Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (and summer break!)
A masterfully told story with major issues.
We’re taking on Harry Potter 2 in this one, but first an announcement: the Snarf is going on summer break. I could use some time to relax, restock the review pipeline, and summer seems like an on-brand time to take some time off.
Stay subscribed: the Snarf will return when the next school year approaches. In the meantime, I’m sending you off with a bigger-than-normal review.
And now…
The Book: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
The Author: J.K. Rowling
Length/Picture Density: 340 pages, small pictures at the top of each chapter
I reviewed the first Harry Potter book, last month, and much of that still applies. The storytelling remains top-notch and the characters well-developed. Rowling has an obvious knack for pacing, drama, subtle hint-dropping, and weaving a cohesive story with lots of characters and sub-plots, while further developing the world. She’s also still transphobic, and I won’t argue with anyone who boycotts her work on those grounds.
Sometimes I wonder if I am too focused on things like pacing and information flow. A major part of how I evaluate narrative media for any age…okay five and up, is if the story is set up and played out in a way that feels natural and satisfying. But kids enjoy it either way, right? And so do most adults. So what’s the big deal?
I felt vindicated as we neared the end of The Chamber of Secrets, where we start getting all the big reveals, and Leo was literally careening off the walls, naming the major plot points like a crazed conspiracy theorist. Lots of stories can keep you engaged, even if the storytelling is only so-so, but it takes another level of skill to send kids bouncing around the room (and to launch an enormous media empire). Leo’s reaction reminded me of when I read the first few Harry Potter books in my freshman year of college. Once I got to around 100 pages left, there was practically no way I was going to stop reading until I finished.
Leo, 6, still needs some hand-holding to understand what’s going on at points, but once kids are at an age to follow the story, it’s engaging at a level that can be hard to find elsewhere.
And also, I have warnings galore for you. We have self-harm, slavery, the celebration of other people getting potentially hurt or killed by both good guys and bad, and a whole lot of dead people. They’re ghosts, not just corpses, but there’s plenty of discussion of death as well. The ghosts are in the first book too, but mostly as side characters — in this one we end up at a ghost party. Also, there are living people, eventually including one of the main good-guy characters, who are put into a sort of magical coma. There’s no real drama about whether they will emerge — they do — but it still could be spooky, especially for kids who have seen an actual person in that state. Oh, and there’s a scene near the end that will not sit well with anyone who has a fear or spiders. Also snakes. The book generally reinforces snake fears, but the spider scene is like something from a horror movie.
One general point before we start wading through all that: the good guys in the Harry Potter books are generally balanced. They have well-defined personality traits, but there’s a sense of normalcy and stability around them. The stern ones will soften up at times, and the goofy or whimsical ones can get serious when the situation truly calls for it.
The bad guys, and some of the well-meaning characters, have their personality traits pushed to such a relentless degree that we are never meant to sympathize with them. We are meant to enjoy their misfortune, because they are caricatures.
Which brings me to Dobby.
I do not like Dobby. He is the Jar Jar Binks of the Harry Potter series: annoying, aggravating, and very problematic.
Dobby is a house elf. What’s a house elf? Many things, but for one, a house elf is a slave — specifically a slave to whichever rich wizard family owns them. The existence of slavery in the story is actually reasonably well handled, and I’m impressed Rowling was willing to go there. However, we only get one exemplar of a house elf, and he’s such an impish freak, that the story seems to be egging the reader into thinking, “yeah, this is bad on principle, but maybe it’s fine if everyone is nice to each other.”
The presentation of Dobby seems to invite a moderate position on whether wizarding families should be able to own perfectly intelligent and powerful creatures, and the main way this plays out is through Dobby’s penchant for self-harm.
Dobby loves Harry Potter so much for dispatching the dark lord that he has to warn him about a coming danger, but he is also so loyal to the family that owns him — which wouldn’t want him to warn Harry — that he has to hit his head against a wall immediately after doing so. This happens not just once, but after every few sentences he speaks. Dobby also mentions things like ironing his own fingers for some misstep with his owners. You, the reader, are supposed to enjoy the slapstick comedy.
Fortunately, he’s not all over the book — just a few key scenes, and the last one is actually quite satisfying.
A couple of tweaks and he’s a great character. Seriously, just give take away his grating speech patterns, make him sound like he’s got some non-human wisdom, and swap the loyalty-driven self harm for some kind of magical bond that he has to fight through to try and warn Harry (which can also solve the nuisance of the warning being needlessly ambiguous), and you’re in good shape. Or at least much better shape.
Enough said on him. We have another cringe-inducing character to tackle.
Gilderoy Lockhart, the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, is also very aggravating, but much less problematic. The comedy of an ego-maniacal buffoon was partly lost on Leo, but he worked better for me, having met the occasional person who meets that description. I found the story more fun in the second half of the book when he mostly gets out of the way so that the action can unfold, but he does provide some irritainment and connective tissue for the plot.
I have three real issues with the Lockhart narrative, which arise mostly out of plot convenience. One, and I mostly forgive this one, is that you cannot convince me that Dumbledore would have hired this guy. Second, Hermoine has a huge crush on him, that persists even after it becomes pretty clear that Lockhart is all style, no substance. Third (vague spoilers coming) at the end of the book, Harry and Ron basically force him into going on a suicide mission, and it’s not really clear why. (He survives.) At the time that they do it, there’s a pretty obvious course of action, which involves gathering some other teachers to help, but that would sidestep the desired end of Lockhart’s narrative, and the book’s, because Harry needs to have his final showdown. (I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I’ll provide details over email or in the comments section if desired.)
Harry and Ron making bad decisions that spurs action and plot movement — that’s all par for the course, but it’s weird how we’re supposed to feel like Lockhart is just getting what he deserved for being a self-centered jerk, especially when Harry and Ron bringing him along has no real point.
Again, we’re meant to enjoy a character’s pain, even when the reasons for it don’t seem anywhere near sufficient.
That brings me to the last problematic bad guy, which is all of Slytherin. To review, there are four houses at Hogwarts: Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, and Slytherin. In the first book, we mostly meet Gryffindors, but there is lots of muttering about how Slytherins, defined by having an ends-justify-the-means approach, are bad. And indeed, Harry’s nemesis, Draco Malfoy is a Slytherin. The teacher who hates Harry from day one for some reason, Severus Snape, is a Slytherin. Even Voldemort, the evilest dark wizard that ever was, was a Slytherin. In this book we learn about the wizard for whom the house is named, and how he was bad news too.
But then we meet a Slytherin who reminds us that it isn’t your inherent strengths or who you get grouped with that really defines a person, and that broad statements like “all Slytherins are bad” are always false, and this character is named Just Kidding there is no character like that.
We don’t meet too many Ravenclaws or Hufflepuffs, but we do meet many Slytherins. All of them are jerks and most of them are ugly. Maybe I just don’t like the commentary Rowling is making on certain personality traits, but this aspect of the books really bothers me. This book was the opportunity to bring in a sympathetic Slytherin or three, and Rowling makes all of them evil or thuggish.
It’s also worth knowing that a key part of this book centers around wizard racism — specifically the desire of some to exclude all human-born wizards from the rest of the wizarding world. There’s even an epithet that gets tossed around by some Slytherins. The book is squarely on the side of acceptance here, and I don’t have issues with how it’s handled.
The storytelling is excellent, many of the characters are great, the world-building is phenomenal, and rewards close attention, particularly as you read more of the stories. There’s even some pretty sharp commentary on power and politics. There are also problems that, while not dealbreakers for me, are not the easiest to forgive.
Still, I’m excited for when we eventually pick up the third book so that I can see if it holds up from my initial reading as the best one in the series.
Enjoy your summers! The Snarf shall return in August! For now, feel free to peruse the archives and send them to every chapter book enthusiast you come across.