Countdown to Harry Potter 7: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is special to me. It’s the first book released after I discovered the series, and my first experience waiting for the blessed release with the legions of other fans. And it was the first time I read a 700-plus page book in just one day.
For the reread, I took my time a bit more. Before returning to Hogwarts for year four, Harry and his friends pay a visit to the Quidditch World Cup. The celebration is cut short, however, when a group of wizards clad as Death Eaters - the chilling supporters of Voldemort - attack a family of Muggles. It gets worse when one of them throws Voldemort’s Dark Mark into the air, and the wand that cast the spell turns out to be Harry’s. Returning to Hogwarts, the students discover that this year they are hosting the Triwizard Tournament, in which a student from each of Europe’s top three wizarding schools is selected to compete in a series of dangerous - even life-threatening - challenges. All seems well until a fourth name is selected by the magical Goblet of Fire: Harry Potter. At the end of the tournament, of course, Harry and the other Hogwarts champion, Cedric Diggory, are kidnapped by an unseen Portkey. Diggory is immediately murdered by Voldemort, and the treacherous Wormtail steals some of Harry’s blood for a concoction to rebuild a body for Voldemort. The Dark Lord walks again. This is bad. Very bad. But it isn’t even apparent how bad until the next book, when the Ministry of Magic tries to deny the fact that Voldemort has returned.
Once again, it sucks to be the Boy Who Lived.
This is really the turning point of the Harry Potter series. From here on out, the series grows progressively darker and more mature with each volume. The first three books each end with a note of triumph, with Voldemort or his surrogate thoroughly defeated. Even though Sirius isn’t exonerated at the end of book three, he at least lives to fight another day. Harry Potter is a series with a three-part A New Hope and a three-part Empire Strikes Back, beginning with this installment. The end of this book brings nothing but foreboding.
Throughout the book, Harry (either alone or with help) has to learn a series of new spells, charms and hexes in order to prepare for the tournament. At the time, it seemed fairly straightforward - he needed to learn this magic to win the games. In book five, Order of the Phoenix, it starts to become clear what J.K. Rowling’s real purpose here was - to begin preparing Harry for combat. He fought in the first three books, but survived one and two because of the intercession of others and conquered the third by conjuring a Patronus, something that’s handy when you’re fighting a Dementor, but won’t stop Voldemort. Here, for the first time, Harry is learning to fight. Even in the climactic duel with Voldemort, Harry is horribly outmatched, but he isn’t helpless either. As they fight, Harry’s life is saved by a rare magical effect called Priori Incantatum. Harry and Voldemort’s wands, as we learned in book one, each contain a feather from the same Phoenix (who, we learn in this book, is Dumbledore’s Phoenix, Fawkes). When “brother wands” battle each other, they don’t work properly. If a duel is carried out, however, the wands create a mystic effect in which one wand forces the other to regurgitate its past spells. Harry manages to turn Priori Incantatum against Voldemort, causing ghost-forms of his most recent murder victims (including Harry’s parents) to do battle with the Dark Lord long enough for Harry to escape. Were it not for Priori Incantatum, Harry most likely would have died… but he wasn’t nearly the easy kill Voldemort expected.
Ron and Hermione are somewhat downplayed in this book. Although they both try to help Harry in the tournament (after Ron goes through a snippy period where he believes Harry put his name in the Goblet on purpose), neither is present for the climax and neither help drive the main plot. Each of them, rather, becomes engaged in various subplots, with Hermione taking the lion’s share. She launches a House-Elf rights group (a plotline which, in two books, hasn’t really gone anywhere. Unless it turns out to be vitally important in the final volume, which I find doubtful, it will be one of the few bits of weak padding in an otherwise excellently-constructed series), discovers the secret of the nasty reporter Rita Skeeter (more on her later) and enters a brief romance with the Durmstrang Triwizard Champion, Quidditch legend Victor Krum. It is through the Krum storyline that Ron gets his best bits in this book - he is infatuated with the Beauxbatons champion, Fleur Delacour, but his crush is largely attributable to the fact that she is part Veela (a sort of siren-type magical being found, evidently, in Krum’s home country of Bulgaria). Throughout the book, Ron berates Hermione for her relationship with Krum, calling it “consorting with the enemy.” Hermione, meanwhile, grows constantly exasperated with Ron’s infatuation with Fleur, even looking daggers at the girl when she kisses Ron for helping Harry save her sister’s life in the second task. By the time Hermione explodes at Ron following the Yule ball (“Next time there’s a ball, ask me before someone else does and not as a last resort!”), it should be painfully obvious that Rowling is pulling a Han and Leia on us here. It’s not the hero that’s getting the girl, it’s the sidekick. Oh, he’s not getting her now, give it a few more books, but if the Ron/Hermione ship hadn’t officially sailed by book four, it was loading up the cargo bay and preparing to cut the ropes to the dock.
Harry tried to make time for romance in this book, but it just didn’t work. He spent the book nursing a crush on the Ravenclaw Seeker, Cho Chang, only to lose her to Cedric. Needless to say, his death hits her pretty hard as well. Harry’s time in this book is full of darkness. We see the first “on-screen” death in this series, although there are at least three other characters murdered before Cedric dies in front of Harry’s eyes. The book also loads us with backstory, as Harry learns much more about the first war against Voldemort and what exactly his return means. Finally, we see in even richer detail how completely Harry has been embraced by the Weasley family - staying with them before the World Cup, being invited back after the season is over… Mrs. Weasley grows cold at Hermione after hearing (erroneous) reports that they were dating and she dumped him for Krum. Molly and Bill - not the Dursleys - are the “family members” brought to Hogwarts to watch Harry compete. And in the end, when the weight of everything he has undergone comes crashing down on Harry, it is Molly Weasley who holds him, like a mother, until he can finally find sleep.
This book loaded us with new characters. In addition to Krum and Fleur, this book introduces us to Ron’s eldest brothers Bill and Charlie for the first time. We meet another House-Elf, Winky, we meet Madam Maxime and Karkaroff (headmasters of Beauxbatons and Durmstrang, respectively), and we meet the venomous Rita Skeeter, a reporter who is more concerned with sensational headlines and petty grievances than accuracy. Having been a reporter for five years, Rita is a character I find highly amusing, because I doubt even Rowling knows just how spot-on this character is. In a flashback sequence, we meet a few Death Eaters who turn out to be important to the backstory of Harry’s classmate, Neville Longbottom, and we learn for the first time that there may be more to Neville than meets the eye. He may be a bit clumsy and absentminded, but he is the son of a great and beloved Auror. Griffindor is the house of the brave, and the sorting hat doesn’t make mistakes. Neville was put there for a reason.
The Crouches - Bartemius and Barty Junior - are one-off characters, but they’re both important to the plot. What’s more, through Junior, we meet the best addition to the series, Mad-Eye Moody. Moody is an Auror, a Dark Wizard hunter, whose paranoia and persistence makes for a perfect cover for Junior, who masquerades as him for most of the book. Junior’s impersonation is so spot-on, fooling even Dumbledore, that even though the real Moody barely appears in this book, by the time he shows up in Order of the Phoenix he already seems like an old friend.
I remember how relieved I was when the announcement came that the film version of this book would carry a PG-13 rating. There really would have been no way to trim it to a PG without completely neutering the story. This book gets dark - Harry’s life has taken a drastic turn for the worse and it’s going to get worse. And that makes for a hell of a read.