Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

or, There has been a murder

Catch up here:

• The Sorcerer’s Stone

• The Chamber of Secrets

• The Prisoner of Azkaban

• Order of the Phoenix

• The Half-Blood Prince

• The Deathly Hallows

At this point in the series, I find myself asking the simple question: what if Book Three had been Book One?

To put it a different way, the PLOT of Harry Potter essentially begins here, with The Prisoner of Azkaban being a mostly necessary opening volume to the PLOT.

But are Books One and Two actually necessary to understanding the story?

This is mostly a stupid question, mind, because those first two are books made for and targeted to 10 year olds. Also, they exist. They’re pleasant little reads touched by enough darkness to be intriguing but not enough to be truly offputting or frightening. They introduce a likeable and fun cast and a fun and silly world.

That they’re also part of the rest of the series seems, at this point, almost accidental. And I do think that this whole thing was an accident, really. Not just the success of the series, but almost everything in the series.

Rowling didn’t sit down and map out a seven book series. And if she did, well, she was tremendously bad at it because every novel feels as if it’s thrown together last minute like she was up all night frantically working and only finished her draft a few hours before it was due. And like I said before, this may sound insulting, but I think it’s one aspect that makes the stories work to the extent that they do.

The way the wizarding world comes together is so sloppy and halfassed that any complaint about the worldbuilding you’ve heard is almost entirely justified. At the same time, the response to that kind of nitpickery is quite simple:

Who cares?

The reason your kids are showing up—the reason you showed up when you were 11—is because this is a fun place to hangout. So much fun, in fact, that when this novel showed up nearly double the length of the previous novel, which itself was nearly double the length of the first novel, you were even more excited. Not because it meant that the novel would be packed full of more adventures and hilarity but because it meant you got to hangout at Hogwarts and in the wizarding world nearly twice as long.

Now, to be fair to Rowling, she did get better at constructing her world as she went. It’s just that at this point she’s stuck with what she wrote in those first two books. She can try to rework them in a way that feels sturdier, but that shit is essentially locked in place because millions of people have already fallen in love with them and started to graft their identity to these books.

I think she does do some clever repurposing of what happened in those early books, but there’s only so much she can do without reworking things that wizards like Dumbledore had to be right about in order for the Dumbledoreness of him to have the kind of weight and meaning required to make the rest of the series work.

And The Goblet of Fire is where this fun series with occasional bouts of darkness becomes a book for young adults rather than for children. You also see Rowling becoming a more competent and confident writer with each book, so, here, she has her most tightly structured mystery.

She lays things out in an enticing and intriguing manner at the opening of the novel and the payoff is nearly 700 pages later, but it’s quite a payoff!

There’s only so much we can take of people cowering at the name of Voldemort before Rowling proves to us that the reason is justified, and one dead teenage hero feels like a pretty solid way to plant your villain’s flag.

The rest of the book is full of Hogwarts and wizards, which should be obvious, but it is remarkable to come to the end, look back, and realize you went almost nowhere.

It’s a strange feeling, but I think it’s the kind of trick you want to pull as a writer. Rowling is propulsive. Every chapter has something happen. It may not be ultimately very important, but it definitely holds your attention strongly. The plot, such as it is, octopuses out in myriad directions while Harry deals with Problem A and then B and then C and then back to A before encountering D, E, F, and G, and now we’re back to C and then H and then B, which spills back into A.

It’s all quite clever, the way these various problems become a complex web holding the novel perilously together. And the real reason it can hold all this together is because of the real reason we’re all here, even after all these years:

We just want to hangout and lmao at Hogwarts, man.

It’s also why we don’t have to think too hard about Hermoine’s haphazard approach to social justice, which Rowling seems to want us to both take seriously and view as naive at the same time.

Hermoine’s interested in the welfare of elves. Unbeknownst to her and the reader, all of Hogwarts relies on the slavery of countless elves. This manages to make every character—even the heroes—complicit in some a very unpleasant system. Dumbledore is as guilty as the Malfoys when it comes to the enslavement of elves.

Only one of those two are cast as villains for this, however.

Which is…well, it’s complicated. And the question, to me, becomes: Is this complicated on purpose or on accident?

Or, to say it differently, Is Rowling saying something about the complexity of benefiting from a system of oppression? Or is this something she kind of fell over backwards into and is trying to make it make more sense for subplot drama?

Rowling seems to want to poke at liberalism’s gestured tolerance towards oppressed and persecuted people but she doesn’t really want to interrogate it. Which makes sense, but it’s also something she could have just left out.

But it all kind of collapses back to what I said during The Chamber of Secrets, which is that the appearance of tolerance is more important than materially improving anyone’s life.

Too, if anything, this novel does more to reinforce the idea that wizards deserve to be overlords of creation with muggles, elves, giants, and whatever else being subservient to the whims and desires of the ubermenschen.

Which, uh…well, it complicates Voldemort’s role as villain, honestly.

Because if he’s correct about the natural hierarchy of species…

Best not to think too hard about that. And, of course, just because he may be right doesn’t mean it justifies genocide but it’s also not crazy to think that wizards are essentially a different species than muggles and maybe it is kind of weird and even perverse to want to mix the two…?

This is the kind of thing that would be clarified by better or more thoughtful worldbuilding. But, again, the novel isn’t really meant to be about the implicit or explicit subtext.

It’s about the text right in front of you.

Voldemort and his ilk are Nazis. Dumbledore and the rest are definitely not Nazis. However, the end of this novel begins to paint a rudimentary picture of how Nazism can flourish even when everyone’s best intentions stand flimsily in the way.

But we’ll deal more with that question in the next novel.

One thing this novel is more concerned with than any of the previous ones is the role of bureaucracy in the wizarding world, which led me to a silly realization early on in this novel.

What are the careers for a graduate of Hogwarts or any of the other wizarding schools?

This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer!

Mostly because of how confounding the wizarding world is. There’s only one wizarding village in the whole of England, so, presumably, most wizards live alongside muggles out in the wider world. But if this is the case, why are wizards so completely clueless about any muggle technology or even customs? Don’t they go to the grocery store? Or even some shopping mall to get clothes?

I guess not because they can just magic anything into existence but it also makes so much of the wizarding world bizarre. For example: how and why are the Weasley’s poor, and why does such a thing matter when you can apparate anywhere in the world, produce food and shelter out of thin air, etc.

If the Quidditch World Cup is anything to go by, there are at least 100,000 wizards. The implication is that there are many more that couldn’t make it to the World Cup, but let’s just say there are only a million total wizards worldwide. I mean, for all we know, there are only three wizarding schools for all of Europe and Hogwarts isn’t exactly bursting at the seams with students so this figure doesn’t seem insane.

But what do they all do?

Some are employed at wizarding schools, whether as professors or groundskeepers and so on. Most of the menial work is either done by elves or no one at all, if Hogwarts is anything to go by.

Then there are those working in Diagon Alley. Which, uh, is not a very big stretch of land. There seem to only be a dozen or so shops and the like there, but let’s just pick a bigger figure and say that a thousand people work in Diagon Alley because why not.

You get the sense that everyone from all over England shops at Diagon Alley. And maybe this isn’t true, but you also get the sense that the wand maker in Diagon Alley is the only one in all of England, since every wizard at Hogwarts got their wand from his shop. Often from him personally.

Is this, by itself, not bizarre?

How is there only one wandmaker!

It seems like this is something that would be quite open to competition and so on.

Then you get the sense that there are some amount of wizards who make a living adventuring around or as quidditch players and some are employed by the single English language wizarding periodical, the Daily Prophet.

Then there are the super rich like the Malfoys who are rich for some reason. Presumably generational wealth. But how did they acquire it?

And what made the Weasleys so poor?

And what made James Potter so rich?

But so where does everyone else work?

The answer seems to be the Ministry of Magic. Most of the adults you meet in the series either work at Hogwarts or at the Ministry of Magic. Which maybe isn’t so odd—governments tend to employ a lot of people. But I would say that the majority of adult wizards work for the government.

And what is the primary purpose of that government?

Well, it seems like their largest purpose is concealing the wizarding world from non-magical humans. Which is very odd. But it also reinforces the idea that wizards are separate and superior to muggles.

Even the passing mention to witch trials implies that most witches burned at the stake were muggles and the rare wizards that were caught were only caught as a sort of prank.

I know, I know, that was a throwaway line mostly intended as a joke, but if we take all these incidental bits of worldbuilding seriously, it paints a very unpleasant view of the wizarding world and most wizards who inhabit it. Their indifference to the death of muggles, the enslavement of elves, the banishment of giants and werewolves, the suspicion of goblins, and on and on—it’s honestly more surprising that most wizards aren’t magic Nazis like Voldemort.

But, again, the presentation here is one of old fashioned 1990s liberalism.

You don’t have to do anything to improve the lives of those around you. You just need to appear to care.

It’s all quite muddy.

And, really, I think the structure of the world does lead you to see Voldemort’s worldview as at least sensible, which is probably not the intention.

Anyway, a big subplot of this novel is also the unreliability of the press and the vile liars who comprise the press. This kind of thing is…well, I also find it odd, especially since there’s no balance to it. Rita Skeeter and The Daily Prophet who publishes her lies are the whole of the press as far as we experience them.

Journalism, in the wizarding world, is the enemy of truth.

At the end of this novel, it becomes clear, too, that the government is also the enemy of truth.

But really, you’re not meant to think so hard about all this or try to dig too deep. It’s not even necessarily that it doesn’t make sense or that it presents a complex web of conflicts, but that it’s not clear that this kind of thing was really done on purpose.

And I could be wrong, but the demonization of the press is especially a useful tool for fascists like Voldemort to exploit. Add to that the weakness of the government, their ineffectual responses to the potential rise of Voldemort, and you have the perfect recipe for Voldemort to rise again and even for his rise to be welcomed.

I mean, the Ministry of Magic clearly also agrees with the hierarchy of species as outlined by the dark wizards like Voldemort.

Like life, the wizarding world is quite messy. Some of the messiness is on purpose but I think a great deal more is accidental and I think this complicates the message the books seem to be sending when you get down to specifics.

The general thrust of the story is pretty clear: evil thrives when good people do nothing.

But what about all the good people who not only allow for evil to fill their lives but actively encourage it?

Are they still good people?

Anyway, shoving all that aside for now, the novel just keeps movin and groovin. It’s built on piling mysteries of the Tri-Wizard Tournament, with each new competition hinted at through puzzles and riddles that the players must solve.

And so we get a lot of cleverness happening in solving mysteries or at least dealing with them. And because the clever reader doing no more than paying attention to the book in their hands is able to come up with a solution right around the same time Harry or Hermoine does, we feel tremendously clever. This rewarding of the reader, as I previously said, makes an already propulsive novel addictive while also filling your trembling teenage heart with a certain kind of witching light.

Along with all that, we get the budding romances of some of the leads and we see how attraction begins to blossom in the hearts of our teenage leads and see how it twists their emotions into knots, leads to anger, distrust, jealousy, and so on.

You were thirteen, too, when you read this. You knew intimately what all this felt like and how new and confusing it all was. And it helped you grapple with your own heart and the newness of heartache and heartbreak.

The way that friend who has always just been your friend who you began, unintentionally, wholly accidentally, to look upon as, well, as something a bit more than just a friend. Something you don’t exactly have a name for, but it’s a feeling you understand because you feel it in your bones, in your teeth, in that pressure at the back of your throat, behind your eyes. Suddenly, you barely even know how to act around them, what to say to them, and it’s not like anything has changed, like they’ve become different, and yet everything is fundamentally different. Inescapably, your thoughts spiral and your heart both hurts and soars whenever you think about them. When you argue, it matters more and feels existential in a way it never did, because, maybe, just maybe, your very life hangs in the balance, depends on the way they feel about you. How much easier this would be without the years of history between you?

Or perhaps, instead, it’s that person who you’ve kinda sorta known for years but never really interacted with much who now dominates your every waking thought. Simply seeing them makes you want to collapse, and because you’ve never really been their friend, barely ever even spoken to them, attempting to approach and strike up conversation feels ludicrously out of reach. Ah, if only you had befriended them a year or two ago, grown an easy rapport before falling headlong through the skin and bones of the earth to the molten heart of all humanity. How much easier would falling in love be if you were friends first?

Or so the thinking goes.

And so resentment grows.

This really is the trick. Capturing this specific feeling.

It’s why hanging out at Hogwarts feels essential and important. It’s why an identity can form around such a place.

How this all fits together with the larger plot is a bit trickier and messier, I’m afraid. Once again, it mostly highlights the unimportance of the daily trials and tribulations of school and the various relationships you manage there.

I mean, by the time Harry’s life is in danger, neither Ron nor Hermoine are especially annoyed with their misunderstandings and smoldering yet repressed feelings.

But if The Prisoner of Azkaban is where the series began growing up, this is where we begin racing towards adulthood and the firm reality of an uncaring, unsympathetic world.

Or maybe not!