Genre: Fantasy
Rating: A
New adventures are coming to Hogwarts, just in time
for Harry Potter’s fourth year. The
school is playing host to the Triwizard’s Tournament, a competition between champions
representing the three great European schools of magic, Hogwarts, Beauxbatons,
and Durmstrang, as determined by the Goblet of Fire. Traditionally there are only three champions,
one for each of the schools, and with the revival of the championship a new
rule has been introduced stating that no one under the age of seventeen may
enter their name as a champion. This is
all changed, however, when four names come out of the Goblet; Cedric Diggory,
Fleur Delacour, Viktor Krum, and Harry Potter.
At first, only Hogwart’s new Defence Against the Dark Arts Teacher, ex-Auror
and extremely paranoid Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody, and Albus Dumbledore seem to
believe that Harry did not put his name into the goblet and the school is
divided between those few who support Harry, and are primarily Gryffindors, and
those who think he is attempting to steal the glory from Hufflepuff
Diggory. As Harry begins to face his
challenges one begins to wonder just who has a desire to hurt Harry.
Harry Potter
and the Goblet of Fire is the book where Rowling
really succeeds in quickly introducing the main plot of the story and staying
with it throughout the entire novel. The
first chapter sets things up really nicely and the events that happen to Harry during
his summer each have an effect on things that happen once school starts up
again. The storytelling here is becoming
a lot more concise, ironically while also becoming longer. The fourth book is almost as long as the
first three books combined, and by series end is the second longest book. The way this works out in Goblet of Fire is that the first overt
sign of the complexity of the world of Harry Potter. There have been other smaller signs of it
previously – the first example being the deluminator in the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,
the second being the casual reference to Sirius Black and the less casual
reference to his flying motorcycle. The
story here is a lot more concise than the earlier books, but there’s also a lot
more going on and we really get to see the world in a whole new light. We’re introduced to the idea of a magical
world beyond just Great Britain, meeting out first international wizards. We also get to see Harry watch Quidditch for
the first, and really the only, time.
In addition to the size of the book, the reader of the
book also grows here. While previous
books all had their dark elements, it isn’t until Goblet of Fire that this begins to become really serious. We see our first deaths of the series – not including
the deaths of Harry’s parents, which we’ve been told about and sort of seen
briefly before, but not in its entirety.
With the death of Frank Bryce in the first chapter of the book Rowling
shows us that she’s not messing around, a fact that she really continues to
emphasis throughout both this book and the later ones. An idea that is introduced in the previous
book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of
Azkaban, is really reinforced here, namely the idea of Voldemort’s
followers, the Death Eaters, and the fact that they’re not all imprisoned. We’ve known for awhile that the world is not
just happy go lucky and there are bad people here, but somehow the presence of
the Death Eaters really reinforces that idea.
We’re also really shown that the world is not divided into good people
and Death Eaters. While we’ve already
met a number of people who might later be put into the category of “not good” without
falling into the category of “Death Eater,” this is the first time that it’s
made explicit. Rita Skeeter is by no
means a good person, but she’s also not a Death Eater. In contrast, Barty Crouch Sr. is far from
being a Death Eater, but one might also question if he’s exactly a good person,
and that’s without going into the whole issue of Ludo Bagman, or some of the
other characters introduced here.
One criticism about the book, however, lies within
its complexity. There is a lot that
could have happened and would have made more logical sense to have
happened. I love the tournament in
general, but Voldemort’s plan in this novel has far too many possibilities for
failure and if you think about things too closely it makes you question just
why he went with it in the first place.
Yes, there’s the whole idea of “I must kill Harry Potter” and what not,
but there are a lot of ways that he could have taken Potter without the more
elaborate plot, with a lot more fail safes built into it. The book itself is based on something that
really makes no sense, but… well, it’s still a good story. Maybe not my favourite in the series, but I
still love it.
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