacs trying to rule it, will there? Unless the Potterverse, unlike our own, mostly parallel world has a history of Dark wizards attempting to rule the Muggle world. Which has not ever been suggested in canon, although it must have sometimes been the case, since this attitude is nothing more than the underlying philosophy of wizarding “supremacy”.

And just where are the Dementors in all of this? They seem to have made a bargain with the leaders of the wizarding world. But I don’t get the impression that striking an honorable bargain with anyone would be all that much in their style. They’ve got their allotted franchise in this new world, but is that likely to satisfy them? We keep hearing about all those Goblin rebellions (another group with its own franchise), but I suspect that an open rebellion isn’t much in the Dementors’ style, either. So what is?

When the Dementors were first brought onstage in PoA it was possible, even in the face of strong counter-suggestions, to regard them as mindless appetites kept firmly under Ministry control.

But Dumbeldore’s exhortation to Cornelius Fudge in GoF, that they would not continue to obey him if Voldemort returned, ought to have belatedly clued us in that they are probably not mindless — although it does raise the question of why Dumbledore would expect them not continue to obey the Ministry this time when by all accounts they had done so the last time. I cannot see the Dementors being awarded control of Azkaban prison by the Ministry if they had supported Voldemort in his first rise, and no one in canon has ever suggested that they did.

The Dementors have also been consistently described as “evil”. I do not think that true evil is likely to be completely mindless. It may have what amounts to a “mass mind”. It’s reasoning may be very basic. But it is usually capable of some form of reason. And it generally wants something. Usually dominance over everything that it interacts with.

The fact is that we do not know nearly as much about these creatures as we need to. In PoA we were told that Muggles cannot even see them, although they can feel their effect. On the face of it, this would suggest that they are native to the spirit plane. However, Rowling’s explanation posted on the official site regarding Squibs effectively tells us that Arabella Figg was lying when she claimed that Squibs can see Dementors, although it had already been made clear in canon that Squibs can usually see ghosts. And Filch can certainly see Peeves.

But in HBP we were finally told that the Dementors were breeding, which would suggest that they must be to at least some degree material Beings rather than purely Spirits.

If they breed, then it would seem logical to conclude that they can also die, for otherwise the world would be overrun with them. But we have no idea what would kill them. Even a Patronus, which Remus Lupin describes as a sort of “anti-dementor” only drives them away.

And just what is a Patronus, when it is at home? Lupin’s full definition goes: “— a guardian that acts as a shield between you and the dementor.”...“The Patronus is a kind of positive force, a projection of the very things that the dementor feeds upon — hope, happiness, the desire to survive — but it cannot feel despair, as real humans do, so the dementors can’t hurt it.”

He goes on to caution Harry that the incantation will only work if one is concentrating with all one’s might upon a single, very happy memory.

It’s true that over the course of the series we have gotten some exaggerated and wildly inaccurate statements from Remus Lupin, but we cannot count upon this being one of them. Or, certainly not intentionally.

Still, once examined, it certainly appears to be back-to-front. It is demonstrably not positive feelings that Dementors feed upon but negative ones. Anyone who is confronted by a Dementor will find himself overwhelmed by his own worst memories, to the exclusion of all else. That is what the Dementor has to be after, or otherwise it would hardly keep digging deeper and deeper into your subconscious to drag more of such memories out of you. Nor that coming up with a happy one would drive them away. If Dementors actually did feed upon happy memories you would expect them to cause their victims to generate those. It reads more as if the Dementors just throw the happy memories away. Like the bag that their crisps came in, and the Patronus is such a tough piece of plastic wrap that they cannot get it open. (I rather suspect that Dementors have no teeth.)

Yet, at the same time, it seems even harder to believe that the whole ww has been reading the situation back-to-front since time immemorial.

Maybe we are asking the wrong questions.

Just how long have there been Dementors?

And where did they come from in the first place?

But, regardless, it seems pretty clear that the Dementors cannot rule the wizarding world by themselves. Not directly. They are not willing to communicate well enough with other species to be able to control them in the way a ruler must. They only want to feed off people. (And besides, they are blind, only sensing the presence of others by tracking their emotions, which has to slow them down or put them at at least some disadvantage.)

But a Dark Lord proxy certainly could rule this world for them, in their stead, and for their benefit.

And perhaps they don’t just wait around for likely prospects to crop up by accident.

Maybe they stay on the alert for conditions which would allow them to try to create one.

****

When you stop and think of it, such conditions must necessarily be rare.

To begin with, they would hope to find a magical child of considerable inherent power. A low-powered wizard would hardly be able to get very far in World Domination™. Ideally, a higher than average degree of intelligence would also be wanted. The child would need the smarts to figure out a way to take control of the wizarding world after all. Or at least to be able to evade the authorities and to keep it stirred up.

Powerful children, even intelligent powerful children are not as uncommon as all that, but the Dementors may not really be able to evaluate a human infant for those qualities.

And Riddle was just a lucky catch.

Because what the Dementors really require is a *newborn* child, since one which has already formed attachments and taken the first steps toward normal human interactions would already be of no use to them, except as the source of a soul to devour.

Moreover, they need this hypothetical child to be without any established ties of affection which might protect him. For their purposes, the child should be absolutely alone in the world. Since for him to have formed even the most basic form of an attachment would give him something else to cling to. A “patron” as it were.

And it is also just about essential for their purposes for such a child to have fallen into Muggle hands. Otherwise their interference would be noted. Muggles, however, cannot see Dementors, are powerless against them, and cannot interfere.

Such a hypothesis might be developed into a rather interesting reason for why Salazar Slytherin mistrusted Muggle-borns, but we will not follow that particular siren’s song here. I’ll leave that one for the fanfic writers.

We know that the Dementors were never absolutely confined to Azkaban. They were the guards of the prison, not the prisoners. And while the MoM only rarely calls them away from the island, I don’t really think the MoM ever took much account of their actions whenever one of them went off to prowl through the Muggle world. The MoM is really concerned only with the wizarding world’s security. Muggles cannot see Dementors. Therefore the safety of the wizarding world is not being threatened by a Dementor roaming at large among Muggles. I think that in the Potterverse, the Dementors may have gone prowling through Muggle society on a fairly regular basis.

And what is likely to be the effect of a Dementor “just hanging around” in a child’s nursery? Muggles cannot see Dementors, but they certainly feel the effects of their proximity.

A child’s caretakers might be so affected that they never quite manage to develop much feeling at all for that little scrap, mightn’t they? And with a Dementor hovering about, the kid’s not going to be doing all that well either. He may never manage to develop the degree of confidence or trust to be able to try form any kind of attachment to his caretakers — or anyone else. An intelligent, unprotected, *highly magical* infant would be a positive gift to the Dementors, wouldn’t it?

Particularly once their tampering has rendered him incapable of comprehending the meaning or purpose of any human social contract.

Because once that particular opportunity is lost, it tends never to come around again. There is no making up for lost time.

Once the initial damage is done, the Dementors could probably safely withdraw and leave their unwitting “godchild” to recover his balance and develop like a cuckoo in the nest. And, if British, eventually that little cuckoo will be sent a Hogwarts letter.

Such a hypothesis would certainly account for what we were shown of the young Tom Riddle.

****

For that matter something along these lines might even account for the leeching of magic, and the profound failure of the will to live which effectively killed Tom’s mother, Merope. You certainly don’t get the impression that Merope Gaunt was likely to have been able to produce a Patronus, do you?

Indeed, how do we know that the crippling despair that Merope Riddle fell into after her husband left her didn’t eventually attract one. One which sensed that she bore young, which they could use. When she finally stumbled up the steps of that (Muggle) orphanage she might not have been alone.

For that matter, she may have already shown up on the Dementors’ radar, before young Tom was even an issue.

We have been told that Dementors inhabit the darkest, filthiest of places. Places of hopelessness and despair.

Sounds a lot like the House of Gaunt, doesn’t it?

Indeed, the Gaunt hovel was exactly the kind of place that would have made a Dementor feel right at home. Particularly when Morfin was living there by himself. Or perhaps, after Marvolo returned from Azkaban to find his daughter fled, leaving him on his own. He died there, at some point in the two and a half years before his son followed him home. The place was isolated enough to have made it unlikely that any of the Gaunts would have been able (or willing) to call for assistance if so confronted. One wonders whether the Dementors might have followed “one who got away”.

And from the situation in PoA, we know that if there is any one thing that really gets them riled up it is for someone to manage to get away from them.

Albus implies that Marvolo staved to death there in his hovel. From what we saw, at the end of GoF, someone who has been administered the Dementors’ Kiss is unlikely to be performing even such basic chores as cooking for and feeding themselves, are they?

****

Which opens another, somewhat uglier line of enquiry.

We know that Merope’s father and brother were hauled off to Azkaban in the summer of 1925 or thereabouts.

Was it just a team of Aurors who hauled them away, or did they get help from the Prison itself? After escaping from the enraged Gaunts, Bob Ogden would have certainly reported that they were NOT likely to “come quietly”.

Did one of the Dementor guards sniff around and spot that here was a third potential victim in an isolated place that no human is likely to be seeking out? A victim who was probably unable to defend herself?

By the time it glided back to settle down for a private snack, some weeks, or months, later, had the bird already flown?

It probably wouldn’t have liked that, at all.

The Ministry, like I say, doesn’t seem to raise much of a fuss about a Dementor doing an occasional sweep through Muggle districts so long as it is discrete about it and leaves wizards alone.

Did that particular Dementor make a point of doing the occasional sweep every few months to see if it could pick up the girl’s trail? Did it work its way gradually south from the Yorkshire/Lancashire area where the Riddle house and the Gaunt hovel are situated until it finally reached London, and hit pay dirt?

Because I’m three-quarters convinced that Merope was not unaccompanied when she finally staggered up the steps of that orphanage. And her lapsing into total silence for her final hour of life, after only giving her child a name and hoping he would resemble his papa sounds highly suspicious to me. In fact, it sounds far too much like our last glimpse of Barty Crouch Jr.

And if the Dementors know anything about their effect on the very young, might that one have decided to pay further visits? I really do think that Tom’s exaggerated terror of death (and of the dark) is suspicious in itself.

And, for that matter, what do you suppose would be the effect of prenatal exposure to Dementors over the last trimester of a pregnancy? That may need to be considered in the equation as well.

****

And what of Mrs Cole’s description? “He was a funny baby. Hardly ever cried, you know. And then, when he got a little older, he was... odd.”

Hardly ever cried? What was he doing then? Lying there, silent and terrified? What a horrible thought! I should think such a child would turn out... odd.

And even in a best-case scenario, a lack of crying probably meant that he did not get the attention he needed from the staff, who, from what we were able to see of the place, were generally harried and run off their legs. A child who did not cry would have been passed over in favor of one who did.

****

But the essential wrongness of the whole wizarding world’s situation, as it stands, is just too complex and too deeply-rooted for any single act from “our young hero” to be able to set it all right, all at once.

Dying for this world will not save it.

So what will?

And at the point that this question is raised we need to step back and take a long clear look at just what kind of story we are dealing with, and what sort of writer its author is, or at least what kind of writer she claims to be.

On this matter we get a fairly wide latitude of choice. Rowling has flip-flopped back and forth over the years in her statements as to what she is trying to accomplish in this series. At some periods over the past decade she has appeared to be attempting to attain some degree of depth. For the final two books, however, she appears to be waving about the shallowest of possible answers and “embracing the cheese”.

My own instincts, up to this point, i.e., Easter 2005, had been to read the series as a single, fairly long, rather complex detective adventure. And the structure of the first four books certainly constitute an invitation to do so. Each of the first four segments of the story was structured around an internal mystery in the classic “whodunit” style. Each of these internal mysteries had an unquestionable villain of that specific piece, and in every case both the mystery and the identity of the villain had been wrapped tidily up by the end of the book.

With OotP we rather abruptly found ourselves in different circumstances altogether, and the result was very uncomfortable. There was not a trace of the whodunit about that plot line.

We knew who the villain was before cracking open the book. The puzzle wasn’t a question of finding the answer to some local mystery du jour, it was all wrapped up in the difficulty of getting reliable “news from the front”; figuring out what the hell was going on out in the wider world where there was nothing that the protagonist could do anything about.

And what I contend was probably going on wasn’t even revealed at the end! Dumbledore and his Order were almost certainly running a scam wrapped around the archived record of the Trelawney Prophecy in order to flush Voldemort out of hiding where he could be seen by so many people that the Ministry would have to admit that he was back. Harry, with his direct connection to Voldemort was the side’s weak link and had to be kept, deliberately, in the dark in order to protect their mission.

And this does certainly appear to have been the case, but we never got a full confirmation.

There was no apparent or ultimately revealed ambiguity about who was on any side throughout the entire school year. With the continuing exception of Severus Snape. The lines were all drawn from the beginning and there were no surprises. And, once the initial Dementor attack in Little Whingeing was thwarted and Harry had escaped being expelled from school, no one but Dolores Umbridge appeared to take any further real interest in persecuting him. Harry had no legitimate part of any of Book 5’s real action. Furthermore, in the three-way opposition between Dumbledore’s Order, the Death Eaters and the Ministry, it ultimately didn’t even matter whether or not Madam Umbridge knew she was furthering Voldemort’s aims.

Year 5 was Dumbledore’s year, not Harry’s, and Dumbledore was engaged in “belling the cat”. His task was to knock the Ministry out of its position of official denial. Harry wasn’t in a position to do anything about that year’s true agenda. So we were shunted off on the sidelines with him and got a tedious, miserable trip through the Tunnel of Adolescent Angst instead. With a side trip up the garden path courtesy of Lord Voldemort at the end of it. And, only at the very end of the year, as a sort of a bad conduct prize, Harry finally was filled in on the text of the stinking fish of doom, Trelawney’s bloody first Prophecy.

— Once all the morass of deliberate obfuscation, smoke, and mirrors had served Dumbledore’s purpose, and the Ministry had been forced to admit they were wrong and Voldemort is, indeed, back, that is. Not one minute before.

The whole book was the dreaded “transitional chapter”. In spades.

And both HBP, and to a surprising extent, DHs, followed the same pattern.

Not to mention Book 5’s function as the opening up of a whole new paradigm shift wherein it looked as if each of the last three books managed to echo and reflect major elements of one of the first three books. A paradigm which Rowling abandoned before the end of the series.

By the end of OotP I was beginning to suspect that my instincts may have been, if not altogether wrong, certainly somewhat insufficient to the potential scope of this story.

****

The detective story is said to be probably one of the most inherently “moral” forms of storytelling in existence. Except under rare conditions a detective story simply does not work unless its wrongdoer is ultimately unmasked.

He may be spared punishment at the discretion of the investigating parties. Justice in a whodunit is often tempered with mercy. Of course the wrongdoer also may already be dead by the time the truth is revealed. But the truth must always be revealed — at least to the people undertaking the investigation. Those stories — and we’ve all run into a few of them if we read mysteries on anything like a regular basis — where the author tries to get all artistic or ironic and spins us a tale where either circumstances or human agency result in everyone being misled and the perpetrator is either misidentified (usually as someone conveniently dead at the end of the story) or the solution is still unknown to the investigating parties (although not to the reader) when the book finally ends, generally just feel wrong or somehow unfair to the situation.

From the standpoint of a detective adventure the whole action of Book 5 was utterly unsatisfactory. It’s small wonder the whole book felt awkward and wrong-footed and uncomfortable. (Besides which; Madam Umbridge was so monumentally unpleasant that every time I encountered her I wanted to stop reading, and had to fight my way through a wall of resistance.)

So; what does this say about the future direction of the series? Had we now moved beyond the “age of mysteries”?

Well... I certainly hoped not. Being neither a theologian nor a mystic, but merely a rude mechanical, I would immeasurably prefer to be able to go on reading the adventure of Harry Potter and the Dark Lord as a variety of detective story than to have to stop and dabble in theology and metaphysics. And there was still a fighting chance that I would be able to continue to do so.

For one thing, it seemed clear that once the Ministry and the Order were back on the same page, even if still not altogether in agreement, the action would undoubtedly shift back to Harry. And Harry had a lot of information that he still needed to go and find out.

But the overall focus of the mystery had changed from the clear, pure, form that it (and we) enjoyed through books 1–4. It seemed unlikely that book 7 would much resemble a whodunit, either.

Even if for no better reason than that ever since the end of the 3-year summer the overriding question has been not so much “Whodunit?”, as “What the hell just happened?”

Followed immediately by the question of; “And what does it all signify?”

If, at the end of the adventure of Harry Potter and the Dark Lord Harry did not know *why* the various people who contributed to the situation in which he had been placed, acted as they did, as well as *what* they did, we would undoubtedly feel that Rowling has failed in her intent. Harry, and we, needed the full story. And we needed to know what happened before we could decide what we were going to have to do about it.

Even if, in the end, what specifically happened bore little relation to what must now be done. It looked to be shaping up into one of those cases — and once again my biases as a mystery reader were showing — in which the villain is the story. I was sure that once we finally fully understood Tom Riddle, we would know what we had to do about him. Otherwise we were just pulling rabbits out of hats.

And I was not convinced that we did know everything that we needed to know concerning Tom Riddle just yet.

****

But this was still the mystery readers’ classic solution. And it was becoming ever more questionable whether — for all her undoubtable skills at mimicking the form — Rowling regarded herself as a mystery writer.

Given what Rowling’s had to say for herself, up to then, it was no stretch to accept that Rowling regards herself as a “moral” writer. (Although her interpretation of the term leaves a lot to be desired in the way of clarity.)

But — rather more to the point — in the, not all that distant, days before she discovered Philip Pullman and started being snotty about C.S. Lewis on general principles (not that one needs to have discovered Pullman in order to have issues with Lewis. I agree that Susan Pevensy was singularly ill-done-by on the part of her creator), she did, when pinned down to it, identify herself as a Christian writer.

And, as the Christians will assure you, morality is not Christianity.

This issue had cropped up quite a long time ago in an interview with the Vancouver Sun. Rowling answered the question whether she herself is Christian with:

“Yes, I am. Which seems to offend the religious right far worse than if I said I thought there was no God. Every time I’ve been asked if I believe in God, I’ve said yes, because I do, but no one ever really has gone any more deeply into it than that, and I have to say that does suit me, because if I talk too freely about that I think the intelligent reader, whether 10 or 60, will be able to guess what’s coming in the books.”

So, with a view to the rest of the puzzle pieces that Rowling had turned over to us in the series at the end of Book 5, what are we to think of that statement?

Are we to think of that statement?

For a while there, it began to look very much as if we were not necessarily going to be able to work out the solution of this conundrum through pure logic and traditional deduction. However useful those qualities may be in helping to determine the extent of the problem.

But, given the general motif of repeated reversals of carefully-built assumptions to which Rowling subjected us, and continued to do so through HBP, I was no longer quite sure what to think. For, with HBP, Rowling suddenly dragged us off on a tangent in which she appeared to completely dismiss most of what she had made such a point of drawing our attention to over the course of OotP.

I was finally beginning to entertain the concept that whereas OotP was a jolt of one kind, HBP was deliberately another. That in each novel Rowling may have intentionally introduced only one half of the problem, intending for the two to collide in the final book.

At that point, such a concept itself was only a bare hypothesis. But it did at least seem to be a possibility.

Left to my druthers, I do not go digging for esoteric symbolism, “deep meanings” or “eternal truths” in my adventure fiction. I will usually try to work out the probable future directions of a story arc from a starting point of following and extrapolating from the currently apparent patterns inside the narrative.

And given that a double handful of dominoes toppled between two previous revisions of this collection, it was beginning to look as though I might be able to go back to doing it. Book 7 definitely appeared to be being set up to echo and reflect Book 3. And there was a recognizable pattern to Book 3.

But, still, I thought that Rowling must have had a reason for leading us off in the direction that we were led over the course of OotP, even though she may appear to have completely dismissed it for the whole of HBP. I am just not convinced that we can safely dismiss what we picked up from Book 5, little as much of it appeared to be relevant in the wake of Book 6.

****

In the middle of all this, one really should try to remember that I am the person who put together the Changeling hypothesis essay, above, and posted it back around May 2003. Theology and metaphysics may not be my preferred form of entertainment, but I am willing to wade into that pool if I have to.

According to the original Changeling hypothesis, the nature of the connection which indubitably exists between Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort is that from the point that Voldemort’s curse rebounded and destroyed his original body, Harry Potter had been the repository of Tom Riddle’s soul.

Post-HBP it was clear that this reading was inaccurate. Harry is not the repository of Tom Riddle’s entire soul. He only had custody of a fragment of it.

At the end of the modified Changeling hypothesis essay above I had listed a few of the steps that would seem to need to be taken in order for Harry to permanently rid the world of Lord Voldemort as:

He has to find and eliminate the other remaining Horcruxes.

He has to destroy the “evil memory” which controls and drives the simulacrum. i.e., he must disarm the “Final Horcrux”.

He has to destroy the simulacrum which Voldemort caused to be created at the end of Book 4.

And, finally, he must release the fragment of Tom Riddle’s soul which is in his own possession, and send it through the Veil.

Not necessarily in that order.

Indeed, ideally he needs to release the fragment before dealing with the simulacrum and the “Final Horcrux”.

And although, over the course of the series to date we’d been given simple solutions (simple, not easy) which might accomplish the first three list items above, we were still left asking how on earth is Harry supposed to release a soul fragment which has become a part of himself?

****

Well, rather than getting mired in the issues introduced in HBP, let’s take a closer look at a few of the hints that we were handed at the end of OotP and try to figure out just what kind of tools we’d been given to work with at that point.

We were presented with a number of what appeared to be great, thumping potential plot elements at the very end of Book 5, in addition to the full text of the Trelawney Prophecy.

The first of these was Dumbledore propounding on the Mysterious Power kept behind the locked door in the Department of Mysteries; the same door that effectively ate the pocket knife/key that Sirius Black had given Harry for Christmas the year of the TriWizard Tournament. The nature of these pronouncements make it altogether too difficult to conclude that this mysterious force is anything other than the Power of Love™. And as such this exchange becomes yet another incidence of Dumbledore’s repeated assertions that Harry was saved because of his mother’s Love; that to have been touched by such Love has marked him as surely as Voldemort’s curse ever did, and that this is, in fact, the Power Harry has which the Dark Lord knows not.

Except that... Harry really does not come across in the books as a particularly loving child.

In fact he comes across as “a very good hater”.

How could anyone expect him to be a particularly loving child, the way the Dursleys raised him? Under their care, what he learned was to withdraw into himself, to become self-contained, and, as much as possible, self-sufficient. Very much as Tom Riddle learned back in his orphanage.

And something in Harry has given him the inclination and resolve to continue to maintain this policy of self-containment even after he has moved beyond the Dursleys’ sphere into a wider world in which he is hailed as a hero. Once out of the Dursleys’ keeping, he could easily have lost his balance and become every bit as much of an attention-sponge as Rita Skeeter and her successors tried to paint him. Instead, he has maintained his barriers and opened himself up to very few people since his entry into the wizarding world, and we have seen him spontaneously reach out to virtually no one.

With the significant exception of Sirius Black, who somehow seems to have charmed his way right through all of Harry’s defenses.

And, yes, Harry does seem to care about those few people to whom he has opened himself up. He has shown himself perfectly capable of friendship and of forming emotional connections to others. The Dursleys did not manage to destroy that. But he still doesn’t seem to go in much for the “Anything, anything at all, for my friends!” routine. Otherwise he might have ended up in Hufflepuff and formed his trio with Justin and Ernie. And he’ll still shut any or all of his friends out in a blink whenever he is upset, or has been presented with a new viewpoint to absorb. Even his fascination with anything that anyone will tell him about his father comes across as more from curiosity or self-absorption than it does of love.

No, I would say that Harry is still effectively sailing under the black flag of “I am a rock, I am an island.” and there was no shortage of examples in the text about which shoals plotting that particular course is likely to wreck you upon. Particularly the suspected example swooping about the landscape like an overgrown bat.

I think that even at this late point in the story arc to blindly accept Dumbledore’s assurances on Harry Potter’s command over the Power of Love™ at face value is to seriously anticipate something which has not yet been adequately demonstrated in the text. Dumbledore may not be often “wide of the mark,” acto Rowling, but he is not infallible.

Dumbledore did have at least one incident upon which to pin his hopes. The one time that Harry got it absolutely right was in PoA when Peter abruptly threw him into the driver’s seat, and without thinking about it too much, even knowing that Peter is the one who had betrayed him and gotten his parents killed, Harry chose not to take the responsibility of exacting revenge upon Peter himself. Albus harped on that string ever afterward. And it was probably the most hopeful sign we’d been given in the whole series that Rowling actually intended to deliver upon the highly touchy issues she seems to have set up.

I rather suspected that this would prove to be one of those aforementioned difficult life lessons that Harry was going to have to master before he would be ready for the final confrontation with his enemy. Probably the greatest of all of them. At the end of HBP his grasp on the principle was still entirely theoretical. And while he may have sorted out an intellectual understanding of what Dumbledore was driving at; that there are things worth dying for, by that point, his grasp upon the whole issue still seemed singularly muzzy-headed and self-contradictory.

...Although Harry’s ability to summon a Patronus at the age of 13 might be more significant than I had been willing to credit. We might need to keep that in mind, as well.

I did imagine that we should try to feel confident that he would ultimately learn this lesson. Even if only at the last moment, in the course of the series’s climax itself. But it was not easy.

And once one considers it, the Power behind the locked door sounds rather like a Patronus taken to the Nth degree, doesn’t it?

Which suggested that it might finally be appropriate to raise the question of why the door in the Department of Mysteries which continues to contain this “greatest Mystery”, and which from Dumbledore’s description would appear to be restraining no less than the Power of Love™ itself, is kept locked in the first place.

We still have no idea, and frankly, Rowling’s description of the Power contained there was an epic failure. We will be much better off trying to hammer out our own explanations on the subject.

But still, wizards are certainly a no less sentimental lot than Muggles. They appear to be no less motivated by their attachments to one another. Human attachments and family ties seem on prominent display in every direction you look in the ww. The wizarding world clearly values such attachments.

So why lock the door?

And once the question has finally been raised, it occurred to me that perhaps the door was originally locked by treaty.

Could the Dementors have been paid off by giving them Azkaban, a steady supply of authorized victims, and an agreement to keep the door locked?

If so, perhaps it was past time that someone pointed it out that the creatures with whom the ww established that treaty had broken their side of the agreement!

****

Another heavy-handed hint we were given was Luna Lovegood’s confident assertion that “They’re all still there, just beyond the Veil.” Luna Lovegood has the gift of being able to state her convictions with such absolute confidence that she will convince anyone who is willing to be convinced of them. Unfortunately for Luna, very few people are willing to be convinced of the existence of the Crumple-Horned Snorkack, Cornelius Fudge’s private army of heliopaths, or the rotfang conspiracy.

Rather a lot of people, however, are willing to be convinced that those that they have loved and lost still exist, as themselves, somewhere just beyond a mysterious Veil. Virtually every organized religion in the world is founded upon that very premise.

So. On the one hand we have the Veil, behind which linger all of our beloved dead, and on the other we have the Power behind door #3. And neither one of these elements is going to go away, despite Rowling’s determination to spend the whole of Book 6 ignoring them. Or Book 7 either.

At the time, I thought that it was seriously unlikely that Rowling would have made such a point of giving us such blatant hints about these two potential plot elements unless these are elements that she intended to make further use of. And, indeed, it feels unwise to dismiss them even now, despite the fact that she seems to have done so. Rowling may have intended both as disposable plot devices, but they seem to have taken on a significance greater than she was willing to grant them.

If nothing else, at the time (Easter 2005) it strongly suggested that a return to the DoM was in order.

Of course, we had also expended a lot of theorizing on a comment of Dumbledore’s in PS/SS which implied that some sort of major paradigm-shifting event had taken place in the wizarding world 11 years before the defeat of Lord Voldemort at Godric’s Hollow, as well. Ultimately to no purpose.

For that matter, the very nature of the concepts we had suddenly been handed to juggle — articles of Faith and the power of Love — do not sound very much like relevant issues pursuant to such a secular, in fact, such a purely political problem as the rooting out and shutting down of a few dozen Death Eaters. The Death Eaters are a purely human problem. We already know where the Death Eaters are coming from, and bringing such ammunition to bear on them is an exercise in swatting a fly with a Buick. The DMLE is perfectly capable of hunting out and shutting down Death Eaters, if they’ll get off their arses and do it. Or if the MoM will get out of their way and let them.

But to all appearances, that caliber of ammo was likely to be necessary for shutting down their Leader.

****

We were given yet a third piece of information in the aftermath of the raid on the DoM as well. And I am still not sure just where that one was supposed to fit. Or if it even does fit. This third maybe-clue was Nearly Headless Nick’s explanation of what makes a ghost.

To be honest, I don’t know just how this information ultimately relates to the conundrum of Harry Potter and the Dark Lord, but I suspected then that it did indeed relate. The connection was just a good deal less obvious than that of the locked door or the Veil.

Originally, I suspected that it may have something to do with the nature of wizards’ souls. Nick assures us that only wizards (and, of course, witches) are capable of manifesting as ghosts. Ergo; wizards are the only humans who are psychically active enough to sustain an existence without the grounding of a physical body.

We’d already had ample demonstration of this premise throughout the series.

And, if nothing else, this alone served as a blindingly clear illustration of the fact that for all his power and alleged brilliance, the former Tom Riddle is fundamentally most unwise. For his soul; that powerful, resilient, indestructible wizard’s soul, was already immortal. And he has hacked it to pieces and strewn the pieces to the four winds in an attempt to preserve its anchor to the material plane. Such folly exceeds all bounds.

According to Nick, the imprint of those souls which cannot face the prospect of the unknown, linger on this side of the Veil, unhappily, as ghosts.

He implies that this is the only reason they linger. But I am inclined to doubt that suggestion very much. For all that it is undoubtedly his reason.

For one thing, we also have the example of Professor Binns, who I suspect is not altogether aware that he is dead. And even if he is, he is incapable of imagining any existence apart from telling an unending succession of schoolchildren about the Goblin wars.

For that matter, we also have the example of Moaning Myrtle who clearly refuses to let go of a grudge against the girls who cruelly amused themselves by teasing her, and when balked of her determination to haunt them personally, by the Ministry, she returned to Hogwarts to make as many other people feel as badly as she possibly could.

One thing that Rowling subtly slips into Nick’s testimony, however, is the information that, presumably, any witch or wizard in the Potterverse gets a choice in the matter. I thought there might yet be a payoff on this issue.

We have also never been informed regarding the ultimate fate of those who face the unknown beyond the Veil in the light of “an awfully big adventure”. Nor is there anyone in the Potterverse truly qualified to tell us what awaits such resilient souls on the other side of the great divide, or whether such souls are so indestructible as to make a practice of returning. (And, ultimately, although the Resurrection Stone will call them back for questioning it is unclear what actually awaits one on the other side, because no one thought to ask.)

On this issue I will absolutely not commit myself either way. But I will say that I have seen no indication in the text, which would suggest that reincarnation is a relevant factor in the Potterverse. No indication at all. Indeed, this is a somewhat curious absence, all things considering.

I cannot count upon having assigned Nick’s information into the proper category. But I do suspect that somewhere there must be a proper category. (At the very least it is additional circumstantial evidence that Voldemort is determined never to die because he is afraid to.)

In the event, I appear to have turned out to be determinedly looking in the wrong direction.

****

So. What did we have — that we knew about — so far?

Item: as far back as Prisoner of Azkaban we were handed a strong wake-up call that, in the Potterverse, souls matter. We were all given a horrible demonstration of this at the end of GoF. This had even already been hinted at as early as the end of PS/SS. The cumulative message is that entering into the service of Lord Voldemort is likely to cost you your soul. Literally.

In HBP we got an up close and personal examination of Lord Voldemort’s present condition framed as a literal example of spiritual disintegration.

Item: in the Chamber of Secrets Harry Potter demonstrated himself both worthy and capable of wielding the Sword of Courage. We also saw that in the Potterverse, Faith seems to provide tangible assistance to those that will profess it.

And in CoS we were also given our only on-stage demonstration of actually destroying a Horcrux. Even though the Diary revenant had nearly managed to free itself from the book; rendering the book unable to contain it banished the soul fragment altogether, returning all of the life force that it had stolen to its proper owner.

Item: we have been hit over the head from the beginning of the whole series with the message that Love can save you.

Souls. Courage, Faith, Love, and Salvation, in the place of the Mysteries. What does that add up to, to you?

For me, at the end of OotP, that added up to a “spirit quest”.

****

For all that such spirit quests are a traditional part of a “Hero’s Journey”, at the end of HBP I was no longer convinced that we would get one.

It never was a done-deal, of course. Plus, we’d already been tacitly set the problem of a physical quest to have to work our way through over the course of Book 7. The spirit quest that I thought I foresaw at the end of OotP may just have become literal.

And neither quest seemed likely to take place upon the “playing fields of Hogwarts”. Although it did seem likely that we would be paying at least one visit to the school over the course of the last book. I thought by sneaking in while the school itself was closed.

I did think that the possibility of being sent on a spirit quest might shed a bit of light on Rowling’s insistence that she “had” to kill Sirius Black when she did. In most classic spirit quests a guide is provided. This guide is always someone that the quester once knew, usually someone dear to the quester, and someone who has already passed beyond death. Harry does not really remember his parents. And he never quite managed to open up enough to be able to claim a true friendship with Cedric Diggory. At the end of OotP, Who did that leave?

I went a little further out on this particular limb and stated that, with this in mind, one of the other difficult life lessons that Harry would *have* to learn before the final confrontation, is that Death, which to the end of OotP was portrayed in the series as uniformly unfair, random, and arbitrary, can be made to *count* for something. And unlike the value of Love which he may only come to understand at the 11th hour, this is a lesson that he will need to have learned *before* the final confrontation with Voldemort.

Which meant he had to learn it between then, and the end of Book 7. Up to that point the only death that had unmistakably counted for anything in the entire series had been Lily Potter’s. And we were not there to see it, Harry was not actually watching, and was far too young to understand. Even the multiple undercurrents and exchanges attendant upon the death of Albus Dumbledore did not register with Harry, who saw only a trust abused.

By the end of the 5th book, Harry was still ignoring the implications of his mother’s sacrifice. For that matter, he was not just ignoring his mother’s death. He was largely ignoring her life as well.

It took until his 5th year trip into Snape’s worst memory before he even asked his first question related to his mother, and he was easily fobbed off with a half-answer. All of his attention was, and remained, focused on his father. It was only with Year 6 and Professor Slughorn’s glowing and continual accolades of Lily that Harry finally had to take note of being his mother’s son as well as James’s. And he still didn’t take sufficient notice of it to satisfy the readers who had been impatiently waiting for the other shoe to fall ever since PoA.

We didn’t hang about Privet Drive long enough for him to start asking questions about Lily in year 6. Nor would it have occurred to Harry to do so at that point. And we were extremely frustrated when Petunia continued to keep silence at the opening of year 7, and then disappeared from the story with her secrets yet untold.

I did think it would be a fine piece of irony if the death that counted enough for Harry to learn the lesson that a death can be an item of negotiable exchange should turn out to be Pettigrew’s. But I wasn’t going to stick my neck out far enough to predict that. Which tur