J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Reviewed by DAVID LARSEN

I once had to put down the fourth book in the Harry Potter series and take my son to a birthday party. This was just when I'd got to the point where Harry's been tied to a gravestone and forced to watch as his arch-enemy, Voldemort, rises from the dead.

I spent two hours surrounded by other parents who'd all finished the book - actually, they'd all finished the precise copy I was reading, since it was the only one any of us had been able to get our kids to part with.

I haven't often had such a strong sense that if anyone told me what happened next, it would be absolutely necessary to kill them.

So if you're one of the three J.K. Rowling fans in New Zealand who haven't read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix yet, relax. I'm not about to spoil it for you.

As it happens, considerate people who try hard not to burden others with information they aren't ready for loom large in the new book. Harry spends most of its considerable length bubbling with frustration, because he's at the centre of an undeclared war, and none of his friends or mentors will tell him anything about it.

Voldemort is back, his army of Death Eaters is at full strength again, the authorities of the wizard world are steadfastly refusing to concede that there's a threat, and all Harry hears from his teachers or their allies is: "We're doing something about it, but we can't tell you what. Patience".

As events ultimately prove, some of the reasons for this reticence are sound, and some are fatally misguided. From the reader's point of view, Harry's information black-out has two key effects. First, it forces you to spend the bulk of a 766-page novel wondering what on earth is going on. This may seem nothing new - every book in the series so far has had a mystery-novel structure, with Rowling scattering clues and teasing you with riddles right up to the closing chapters.

But this one's a lot longer. You can't simply scale up from 100,000 words to more than double that and expect the same basic techniques to produce the same effects. I ended up sharing some of Harry's frustration at the glacial unfolding of the plot.

Or, to put it another way, I ended up empathising deeply with a character going through a difficult rite of passage. This is the second significant aspect of Rowling's deliberately slow pace: it lets her explore one of the great trials of adolescence. Harry is unusual among heroes of children's fiction, in that he changes and grows from book to book. He's now 15, right around the age where adults stop treating you as a child but refuse to start treating you as an adult.

To anyone who's lived through this, the inconsistencies and unfairness Harry has to put up with are entirely recognisable - as are his discomfort and his increasingly frequent moments of rage.

Rowling's sharp-edged portrait of a resentful teenager is a jarring change from the noble, rash-but-lovable Harry of the previous books. It makes for a more challenging reading experience than many fans of the series may expect, but it also provides the psychological depth the story's new scope demands.

This new volume isn't just more of the same. The world Harry inhabits has become larger, peopled with more visibly complex characters, and though it remains richly comic, it's also increasingly grim. But there are many incidental pleasures - in-jokes, favourite characters, answers to long-standing questions.

And as the plot crawls quietly forward to the point where it suddenly ignites, it becomes increasingly clear that we're coming to the heart of what is in essence a single, seven-part novel. It also becomes clear that Rowling, as usual, knows exactly what she's doing.

Bloomsbury $49.95