Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

At first I thought the key would be the humour. I love the bit where Harry blows up Aunt Marge, like the fat old windbag that she is. Rowling's ability to make the punishment fit the crime is spot on. It was only when I was thinking about the incident where Snape discovers the Marauder's map that I realized what it actually is that makes this book different. When Snape commands the parchment to reveal its secret we are terrified that Harry will be found out, so when the rude messages from Messrs. Moony, Padfoot, Wormtail and Prongs begin to appear we are both amused and relieved.

Then however, we stop and think about what this means for Harry. It is lucky that he hasn't been found out, but Snape has been shown up in front of Professor Lupin whom he loathes. Snape already has a pathological hatred for Harry and this is only going to fuel his resentment. Even the light hearted moments in this book lead to menace, every moment of peace and happiness is weighted with its counterpart of somberness and an increase in tension that never wavers for an instant.

It is this darkness, this malevolence that makes 'the Prisoner of Azkaban' so special. Harry is a teenager now, he is growing up fast and events are getting serious. Right from the moment that Harry sees the Grim in Magnolia Drive the tension is palpable, and as we near the climax the plot picks up such pace that one event smashes into the back of another like a multiple pile up in fog. Interestingly, the mood is not lightened by the denouement, as in the previous books. This time, Professor Trelawney's prediction hangs over the ending like a dark cloud promising much worse to come.

Even the scenes with the Dursleys are not as light hearted as usual. Previously these have been more funny than frightening. The Dursleys are drawn in an exaggerated, cartoonish way. Vernon is described as "beefy", Dursley as "porky" and Petunia is "horse faced". By giving them the characteristics of farm animals Rowling dehumanises them, which allows us to look down on them and laugh at their ignorance. Yet she uses them as a vehicle for getting a serious message across. The Dursleys are racists. It is better for them to tell Aunt Marge that Harry goes to 'St Brutus's School for Incurably Criminal Boys' than it is for them to accept Harry as he is and acknowledge that they have a wizard in the family.

Yet if we judge the Dursleys as they judge Harry we are no better than them. They fear Harry and what he represents because they do not understand it. If we look down on the Dursleys because we think of them as less than human, what do we make of the animagi that appear later in the book? Take Snape again. Certain aspects of Snape's past are explained to us later in the book that allow us to understand his nature more fully and see him as more than just a one dimensional villain of the piece. We are used to seeing the characters of these books in certain roles and this time around we have to re-evaluate our beliefs.

Rowling forces us to take a close look at what it means to be human. It is no longer possible for us to see things as plain good or evil. Look at the heroes. When Ron and Hermione fight so bitterly with each other, how are we as the readers supposed to take sides? They are both 'goodies' and yet they are both shown to be capable of making mistakes, of making bad judgements and causing each other pain. We don't love them any the less, we accept their failings as a part of what makes them real for us. But this acceptance of the darker side of the people we care for has to make us question whether we can just accept that someone is truly evil because we don't like them or what they do.

By making us think about this issue Rowling makes us identify all the more strongly with Harry, for it is his dilemma too. In facing Sirius Black and all that he stands for, Harry has to separate his emotions from what he knows to be true. By showing us the Dursleys and the way they deal with what they do not understand we are made to see that if Harry wants to avoid being like them he has to face and appreciate what he fears. Only then can it lose its power over him. He is already part way there when he instinctively and repeatedly calls Voldemort by his name. Nearly everyone else refers to him as 'He Who Must Not Be Named'. This means that Voldemort's power is forced to move underground where it can grow unchecked and feed off the genuine darkness as well as taking life from our unspoken nightmares and imaginings.

Harry faces his fears twice over in the shape of the Boggart and the Dementors. The Boggart is a kind of dry run for the Dementors who are truly horrifying creatures on a par with Tolkein's Dark Riders from 'The Lord of the Rings'. The Dementors suck all the happiness out of a person until they become emotional zombies, alive but with no soul. They symbolise what Harry is most frightened of: his own fear.

Harry's fear expresses itself at flashpoint in the shape of anger. In this book Harry shows his enormous capacity for rage. The trigger for this rage is not abuse levelled at himself, but at the memory of his parents. Ironically, as they died to protect him, it is they who make Harry most vulnerable. He has few real memories of his parents, so when people malign them he feels fear at the deepest level of his being. What if they are right about his parents? He has no real way of knowing, just the way that he feels. He can only protect them instinctively by lashing out, and the magical power he shows at these times is enormous. Both Aunt Marge and Snape feel the force of his anger with potentially disastrous results, both for themselves but more importantly for Harry.

Anger is always shown to have its roots in fear. The Dursleys fear Harry, and so they brutalize him. Draco Malfoy is a classic bully, insecure and weak, so he lashes out at others. One of his main fears is of being humiliated by Harry at Quidditch, which is why he stoops to the abysmal trick of impersonating a Dementor whilst Harry is playing a match. The Ministry of Magic fear Sirius Black so they send the real Dementors to try and suck his life out. Fear is often considered a weak, inexcusable emotion and is much more easily borne as anger, first at oneself for showing fear and then pushed onto someone or something else, because it is much easier to punish someone else than it is yourself.

When Harry faces the Dementors he hears the voices of his Mother and Father trying to protect him from Voldemort. He fears the Dementors, but he is also afraid that if he conquers them he will never be able to hear his parents voices again. This leads directly to anger at himself for being so weak, for not wanting to accept that they are dead. By placing him in this double bind Rowling is forcing Harry to confront and ultimately make peace with his own humanity, the essentially paradoxical nature of what it means to be human.

When Harry feels rage he loses his capacity for true judgement. As we have seen in such a harmless way with Ron and Hermione, it is so easy to misjudge people when we are angry. What if Harry does something really terrible without meaning to? What if his capacity for anger turns him into what he is fighting against, someone like Sirius Black, who blew up a street full of Muggles and then laughed about it? Once again the sharp line between good and evil blurs and we see how easy it is to move from one to the other without always being aware of it. We know that Harry will have to learn to control his anger if he is going to face all that is symbolised by Sirius Black.

copyright c)2001 Katy Smart