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deadlyhollowIn which Rita Skeeter dishes serious dirt, Dumbledore goes in for what he considers semi-benevolent despotism, Aberforth suspects DD of murder, Harry finally realises that Dumbledore Is Not What He Seemed, Rowling is cavalier about World War II, and I nearly lose my lunch.
Chapter Eighteen -- The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore
I'm going to be honest with you lot; there were occasional bits I liked here. The chapter is short, lucid, emotional without being emo and informative without drowning us in exposition or lack of continuity. It's rare to find such a chapter in Rowling. I don't know how to explain it. Perhaps she wrote it when the moon was in the seventh house and Jupiter had aligned with Mars.
Regrettably, Dumbledore is odious in this chapter. More odious than usual, I mean. And there's one sentence where the sheer insensitivity of the wizarding world (and Rowling) made me physically sick.
As the chapter begins, Harry has just awakened from unconsciousness after very nearly being killed by Snake! Bathilda. Rowling describes Harry gazing out on a cold, glittering winter world devoid of color, not knowing what to do next, or how to feel. His wand is irreparably damaged and, since he doesn't know how to do wandless magic, he feels utterly helpless.
He managed to get Hermione to loan him her wand in the previous chapter, but it's not the same. Considering all the emphasis on the wand choosing the wizard, I imagine that losing a wand is losing an arm or a leg; it's that much a part of you. [I am not using the Penis Analogy because witches lose their wands in this book, too, and it seems to distress them no less than the male wizards.] Consequently, simply borrowing someone else's wand seems rather like borrowing a prosthetic. One for which you haven't been fitted. And that doesn't feel quite right. And that doesn't do everything that your own limb could. And that's constantly chafing and reminding you that it IS a prosthetic.
So yes, I do feel a little bit sorry for Harry here. That does not mean, however, that I can ignore the following:
Simply to be alive to watch the sun rise over the sparkling snowy hillside ought to have been the greatest treasure on earth, yet he could not appreciate it: his senses had been spiked by the calamity of losing his wand.
OUCH. What a swag-bellied sentence. "Simply to be alive" instead of "being alive", a colon instead of a full stop or a semi-colon, and...what are "spiked senses"?
He looked out over a valley blanketed in snow, distant church bells chiming through the glittering silence.
Now, this would normally be where I'd protest that silence doesn't glitter, and that if church bells are chiming, the world can't be silent.
But I've lived through a thousand or so winter mornings where there's just snow, and the sun glistening on snow. No sand, no salt, no shoveled-out driveways, no tire tracks in the snow on the road, no signs of any plowing. Just snow. And the world is hushed; you almost find yourself straining to hear something in the silence. And if it's a Sunday morning, the automatic carillon starts in the church down the street. So you can hear bells....but the sound only serves to emphasize how quiet the world is.
So...yeah. I think I know what she means here.
Harry then itemizes his scars:
He had spilled his own blood more times than he could count; he had lost all bones in his right arm once;
Well, yes, Harry, but that wasn't something you did deliberately. It's not even something you did, period. That was due to Gilderoy Lockhart trying to fix your broken arm and screwing up.
this journey had already given him scars to his chest and forearm to join those on his hand and forehead,
I'll go along with the scar on the chest—the locket Horcrux did, after all, burn "a scarlet oval over his heart"—but the marks on Harry's forearm were described as "half-healed puncture marks" about ten minutes ago, book time. I really think that a wound has to have healed before it can be called a scar.
but never, until this moment, had he felt himself to be fatally weakened, vulnerable, and naked, as though the best part of his magical power had been torn from him.
It must be difficult to feel that you can't even put up a hopeless fight. Moreover, Harry's upset not only because he lost his wand, but because his wand and Voldemort's had tail feather cores from the same phoenix, which meant that they couldn't successfully cast spells at each other. Now that invulnerability is gone. Understandably, he's not best pleased.
He puts the bits of his wand in the Mokeskin pouch, which he realizes contains nothing but junk and broken stuff. For a minute, Harry is tempted to throw away the Snitch DD left him because it's singularly unhelpful, which would be understandable but dumb. The seemingly useless, broken, worthless junk that any sane person would throw away is always the stuff you need to keep. Geez, Harry, read a few fairy tales, why don't you? That way you might recognize the tropes.
Then Harry gets mad at Dumbledore. All right. I can get behind that. The problem is that Harry's not blaming the Dumb One for the right reasons:
Out of sheer desperation they had talked themselves into believing that Godric’s Hollow held answers, convinced themselves that they were supposed to go back, that it was all part of some secret path laid out for them by Dumbledore: but there was no map, no plan.
The key words are "talked themselves" and "convinced themselves." Dumbledore is guilty of a great many things. He gave an Invisibility Cloak to an eleven-year-old boy, knowing that Harry would use it. He sent two children onto Hogwarts grounds to play with the space-time continuum, knowing that the kids would risk being infected, maimed, killed or eaten by a hungry werewolf, captured or killed by two suspected Death Eaters, both of whom had wands and one of whom had an executioner's axe, or rendered soulless by a hundred or more starving Dementors. He didn't even attempt to cancel the Triwizard Tournament or find a loophole that would render the magical contract null and void, even though he had reason to suspect that someone was using the Tournament to set Harry up and that all the students at Hogwarts, as well as all the champions, might be in danger. He kept secrets from Harry. He utterly failed to stand by Sirius after the Potters died—even if Sirius HAD been guilty, he would have deserved a trial and actual evidence, rather than just being banged up in prison on the Minister's say-so. And he brought Tom Riddle to Hogwarts himself...despite knowing that eleven-year-old Tom Riddle was an evil little sod who killed pets, tortured small children into madness,and could make people hurt if he wanted to.
(I don't know about you, but I'd wonder about a kid like that. The wisest wizard in the world, however, completely missed these little tells, failing to grasp that they might indicate that Tommy-boy wasn't such a nice fellow.)
So yes, there is plenty to blame DD for.
Blaming him for Harry's and Hermione's bad decisions, however, simply isn't on. Harry and Hermione chose to go to Godric's Hollow despite the fact that they suspected that it was a trap and that the Death Eaters were watching the place. Considering that they spent a couple of chapters debating this and chose to go there anyway, I can't really blame Dumbledore, much as I'd like to.
Dumbledore had left them to grope in the darkness, to wrestle with unknown and undreamed-of terrors, alone and unaided:
Okay, see, that I can blame him for.
Nothing was explained,
Knowing the way that Dumbledore works, I was certain on the first read-through that everything would be explained in vast detail once we were at the close of the book and didn't care anymore. Dumbledore is such an Author's Darling that I knew Rowling would find a way to have him bore us from beyond the grave.
nothing was given freely, they had no sword, and now, Harry had no wand.
To be fair, they haven't got the sword YET.
Hermione brings Harry some tea, because tea makes everything better. She also gives him a copy of The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore, which contains a copy of the photograph that Harry just dropped in the debacle with Bathilda. Apparently Rita Skeeter gave Bathilda Bagshot one of her author's copies. An autographed copy:
“ ‘Dear Batty, Thanks for your help. Here’s a copy of the book, hope you like it. You said everything, even if you don’t remember it. Rita.’
I don't know about you, but if I were Bathilda, I don't think I'd appreciate being called Batty. Especially since she's presented before this as being semi-senile. Can you imagine being called Batty Batty?
Harry looked down upon Dumbledore’s face and experienced a surge of savage pleasure: Now he would know if all the things that Dumbledore had never thought it worth telling him, whether Dumbledore wanted him to or not.
And it only took you seven books to get to this level of curiosity!
After reassuring Hermione, who thinks, correctly, that Harry is still mad at her, Harry opens the book. He finds the photograph he's looking for almost instantly.
He came across the one he sought almost at once, the young Dumbledore and his handsome companion, roaring with laughter at some long-forgotten joke.
Harry's been checking out that photograph for several chapters. Each time, the unidentified male has been described as handsome, as well as having long gold hair and a merry face that reminds Harry of the Weasley twins. This is also, incidentally, the same guy who stole the Elder Wand from Gregorovitch the Wandmaker. Harry never gets particularly upset by the theft, though. I guess bad things are only bad when they're done by Slytherins or ugly people, rather than Gryffindors and people who are hot.
Harry dropped his eyes to the caption.
Ewww, Harry! Why don't you put your eyes back in your head? Maybe then you won't drop them!
Albus Dumbledore, shortly after his mother’s death, With his friend Gellert Grindelwald.
I know it's possible to roar with laughter shortly after someone dies and still be sincerely grieving. Nevertheless, this is not creating the most wonderful of impressions.
Oh, and "Gellert" is a name. It's Hungarian for "Gerard." A Hungarian first name and a Swiss last name? Probably not what Rowling was going for.
The next section can be summarized thus:
Harry: Grindelwald?
Hermione: Grindelwald?
Harry and Hermione: GRINDELWALD?!
Harry searches for mentions of Grindelwald. He hits the jackpot in a chapter called "The Greater Good."
Now approaching his eighteenth birthday, Dumbledore left Hogwarts in a blaze of glory --- Head Boy, Prefect, Winner of the Barnabus Finkley Prize for Exceptional Spell-Casting,
This last being something that we've never heard of before. Isn't it kind of odd that Hermione didn't win this?
British Youth Representative to the Wizengamot,
Which we've also never heard of before.
Gold Medal-Winner for Ground-Breaking Contribution to the International Alchemical Conference in Cairo.
Third thing that we've never of before. This is the first and last reference to alchemy that I've ever seen in these books. I swear she tossed it in just to throw a bone to the readers who spent so much time inventing convoluted alchemic theories about the novels.
Dumbledore intended, next, to take a Grand Tour with Elphias "Dogbreath" Doge, the dim-witted but devoted sidekick he had picked up at school.
Oookay. So Albus is planning on traveling all over Europe, unsupervised, with another young man stated to be devoted to him. Is it just me, or does she not recognize the implicit slashiness?
Also, Doge is pronounced like the first syllable of "dojo", not like "dog." That's the problem with using nicknames based on the way a name looks rather than how it sounds.
The two young men were staying at the Leaky Cauldron in London, preparing to depart for Greece the following morning,
I bet they were.
Skeeter's book has a few things to say about DD going back to Godric's Hollow to take care of his younger brother and sister. Aberforth is described as being crazy, running wild and throwing goatshit at the head of one Enid Smeek. As we're not told when DD was going off on his Grand Tour, we don't know if this is accurate. Aberforth could easily have been back at Hogwarts, studying for his OWLs. And I can't really imagine a fifteen-year-old throwing goatshit for days on end as an amusement. It sounds like something a kid would do. A real, real little kid.
The book says that DD was "imprisoning" his sister, even after their mother's death. There are a lot of references to Airhead's—I mean, Ariana's—illness, frailty and delicacy, all of which Skeeter admits to doubting strongly. There's also a lot of talk about Bathilda Bagshot, and how Rita Skeeter deduced enough from talking to her to learn DD's most closely guarded secrets.
Some of Rita's lines re: Bathilda are odd.
Kendra, of course, had rebuffed Bathilda when she first attempted to welcome the family to the village.
Why "of course," Skeeter?
Several years later, however, the author sent an owl to Albus at Hogwarts, having been favorably impressed by his paper on transspecies transformation in Transfiguration Today.
I'm not exactly sure why a magical historian would be interested in a fourteen-year-old's article on how to Transfigure one species into another. It doesn't seem to have much to do with history.
(And yes, he'd have been fourteen. Several is generally construed as three or four. DD was eleven when the family moved to Godric's Hollow, plus several years later = fourteen. Fifteen at the oldest.)
At the time of Kendra’s death, Bathilda was the only person in Godric’s Hollow who was on speaking terms with Dumbledore’s mother.
Gee, even Kendra's children weren't talking to her!
After more talk about Bathilda, Skeeter starts talking about Gellert Grindelwald...who, the summer that Kendra died, was visiting his Great Aunt Bathilda in Godric's Hollow.
Grindelwald, it develops, went to Durmstrang (no surprise there, since Viktor Krum saw his mark carved in the wall). Like the Dumb One, Gellert was very good at school, though he didn't dedicate himself to winning prizes. Perhaps he couldn't. I mean, what kind of award would you give a teenager who was good at the Dark Arts? The Clothilde Kleinhuffer Cup for Covalvent Cursing? The Anselm Adelbert Award for Astonishing Avada Kedavras?
Anyway, Gellert, whose name I keep wanting to pronounce as Jello, eventually gets expelled for being a bad 'un.
At sixteen years old, even Durmstrang felt it could no longer turn a blind eye to the twisted experiments of Gellert Grindelwald, and he was expelled.
I did not know that Durmstrang was both a school and a sixteen-year-old human. Amazing, the things that go on in the wizarding world!
Anyway, Bathilda introduces sixteen-year-old Gellert to seventeen-year-old Albus, and the two get along famously...
“Yes, even after they’d spent all day in discussion --- both such brilliant young boys, they got on like a cauldron on fire --- I’d sometimes hear an owl tapping at Gellert’s bedroom window, delivering a letter from Albus! An idea would have struck him and he had to let Gellert know immediately!”
Spend all day together, and then send each other letters. Ah, young love. Seriously, I think that at this point the subtext, as Rupert Giles would say, is becoming text.
Then we get a letter from the Dumb One to Grendel:
Your point about Wizard dominance being FOR THE MUGGLES’ OWN GOOD --- this, I think, is the crucial point.
Or the crucial rationalization.
Yes, we have been given power
Given by whom? Certainly not God, though that's implicit in the line. Generally wizards are not especially religious; their celebration of Christmas, Easter vacation and Hufflepuff's ghost, the Fat Friar are virtually the only signs of religion this world has.
(I don't think we can count Sirius and Harry being godfathers, as neither Sirius nor Harry show the slightest awareness of anything related to any religion. Presumably, then, christenings and godfathers are a cultural thing.)
and yes, that power gives us the right to rule,
No, Dumb One. Magical power gives you the ability to seize political power. It doesn't give you the RIGHT to do it. Unless you're willing to concede that superiority in numbers, weaponry and technology gives Muggles the RIGHT to take over the wizarding world. That baaaaaad case of entitlement you've got cuts both ways.
but it also gives us responsibilities over the ruled.
Please note that the Dumb One doesn't seem to feel that one of those responsibilities is finding out if the ruled need, or indeed want to be ruled in the first place.
We must stress this point, it will be the foundation stone upon which we build.
To be technical—and when was I not?--that comma after "point" should be a semi-colon or a full stop.
SNIP!
We seize control FOR THE GREATER GOOD.
Isn't it amazing how much "the greater good" looks like greed, overweening ambition and a paternalistic attitude toward others that borders on contempt? You know, Dumbledore, you'd have made a wonderful Death Eater. I refuse to believe that you weren't in Slytherin.
And from this it follows that where we meet resistance, we must use only the force that is necessary and no more.
Of course, just how much force might be considered necessary is rather open to interpretation, isn't?
(This was your mistake at Durmstrang!
So does this mean that a sixteen-year-old wizard tried applying unnecessary force to all of the Muggles in attendance at Durmstrang? Wait, didn't it say earlier that he was expelled for "twisted experiments"?
SNIP!
Astonished and appalled though his many admirers will be, this letter constitutes proof that Albus Dumbledore once dreamed of overthrowing the Statute of Secrecy, and establishing Wizard's First rule over Muggles.
Now, I know that Rowling doesn't intend me to believe this line, because Skeeter is trash-talking Dumbledore. It's supposed to be all tense and suspenseful and how-could-anyone-think-that-of-Dumbledore! But the thing is, I have no problem believing it. How many times does he not tell Harry something for what Dumbledore claims is his own good? How many times does he put clues to the path of danger in Harry's way for the greater good? How many times do people suffer and die in these books because DD is committed to "the big picture"? Not to mention that in this book, DD is dead, and Harry and Snape are STILL dancing to the old twit's tune.
No, Dumbledore never really gave up that attitude of "what I am doing is for the greater good." Which is a pity, because so much of what he did for the greater good ended up being for someone else's bad.
Anyway, Skeeter continues to point out just how bad this makes Dumbledore look—because we couldn't POSSIBLY notice this without Skeeter saying so, could we, Rowling?--and then tells us that:
1)Ariana died under Mysterious Circumstances.
2)Grindelwald high-tailed it out of Godric's Hollow the day after she died.
3)Aberforth blamed Albus for Ariana's death.
4)Aberforth broke Albus's nose at Ariana's funeral.
Now, I was expecting a murder investigation which nearly ruined DD's career. But no, there wasn't. A little girl dies, a person guilty of "twisted experiments" known to have been there when she died flees the country—and the wizarding world does NOTHING. No questioning of the one remaining witness. No asking Aberforth just why he suspected his brother. Not even so much as a paragraph-long background sketch indicating that some town watchman, some sheriff, some Auror even considered that there was anything even vaguely wrong with what happened.
I could accept a cover-up by the family. I could accept that the circumstances looked bad but in fact weren't. What I can't accept is that no one, looking at those circumstances, suspected a thing until Skeeter.
Because, of course, it's Dumbledore.
Riiiight. Pardon me while I spit fire.
Neither Dumbledore nor Grindelwald ever seems to have referred to this brief boyhood friendship in later life.
Oh, I bet they didn't. Especially since I wouldn't use the term "friendship." It flared up briefly and ended just as quickly. I'd call it a "crush."
However, there can be no doubt that Dumbledore delayed, for some five years of turmoil, fatalities, and disappearances, his attack upon Gellert Grindelwald.
Presumably this means that Dumbledore could have attacked and defeated Grindelwald in 1939—and thus prevented World War II, and all of the hideous deaths that took place as a result.
Think about what that implies.
More than six million Jews died. One or two million Catholics. Three million gypsies, and I don't know how many disabled people or trade unionists or Communists or twins died. Somewhere between fourteen and seventeen million, I read.
All were labeled nonhuman.
And experiments on the "nonhumans." How much pain or fire or cold they could bear. Or breeding experiments to see if these people they called inhuman could be interbred with animals.
Seventeen million people.
And that was just in the death camps.
Forty-four million MORE died for the Allies. England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Yanks, France, Poland, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Australia, New Zealand, and so on.
Sixty-one countries fought over three-quarters of the world.
More than sixty-one million people. (That's not even counting the eleven million or so who died fighting for the Axis Powers.)
Maybe it's me, but I'm absolutely furious at Rowling for minimizing the consequences of Dumbledore's actions. At the same time, I'm mad that millions upon millions of people could be suffering, fighting and dying for their families, friends and freedom, both in various armies and in resistance movements...and that none of it matters in Rowlingland. Because in Rowlingland, saving the world in World War II, as in 1998, is the job of a white Anglo-Saxon male. No other saviors of the world need apply—even if said white Anglo-Saxon male can't be bothered to get up off his fat arse and save close to a hundred million lives by fighting a former friend.
Okay. I am in a "TROGDOR SMASH!" kind of mood. I'll be back later when my stomach isn't roiling.
::::::
Back now.
Was it lingering affection for the man or fear of exposure as his once best friend that caused Dumbledore to hesitate?
I'll take "Fear of Exposure" for $2000, Alex. (Is there any other choice? Dumbledore is a manipulative old codger who has never loved anyone but himself.)
Was it only reluctantly that Dumbledore set out to capture the man he was once so delighted he had met?
Don't know, don't care. What I DO care about is that Dumbledore faffed about, delaying going after the then-Dark Lord for more than five years for no reason that's ever given, costing wizards and Muggles alike their lives. The why doesn't matter to me. I don't give a damn whether he delayed because he was helping Edward Elric Nicolas Flamel create the Philosopher's Stone, or because he was mourning for Ariana, or whatever. It's the delay itself I can't get past. I'm really not seeing doing nothing as millions die as the act of "one of the bravest men Harry ever knew."
There is more speculation on why Ariana died, all couched in questions. This is a trick that I remember from a Dick Francis book. All the unfavorable speculation was in the form of questions so that the British press couldn't be accused of saying anything that wasn't true.
The chapter ended here
YAY!
and Harry looked up.
Oh, drat. Wrong chapter, then.
Hermione closes the book for Harry:
She tugged the book out of Harry’s hands, looking a little alarmed by his expression, and closed it without looking at it, as though hiding something indecent.
Hermione Granger—-future employee of Six Apart.
Harry is devastated.
He had trusted Dumbledore, believed him the embodiment of goodness and wisdom.
How did this kid get to be seventeen years old AND grow up with the Dursleys, and yet never once experience a moment of doubt about the adults in his life?
All was ashes: How much more could he lose? Ron, Dumbledore, the phoenix wand...
Notice that his parents and Sirius are not on this list. Nor is Mad-Eye Moody, who risked and gave his life to save Harry. Nope. It's all about Ron, a dysfunctional wand, and the Harrydore.
Hermione protests that this is about what you could expect from Rita Skeeter. Harry brings up the letter. Hermione provides more exposition dump.
'For the Greater Good' became Grindelwald's slogan, his justification for all the atrocities he committed later. And . . . from that . . . it looks like Dumbledore gave him the idea. They say 'For the Greater Good' was even carved over the entrance to Nurmengard."
Nurmengard. Sheesh. Is this the world where the German-Soviet Alliance actually took?
And is anyone but me hearing about a slogan over the entrance of a prison and thinking about Auschwitz? And does anyone else wish that Rowling would stop doing this?
Harry, of course, doesn't know anything--what a surprise!---so he has to ask Hermione what Nurmengard is. She tells him it's the prison that Grindelwald built, and that he was imprisoned there after DD defeated him.
Anyway, it's --- it’s an awful thought that Dumbledore's ideas helped Grindelwald rise to power.
I fail to see why it's any worse than anyone else's ideas helping him rise to power.
Hermione then protests that Dumbledore and Grindelwald were very young and didn't know better. Riiight. Because there's such a vast difference between being eighteen and being sixteen or seventeen. Even Harry calls her on this, which is amazing.
They were the same age as we are now. And here we are, risking our lives to fight the Dark Arts, and there he was, in a huddle with his new best friend, plotting their rise to power over the Muggles."
Saying she's not defending Dumbledore, Hermione continues to try to defend Dumbledore:
But Harry, his mother had just died, he was stuck alone in the house ---"
Because parental deaths and solitude plainly cause desire for world domination. And Harry points out another fact:
"Alone? He wasn't alone! He had his brother and sister for company
Hermione protests that she doesn't believe that Ariana was a Squib. She says that the Dumbledore she knew wouldn't have done that.
"The Dumbledore we thought we knew didn't want to conquer Muggles by force!" Harry shouted, his voice echoing across the empty hilltop
Hermione then starts playing fast and loose with the facts:
Dumbledore was the one who stopped Grindelwald,
Well, he defeated Grindelwald in a magical duel. I'm not sure that constitutes stopping all of Grindelwald's forces.
the one who always voted for Muggle protection and Muggle born rights,
No, he didn't. Wizards don't have a legislature, or an electoral process. There's just the Minister of Magic—who's appointed, not elected. He and his staff issue what "decrees" they like (See also: Umbridge). How do you vote for something when your form of government makes no provision for voting?
who fought You-Know-Who from the start,
And who brought him to Hogwarts too, despite knowing that eleven-year-old Tom liked killing other children's pets, torturing small children until they weren't right in the head, and making other people hurt if he wanted them to. I don't think Dumbledore deserves much credit for opposing Voldemort when, if it weren't for him, there would be neither a fully trained Voldemort nor any Horcruxes in the first place.
and who died trying to bring him down!"
Oh, rubbish. Snape killed an old fool who was dying of poison and an curse. Euthanasia is not the same thing as noble self-sacrifice!
Hermione then says that Harry's mad because DD never told him any of this. Harry explodes, and in a fairly sane manner:
"Look what he asked from me, Hermione! Risk your life, Harry! And again! And again! And don't expect me to explain everything, just trust me blindly, trust that I know what I'm doing, trust me even though I don't trust you! Never the whole truth! Never!"
Geez, Harry. It only took you seven books to notice this, but you finally got there. Congratulations.
Hermione tries telling Harry that DD loved him, which, in view of the rest of this book and the six preceding it, is such a blatant lie that I expected her to be struck by lightning. Harry, displaying an unusual amount of sense, refutes this:
"I don't know who he loved, Hermione, but it was never me. This isn't love, the mess he's left me in. He shared a damn sight more of what he was really thinking with Gellert Grindelwald than he ever shared with me."
APPLAUSE!
Harry tells Hermione to go back in the tent, which she does. As she exits stage left, he "hated himself for wishing that what she said was true: that Dumbledore had really cared.
And I hate Rowling for trying to convince us that despite the Dumb One being a lazy, negligent, manipulative incipient dictator-world conquerer, he's really a good guy.
I'm going to be honest with you lot; there were occasional bits I liked here. The chapter is short, lucid, emotional without being emo and informative without drowning us in exposition or lack of continuity. It's rare to find such a chapter in Rowling. I don't know how to explain it. Perhaps she wrote it when the moon was in the seventh house and Jupiter had aligned with Mars.
Regrettably, Dumbledore is odious in this chapter. More odious than usual, I mean. And there's one sentence where the sheer insensitivity of the wizarding world (and Rowling) made me physically sick.
As the chapter begins, Harry has just awakened from unconsciousness after very nearly being killed by Snake! Bathilda. Rowling describes Harry gazing out on a cold, glittering winter world devoid of color, not knowing what to do next, or how to feel. His wand is irreparably damaged and, since he doesn't know how to do wandless magic, he feels utterly helpless.
He managed to get Hermione to loan him her wand in the previous chapter, but it's not the same. Considering all the emphasis on the wand choosing the wizard, I imagine that losing a wand is losing an arm or a leg; it's that much a part of you. [I am not using the Penis Analogy because witches lose their wands in this book, too, and it seems to distress them no less than the male wizards.] Consequently, simply borrowing someone else's wand seems rather like borrowing a prosthetic. One for which you haven't been fitted. And that doesn't feel quite right. And that doesn't do everything that your own limb could. And that's constantly chafing and reminding you that it IS a prosthetic.
So yes, I do feel a little bit sorry for Harry here. That does not mean, however, that I can ignore the following:
Simply to be alive to watch the sun rise over the sparkling snowy hillside ought to have been the greatest treasure on earth, yet he could not appreciate it: his senses had been spiked by the calamity of losing his wand.
OUCH. What a swag-bellied sentence. "Simply to be alive" instead of "being alive", a colon instead of a full stop or a semi-colon, and...what are "spiked senses"?
He looked out over a valley blanketed in snow, distant church bells chiming through the glittering silence.
Now, this would normally be where I'd protest that silence doesn't glitter, and that if church bells are chiming, the world can't be silent.
But I've lived through a thousand or so winter mornings where there's just snow, and the sun glistening on snow. No sand, no salt, no shoveled-out driveways, no tire tracks in the snow on the road, no signs of any plowing. Just snow. And the world is hushed; you almost find yourself straining to hear something in the silence. And if it's a Sunday morning, the automatic carillon starts in the church down the street. So you can hear bells....but the sound only serves to emphasize how quiet the world is.
So...yeah. I think I know what she means here.
Harry then itemizes his scars:
He had spilled his own blood more times than he could count; he had lost all bones in his right arm once;
Well, yes, Harry, but that wasn't something you did deliberately. It's not even something you did, period. That was due to Gilderoy Lockhart trying to fix your broken arm and screwing up.
this journey had already given him scars to his chest and forearm to join those on his hand and forehead,
I'll go along with the scar on the chest—the locket Horcrux did, after all, burn "a scarlet oval over his heart"—but the marks on Harry's forearm were described as "half-healed puncture marks" about ten minutes ago, book time. I really think that a wound has to have healed before it can be called a scar.
but never, until this moment, had he felt himself to be fatally weakened, vulnerable, and naked, as though the best part of his magical power had been torn from him.
It must be difficult to feel that you can't even put up a hopeless fight. Moreover, Harry's upset not only because he lost his wand, but because his wand and Voldemort's had tail feather cores from the same phoenix, which meant that they couldn't successfully cast spells at each other. Now that invulnerability is gone. Understandably, he's not best pleased.
He puts the bits of his wand in the Mokeskin pouch, which he realizes contains nothing but junk and broken stuff. For a minute, Harry is tempted to throw away the Snitch DD left him because it's singularly unhelpful, which would be understandable but dumb. The seemingly useless, broken, worthless junk that any sane person would throw away is always the stuff you need to keep. Geez, Harry, read a few fairy tales, why don't you? That way you might recognize the tropes.
Then Harry gets mad at Dumbledore. All right. I can get behind that. The problem is that Harry's not blaming the Dumb One for the right reasons:
Out of sheer desperation they had talked themselves into believing that Godric’s Hollow held answers, convinced themselves that they were supposed to go back, that it was all part of some secret path laid out for them by Dumbledore: but there was no map, no plan.
The key words are "talked themselves" and "convinced themselves." Dumbledore is guilty of a great many things. He gave an Invisibility Cloak to an eleven-year-old boy, knowing that Harry would use it. He sent two children onto Hogwarts grounds to play with the space-time continuum, knowing that the kids would risk being infected, maimed, killed or eaten by a hungry werewolf, captured or killed by two suspected Death Eaters, both of whom had wands and one of whom had an executioner's axe, or rendered soulless by a hundred or more starving Dementors. He didn't even attempt to cancel the Triwizard Tournament or find a loophole that would render the magical contract null and void, even though he had reason to suspect that someone was using the Tournament to set Harry up and that all the students at Hogwarts, as well as all the champions, might be in danger. He kept secrets from Harry. He utterly failed to stand by Sirius after the Potters died—even if Sirius HAD been guilty, he would have deserved a trial and actual evidence, rather than just being banged up in prison on the Minister's say-so. And he brought Tom Riddle to Hogwarts himself...despite knowing that eleven-year-old Tom Riddle was an evil little sod who killed pets, tortured small children into madness,and could make people hurt if he wanted to.
(I don't know about you, but I'd wonder about a kid like that. The wisest wizard in the world, however, completely missed these little tells, failing to grasp that they might indicate that Tommy-boy wasn't such a nice fellow.)
So yes, there is plenty to blame DD for.
Blaming him for Harry's and Hermione's bad decisions, however, simply isn't on. Harry and Hermione chose to go to Godric's Hollow despite the fact that they suspected that it was a trap and that the Death Eaters were watching the place. Considering that they spent a couple of chapters debating this and chose to go there anyway, I can't really blame Dumbledore, much as I'd like to.
Dumbledore had left them to grope in the darkness, to wrestle with unknown and undreamed-of terrors, alone and unaided:
Okay, see, that I can blame him for.
Nothing was explained,
Knowing the way that Dumbledore works, I was certain on the first read-through that everything would be explained in vast detail once we were at the close of the book and didn't care anymore. Dumbledore is such an Author's Darling that I knew Rowling would find a way to have him bore us from beyond the grave.
nothing was given freely, they had no sword, and now, Harry had no wand.
To be fair, they haven't got the sword YET.
Hermione brings Harry some tea, because tea makes everything better. She also gives him a copy of The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore, which contains a copy of the photograph that Harry just dropped in the debacle with Bathilda. Apparently Rita Skeeter gave Bathilda Bagshot one of her author's copies. An autographed copy:
“ ‘Dear Batty, Thanks for your help. Here’s a copy of the book, hope you like it. You said everything, even if you don’t remember it. Rita.’
I don't know about you, but if I were Bathilda, I don't think I'd appreciate being called Batty. Especially since she's presented before this as being semi-senile. Can you imagine being called Batty Batty?
Harry looked down upon Dumbledore’s face and experienced a surge of savage pleasure: Now he would know if all the things that Dumbledore had never thought it worth telling him, whether Dumbledore wanted him to or not.
And it only took you seven books to get to this level of curiosity!
After reassuring Hermione, who thinks, correctly, that Harry is still mad at her, Harry opens the book. He finds the photograph he's looking for almost instantly.
He came across the one he sought almost at once, the young Dumbledore and his handsome companion, roaring with laughter at some long-forgotten joke.
Harry's been checking out that photograph for several chapters. Each time, the unidentified male has been described as handsome, as well as having long gold hair and a merry face that reminds Harry of the Weasley twins. This is also, incidentally, the same guy who stole the Elder Wand from Gregorovitch the Wandmaker. Harry never gets particularly upset by the theft, though. I guess bad things are only bad when they're done by Slytherins or ugly people, rather than Gryffindors and people who are hot.
Harry dropped his eyes to the caption.
Ewww, Harry! Why don't you put your eyes back in your head? Maybe then you won't drop them!
Albus Dumbledore, shortly after his mother’s death, With his friend Gellert Grindelwald.
I know it's possible to roar with laughter shortly after someone dies and still be sincerely grieving. Nevertheless, this is not creating the most wonderful of impressions.
Oh, and "Gellert" is a name. It's Hungarian for "Gerard." A Hungarian first name and a Swiss last name? Probably not what Rowling was going for.
The next section can be summarized thus:
Harry: Grindelwald?
Hermione: Grindelwald?
Harry and Hermione: GRINDELWALD?!
Harry searches for mentions of Grindelwald. He hits the jackpot in a chapter called "The Greater Good."
Now approaching his eighteenth birthday, Dumbledore left Hogwarts in a blaze of glory --- Head Boy, Prefect, Winner of the Barnabus Finkley Prize for Exceptional Spell-Casting,
This last being something that we've never heard of before. Isn't it kind of odd that Hermione didn't win this?
British Youth Representative to the Wizengamot,
Which we've also never heard of before.
Gold Medal-Winner for Ground-Breaking Contribution to the International Alchemical Conference in Cairo.
Third thing that we've never of before. This is the first and last reference to alchemy that I've ever seen in these books. I swear she tossed it in just to throw a bone to the readers who spent so much time inventing convoluted alchemic theories about the novels.
Dumbledore intended, next, to take a Grand Tour with Elphias "Dogbreath" Doge, the dim-witted but devoted sidekick he had picked up at school.
Oookay. So Albus is planning on traveling all over Europe, unsupervised, with another young man stated to be devoted to him. Is it just me, or does she not recognize the implicit slashiness?
Also, Doge is pronounced like the first syllable of "dojo", not like "dog." That's the problem with using nicknames based on the way a name looks rather than how it sounds.
The two young men were staying at the Leaky Cauldron in London, preparing to depart for Greece the following morning,
I bet they were.
Skeeter's book has a few things to say about DD going back to Godric's Hollow to take care of his younger brother and sister. Aberforth is described as being crazy, running wild and throwing goatshit at the head of one Enid Smeek. As we're not told when DD was going off on his Grand Tour, we don't know if this is accurate. Aberforth could easily have been back at Hogwarts, studying for his OWLs. And I can't really imagine a fifteen-year-old throwing goatshit for days on end as an amusement. It sounds like something a kid would do. A real, real little kid.
The book says that DD was "imprisoning" his sister, even after their mother's death. There are a lot of references to Airhead's—I mean, Ariana's—illness, frailty and delicacy, all of which Skeeter admits to doubting strongly. There's also a lot of talk about Bathilda Bagshot, and how Rita Skeeter deduced enough from talking to her to learn DD's most closely guarded secrets.
Some of Rita's lines re: Bathilda are odd.
Kendra, of course, had rebuffed Bathilda when she first attempted to welcome the family to the village.
Why "of course," Skeeter?
Several years later, however, the author sent an owl to Albus at Hogwarts, having been favorably impressed by his paper on transspecies transformation in Transfiguration Today.
I'm not exactly sure why a magical historian would be interested in a fourteen-year-old's article on how to Transfigure one species into another. It doesn't seem to have much to do with history.
(And yes, he'd have been fourteen. Several is generally construed as three or four. DD was eleven when the family moved to Godric's Hollow, plus several years later = fourteen. Fifteen at the oldest.)
At the time of Kendra’s death, Bathilda was the only person in Godric’s Hollow who was on speaking terms with Dumbledore’s mother.
Gee, even Kendra's children weren't talking to her!
After more talk about Bathilda, Skeeter starts talking about Gellert Grindelwald...who, the summer that Kendra died, was visiting his Great Aunt Bathilda in Godric's Hollow.
Grindelwald, it develops, went to Durmstrang (no surprise there, since Viktor Krum saw his mark carved in the wall). Like the Dumb One, Gellert was very good at school, though he didn't dedicate himself to winning prizes. Perhaps he couldn't. I mean, what kind of award would you give a teenager who was good at the Dark Arts? The Clothilde Kleinhuffer Cup for Covalvent Cursing? The Anselm Adelbert Award for Astonishing Avada Kedavras?
Anyway, Gellert, whose name I keep wanting to pronounce as Jello, eventually gets expelled for being a bad 'un.
At sixteen years old, even Durmstrang felt it could no longer turn a blind eye to the twisted experiments of Gellert Grindelwald, and he was expelled.
I did not know that Durmstrang was both a school and a sixteen-year-old human. Amazing, the things that go on in the wizarding world!
Anyway, Bathilda introduces sixteen-year-old Gellert to seventeen-year-old Albus, and the two get along famously...
“Yes, even after they’d spent all day in discussion --- both such brilliant young boys, they got on like a cauldron on fire --- I’d sometimes hear an owl tapping at Gellert’s bedroom window, delivering a letter from Albus! An idea would have struck him and he had to let Gellert know immediately!”
Spend all day together, and then send each other letters. Ah, young love. Seriously, I think that at this point the subtext, as Rupert Giles would say, is becoming text.
Then we get a letter from the Dumb One to Grendel:
Your point about Wizard dominance being FOR THE MUGGLES’ OWN GOOD --- this, I think, is the crucial point.
Or the crucial rationalization.
Yes, we have been given power
Given by whom? Certainly not God, though that's implicit in the line. Generally wizards are not especially religious; their celebration of Christmas, Easter vacation and Hufflepuff's ghost, the Fat Friar are virtually the only signs of religion this world has.
(I don't think we can count Sirius and Harry being godfathers, as neither Sirius nor Harry show the slightest awareness of anything related to any religion. Presumably, then, christenings and godfathers are a cultural thing.)
and yes, that power gives us the right to rule,
No, Dumb One. Magical power gives you the ability to seize political power. It doesn't give you the RIGHT to do it. Unless you're willing to concede that superiority in numbers, weaponry and technology gives Muggles the RIGHT to take over the wizarding world. That baaaaaad case of entitlement you've got cuts both ways.
but it also gives us responsibilities over the ruled.
Please note that the Dumb One doesn't seem to feel that one of those responsibilities is finding out if the ruled need, or indeed want to be ruled in the first place.
We must stress this point, it will be the foundation stone upon which we build.
To be technical—and when was I not?--that comma after "point" should be a semi-colon or a full stop.
SNIP!
We seize control FOR THE GREATER GOOD.
Isn't it amazing how much "the greater good" looks like greed, overweening ambition and a paternalistic attitude toward others that borders on contempt? You know, Dumbledore, you'd have made a wonderful Death Eater. I refuse to believe that you weren't in Slytherin.
And from this it follows that where we meet resistance, we must use only the force that is necessary and no more.
Of course, just how much force might be considered necessary is rather open to interpretation, isn't?
(This was your mistake at Durmstrang!
So does this mean that a sixteen-year-old wizard tried applying unnecessary force to all of the Muggles in attendance at Durmstrang? Wait, didn't it say earlier that he was expelled for "twisted experiments"?
SNIP!
Astonished and appalled though his many admirers will be, this letter constitutes proof that Albus Dumbledore once dreamed of overthrowing the Statute of Secrecy, and establishing Wizard's First rule over Muggles.
Now, I know that Rowling doesn't intend me to believe this line, because Skeeter is trash-talking Dumbledore. It's supposed to be all tense and suspenseful and how-could-anyone-think-that-of-Dumbledore! But the thing is, I have no problem believing it. How many times does he not tell Harry something for what Dumbledore claims is his own good? How many times does he put clues to the path of danger in Harry's way for the greater good? How many times do people suffer and die in these books because DD is committed to "the big picture"? Not to mention that in this book, DD is dead, and Harry and Snape are STILL dancing to the old twit's tune.
No, Dumbledore never really gave up that attitude of "what I am doing is for the greater good." Which is a pity, because so much of what he did for the greater good ended up being for someone else's bad.
Anyway, Skeeter continues to point out just how bad this makes Dumbledore look—because we couldn't POSSIBLY notice this without Skeeter saying so, could we, Rowling?--and then tells us that:
1)Ariana died under Mysterious Circumstances.
2)Grindelwald high-tailed it out of Godric's Hollow the day after she died.
3)Aberforth blamed Albus for Ariana's death.
4)Aberforth broke Albus's nose at Ariana's funeral.
Now, I was expecting a murder investigation which nearly ruined DD's career. But no, there wasn't. A little girl dies, a person guilty of "twisted experiments" known to have been there when she died flees the country—and the wizarding world does NOTHING. No questioning of the one remaining witness. No asking Aberforth just why he suspected his brother. Not even so much as a paragraph-long background sketch indicating that some town watchman, some sheriff, some Auror even considered that there was anything even vaguely wrong with what happened.
I could accept a cover-up by the family. I could accept that the circumstances looked bad but in fact weren't. What I can't accept is that no one, looking at those circumstances, suspected a thing until Skeeter.
Because, of course, it's Dumbledore.
Riiiight. Pardon me while I spit fire.
Neither Dumbledore nor Grindelwald ever seems to have referred to this brief boyhood friendship in later life.
Oh, I bet they didn't. Especially since I wouldn't use the term "friendship." It flared up briefly and ended just as quickly. I'd call it a "crush."
However, there can be no doubt that Dumbledore delayed, for some five years of turmoil, fatalities, and disappearances, his attack upon Gellert Grindelwald.
Presumably this means that Dumbledore could have attacked and defeated Grindelwald in 1939—and thus prevented World War II, and all of the hideous deaths that took place as a result.
Think about what that implies.
More than six million Jews died. One or two million Catholics. Three million gypsies, and I don't know how many disabled people or trade unionists or Communists or twins died. Somewhere between fourteen and seventeen million, I read.
All were labeled nonhuman.
And experiments on the "nonhumans." How much pain or fire or cold they could bear. Or breeding experiments to see if these people they called inhuman could be interbred with animals.
Seventeen million people.
And that was just in the death camps.
Forty-four million MORE died for the Allies. England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Yanks, France, Poland, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Australia, New Zealand, and so on.
Sixty-one countries fought over three-quarters of the world.
More than sixty-one million people. (That's not even counting the eleven million or so who died fighting for the Axis Powers.)
Maybe it's me, but I'm absolutely furious at Rowling for minimizing the consequences of Dumbledore's actions. At the same time, I'm mad that millions upon millions of people could be suffering, fighting and dying for their families, friends and freedom, both in various armies and in resistance movements...and that none of it matters in Rowlingland. Because in Rowlingland, saving the world in World War II, as in 1998, is the job of a white Anglo-Saxon male. No other saviors of the world need apply—even if said white Anglo-Saxon male can't be bothered to get up off his fat arse and save close to a hundred million lives by fighting a former friend.
Okay. I am in a "TROGDOR SMASH!" kind of mood. I'll be back later when my stomach isn't roiling.
::::::
Back now.
Was it lingering affection for the man or fear of exposure as his once best friend that caused Dumbledore to hesitate?
I'll take "Fear of Exposure" for $2000, Alex. (Is there any other choice? Dumbledore is a manipulative old codger who has never loved anyone but himself.)
Was it only reluctantly that Dumbledore set out to capture the man he was once so delighted he had met?
Don't know, don't care. What I DO care about is that Dumbledore faffed about, delaying going after the then-Dark Lord for more than five years for no reason that's ever given, costing wizards and Muggles alike their lives. The why doesn't matter to me. I don't give a damn whether he delayed because he was helping
There is more speculation on why Ariana died, all couched in questions. This is a trick that I remember from a Dick Francis book. All the unfavorable speculation was in the form of questions so that the British press couldn't be accused of saying anything that wasn't true.
The chapter ended here
YAY!
and Harry looked up.
Oh, drat. Wrong chapter, then.
Hermione closes the book for Harry:
She tugged the book out of Harry’s hands, looking a little alarmed by his expression, and closed it without looking at it, as though hiding something indecent.
Hermione Granger—-future employee of Six Apart.
Harry is devastated.
He had trusted Dumbledore, believed him the embodiment of goodness and wisdom.
How did this kid get to be seventeen years old AND grow up with the Dursleys, and yet never once experience a moment of doubt about the adults in his life?
All was ashes: How much more could he lose? Ron, Dumbledore, the phoenix wand...
Notice that his parents and Sirius are not on this list. Nor is Mad-Eye Moody, who risked and gave his life to save Harry. Nope. It's all about Ron, a dysfunctional wand, and the Harrydore.
Hermione protests that this is about what you could expect from Rita Skeeter. Harry brings up the letter. Hermione provides more exposition dump.
'For the Greater Good' became Grindelwald's slogan, his justification for all the atrocities he committed later. And . . . from that . . . it looks like Dumbledore gave him the idea. They say 'For the Greater Good' was even carved over the entrance to Nurmengard."
Nurmengard. Sheesh. Is this the world where the German-Soviet Alliance actually took?
And is anyone but me hearing about a slogan over the entrance of a prison and thinking about Auschwitz? And does anyone else wish that Rowling would stop doing this?
Harry, of course, doesn't know anything--what a surprise!---so he has to ask Hermione what Nurmengard is. She tells him it's the prison that Grindelwald built, and that he was imprisoned there after DD defeated him.
Anyway, it's --- it’s an awful thought that Dumbledore's ideas helped Grindelwald rise to power.
I fail to see why it's any worse than anyone else's ideas helping him rise to power.
Hermione then protests that Dumbledore and Grindelwald were very young and didn't know better. Riiight. Because there's such a vast difference between being eighteen and being sixteen or seventeen. Even Harry calls her on this, which is amazing.
They were the same age as we are now. And here we are, risking our lives to fight the Dark Arts, and there he was, in a huddle with his new best friend, plotting their rise to power over the Muggles."
Saying she's not defending Dumbledore, Hermione continues to try to defend Dumbledore:
But Harry, his mother had just died, he was stuck alone in the house ---"
Because parental deaths and solitude plainly cause desire for world domination. And Harry points out another fact:
"Alone? He wasn't alone! He had his brother and sister for company
Hermione protests that she doesn't believe that Ariana was a Squib. She says that the Dumbledore she knew wouldn't have done that.
"The Dumbledore we thought we knew didn't want to conquer Muggles by force!" Harry shouted, his voice echoing across the empty hilltop
Hermione then starts playing fast and loose with the facts:
Dumbledore was the one who stopped Grindelwald,
Well, he defeated Grindelwald in a magical duel. I'm not sure that constitutes stopping all of Grindelwald's forces.
the one who always voted for Muggle protection and Muggle born rights,
No, he didn't. Wizards don't have a legislature, or an electoral process. There's just the Minister of Magic—who's appointed, not elected. He and his staff issue what "decrees" they like (See also: Umbridge). How do you vote for something when your form of government makes no provision for voting?
who fought You-Know-Who from the start,
And who brought him to Hogwarts too, despite knowing that eleven-year-old Tom liked killing other children's pets, torturing small children until they weren't right in the head, and making other people hurt if he wanted them to. I don't think Dumbledore deserves much credit for opposing Voldemort when, if it weren't for him, there would be neither a fully trained Voldemort nor any Horcruxes in the first place.
and who died trying to bring him down!"
Oh, rubbish. Snape killed an old fool who was dying of poison and an curse. Euthanasia is not the same thing as noble self-sacrifice!
Hermione then says that Harry's mad because DD never told him any of this. Harry explodes, and in a fairly sane manner:
"Look what he asked from me, Hermione! Risk your life, Harry! And again! And again! And don't expect me to explain everything, just trust me blindly, trust that I know what I'm doing, trust me even though I don't trust you! Never the whole truth! Never!"
Geez, Harry. It only took you seven books to notice this, but you finally got there. Congratulations.
Hermione tries telling Harry that DD loved him, which, in view of the rest of this book and the six preceding it, is such a blatant lie that I expected her to be struck by lightning. Harry, displaying an unusual amount of sense, refutes this:
"I don't know who he loved, Hermione, but it was never me. This isn't love, the mess he's left me in. He shared a damn sight more of what he was really thinking with Gellert Grindelwald than he ever shared with me."
APPLAUSE!
Harry tells Hermione to go back in the tent, which she does. As she exits stage left, he "hated himself for wishing that what she said was true: that Dumbledore had really cared.
And I hate Rowling for trying to convince us that despite the Dumb One being a lazy, negligent, manipulative incipient dictator-world conquerer, he's really a good guy.
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