Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
J.K. Rowling
NOTE 1: J.K. Rowling is a virulently hateful person, and she has made that inescapably clear over the last several years. This review series is solely about my thoughts on the Harry Potter books and will not go into her unapologetic transphobia, though I will make a note of it if and when it pops up in the books. Nevertheless, it would’ve been strange to embark upon a Harry Potter review without mentioning the author herself.
NOTE 2: I’m assuming you’re going to be able to follow the names and vocabulary. Google it if you can’t. There’s way too much background detail for me to explain in one review, or even seven.
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers for pretty much the entire series. Other reviews in this series can be found here. Increasingly feral Kindle notes are saved here.
Confession time, here’s what I’ve got: My friends will tell you Chamber of Secrets is probably my favorite Harry Potter, though that’s apparently an unpopular opinion. (Order of the Phoenix, on the other hand, is my least favorite, which seems to be a far more popular opinion.) Maybe it’s the giant murder python or maybe it’s the bookish vibes provided by the Lockhart canon, even if I think their author is an idiot, or maybe it’s just sheer animal instinct. Or maybe it’s merely because Hagrid doesn’t try to raise an illegal dragon in this one, putting it head and shoulders above Sorcerer’s Stone in my personal hierarchy. Whatever the case, I like it, I don’t think it’s boring, and every time I read it I end up low-key wanting a full set of gorgeous leatherbound Lockhart books to display impressively in my library while knowing perfectly well that I would never ever read them and would absolutely kick their creator in the shins if I ever met him face to face. Like Lockhart himself, I expect they’d be chatty and entirely substance-free, but at least they’d look pretty on my shelves.
Picking up a couple months after the end of our first year at Hogwarts, Chamber of Secrets begins – as does every book – on Harry’s birthday. The Dursleys are as vile as they were when we met them: they’ve locked all of Harry’s school things in the cupboard under the stairs with no regard to his summer homework, and they also force him to keep his pet owl Hedwig locked in her cage 24/7 despite some compelling evidence that she might actually need to get out once in a while. In addition to forgetting Harry’s twelfth birthday entirely, they schedule an important dinner party for that very evening, which they then bar Harry from attending. Worse than the Dursleys’ dreadful party is the fact that Harry hasn’t heard a peep from his friends since the end of term, despite their earlier promises to write, and he has spent a lonely, frustrating summer more or less alone in a house full of people who can’t stand him.
Thus, Harry is completely resigned to spending his birthday evening in his bedroom, making no noise and pretending he doesn’t exist, but gets the shock of his life when a self-flagellating house elf named Dobby turns up in his room and begs him not to return to Hogwarts. Harry asks for clarification but receives none, and therefore refuses to grant Dobby’s request. (Have you ever considered learning to lie, Harry? Maybe just a little bit?) However, Dobby came prepared to fight dirty, and, having already intercepted all of Harry’s mail, ruins the Dursleys’ dinner party before fleeing. The Dursleys naturally blame Harry for everything and lock him in his bedroom, swearing that he’ll never see Hogwarts again. To add insult to injury, the Ministry of Magic detects the Hover Charm used by Dobby – but not its source – and sends Harry an official warning, telling him that any further unauthorized magic use will result in his expulsion from Hogwarts.
Things look pretty grim for a while and the Dursleys seem poised for victory, but they forget as usual to factor in the persistence and resourcefulness of teenaged boys. After a few days of captivity, Harry and Hedwig are freed from their prison when Ron turns up with his older twin brothers, Fred and George, in a flying car enchanted by their father (who, it must be noted, works for the Ministry in the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office but spends all his free time flagrantly abusing the laws he is charged with upholding). After springing Harry out of his room and retrieving his trunk from the downstairs cupboard, the boys just narrowly escape the Dursleys, and they all fly to the Weasleys’ house, affectionately called “the Burrow.” Despite a brief but violent altercation in Flourish and Blotts with Draco Malfoy and his Muggle-hating father Lucius, Harry has the happiest summer he’s ever known, at the end of which he and the Weasley boys – along with their younger sister Ginevra (“Ginny”), starting school for the first time – report to King’s Cross, from where they will board the Hogwarts Express.
This is literally supposed to be the easiest part of the school year, given that stepping onto a train doesn’t take much in the way of brains or even coordination, but it is made more complicated by Dobby, who secretly seals off the platform as part of his ongoing campaign to save Harry from himself. While the others proceed to school in the normal way, Harry and Ron miss the train due to Dobby’s unseen interference, and – employing Classic Preteen Boy LogicTM – instead steal the flying car in order to get to school. Unfortunately, the journey is long and the car has problems, which become increasingly obvious the closer they get to Hogwarts. Though they do eventually make it to school grounds, they also manage to crash the car into a ferocious tree called the Whomping Willow, which beats the crap out of both them and the car, and then they lose the car altogether when it angrily ejects them onto the lawn and makes its way into the Forbidden Forest to live a wild life far away from idiot preteens.
It isn’t the best start to the school year, and things only go downhill when they attend the first Defense Against the Dark Arts class taught by Gilderoy Lockhart, the astonishingly narcissistic celebrity wizard who was hired to replace the late Professor Quirrell. Despite his grandiose claims to greatness (thoroughly documented in a set of heavy best-selling tomes) and his devoted female fanbase, which is the size of a small army, Lockhart seems to have no actual magical skills, but he latches onto Harry – whose genuine fame he secretly covets – and harasses him throughout the year under the guise of celebrity tutelage. (He’s played by Kenneth Branagh in the movie. Go figure.) Almost worse is Colin Creevey, a first-year Gryffindor with a camera, who quickly memorizes Harry’s entire schedule and takes pictures of him at every opportunity, usually without his knowledge and always without his consent. Along with the daily irritations provided by Lockhart and Colin, Harry begins to hear a murderous voice that seems to live in the walls of the castle, though no one else is aware of it. The mystery only deepens when Mrs. Norris, beloved cat of Hogwarts caretaker Argus Filch, is turned completely to stone on Halloween night. Having followed the murderous voice as best he could, Harry finds the Petrified Mrs. Norris hanging by her tail from a torch bracket, along with a painted message warning that the Chamber of Secrets has been opened again.
Despite a proliferation of rumors and half-truths, the plain facts of the case are these: the Chamber was supposedly built by Salazar Slytherin, who – along with Godric Gryffindor, Rowena Ravenclaw, and Helga Hufflepuff – founded the school. After a fight with Gryffindor over their policy of accepting Muggle-born students, Slytherin left the school, but is reputed to have left behind some sort of monster. Together with Slytherin’s trueborn heir, as yet unidentified, this monster is supposed to purge the school of everyone Slytherin personally considered unworthy. However, generations of scholars have been unable to find any evidence that the Chamber exists, let alone the monster, though there was a nasty unsolved incident fifty years ago which resulted in the death of a student. Still, something is undeniably roaming the school, as everyone learns when Colin is found Petrified with no explanation other than that he seems to have been on his way to visit Harry in the hospital wing. As for Harry, he is in the hospital wing because Dobby followed him to school and fixed one of the Quidditch Bludgers, which broke Harry’s arm during a match against Slytherin, which wouldn’t have been a big deal if Lockhart hadn’t removed all the bones in Harry’s arm while in the same breath claiming to be healing him. Merlin’s beard, this man is infuriating.
The rumors reach a feverish pitch after a harebrained dueling club started by Lockhart and Snape, ostensibly to teach students to protect themselves against Slytherin’s monster but really to give Lockhart yet another chance to show off. The one good effect of the club is that it teaches Harry the Disarming Charm that will later save his life multiple times, but it goes down in flames when Malfoy conjures a giant snake on Snape’s instructions. Though Harry manages to calm the snake, he also unwittingly reveals himself as a Parselmouth, a wizard who can speak to snakes. The problem is that Parseltongue is historically associated with Dark wizards, particularly Voldemort, and about 90% of the student body becomes convinced overnight that Harry is the Heir of Slytherin. His friends stand by him with ferocious loyalty, but otherwise – as they did last year – things start progressing to the point where it kinda sucks to be Harry.
Anyway, Hermione puts on her thinking cap and shortly comes up with a wild plan to brew the Polyjuice Potion, which when brewed correctly will turn the drinker into another person for a short period of time. In this case, Hermione proposes that she and the boys use the Potion to temporarily turn themselves into three Slytherins for the purposes of tricking Malfoy – whom all three suspect of being the Heir of Slytherin – into confessing his role in the attacks on Mrs. Norris and Colin. For these purposes, they raid Snape’s office for the more obscure ingredients and take over a stall in a defunct girls’ bathroom, where they are glumly supervised by Moaning Myrtle, a teenaged ghost who haunts one of the toilets. (Oh look at that, I guess it is okay for two AMABs to be alone with one AFAB in a girls’ bathroom as long as all they’re doing is breaking the law.) The potion works as expected with Harry and Ron but puts Hermione in the hospital with a fuzzy face and a kitty tail, and all they learn is that Malfoy isn’t even slightly involved.
The case takes an undesirable turn when Harry discovers an abandoned diary in Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom and learns that it is a magical record set down by Tom Riddle, a Hogwarts student who was at the school the last time the Chamber was opened. Initially eager to hear Riddle’s version of events, Harry balks when the diary places the blame squarely on Hagrid, who as it happens was expelled from Hogwarts after Riddle named him as the Heir of Slytherin. This is inconsistent with everything everyone knows about Hagrid, but larger things are afoot by this time: Hermione seems to have a groundbreaking epiphany but is Petrified before she can tell either Harry or Ron about her conclusions, and this latest attack prompts a visit from Cornelius Fudge, the ineffectual Minister of Magic, who arrests Hagrid in order to be seen as “doing something.” Additionally, the school governors – led by Lucius Malfoy – vote to remove Dumbledore as headmaster, leaving deputy headmistress Professor McGonagall with the burden of running the school in a time of severe crisis in addition to a full schedule of Transfiguration classes. During his arrest, Hagrid drops one bizarre hint that leads Harry and Ron to a clan of hungry acromantulas spawned by Hagrid’s friend Aragog, and they are only saved by the now feral flying car.
The one benefit to almost getting eaten alive by a bunch of giant spiders is that the boys receive some fairly convincing testimony in Hagrid’s favor, though arachnophobic Ron suffers greatly in the collection of said testimony. Eventually, of course, all roads lead back to Hermione, who they finally realize has had the research on her the entire time despite being completely Petrified, and through her they learn that the monster of Slytherin is a basilisk that has been traversing the school through its network of pipes. Before they can tell the teachers what they know, however, Ginny is abducted and taken down to the Chamber of Secrets, as explained by one final sinister message. The boys appeal to Lockhart, who had earlier claimed to know exactly where the Chamber was and what was in it, but are unpleasantly surprised when he admits that he made up his entire career and is now about to leave Hogwarts forever. When he tries to wipe their memories, they Disarm him and force him to accompany them to Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom. Here they learn that Myrtle was killed by the basilisk when it was unleashed upon the school by the true Heir, and, from this information, discover that the entrance to the Chamber is in Myrtle’s bathroom, and can only be opened by a Parselmouth.
Upon arrival in the bowels of the school, Lockhart nearly ruins everything but fortunately manages to completely erase his own memory by happy accident. While Ron stays behind, trapped by a barricade of rocks brought down by Lockhart’s accident, the newly unencumbered Harry makes his way into the Chamber of Secrets, where he finds Ginny barely alive. She is accompanied by the spirit of Tom Riddle, who reveals that he is the Heir of Slytherin, and that he eventually grew to become the Dark wizard now known as Voldemort. His diary took on a life of its own when he embedded a piece of his own soul within its pages, and this sliver of intelligence was more than enough to enchant Ginny, whom he used as a tool to open the Chamber and attack Muggle-born students. His intention is naturally to use the basilisk to kill Harry, but assistance arrives in the form of Fawkes, Dumbledore’s pet phoenix, who brings along the Sorting Hat for no obvious reason.
During the battle that follows, Harry manages to pull Godric Gryffindor’s own thousand-year-old ruby-hilted sword out of the Sorting Hat, and with it he kills the basilisk, though its fang pierces his arm during its dying moments. No problem: phoenixes’ tears have healing powers, and Fawkes quite literally cries Harry’s death away. Tom of course is still kicking around, alive in a manner of speaking, or he is until Harry drives one of the basilisk’s fangs into the diary, destroying both the diary and the memory of Riddle. Still alive and very tired, Harry and Ginny return to the main body of the school; Ginny reunites with her frantic parents and confesses everything, while Dumbledore – who received a number of letters from every school governor who is not named Lucius Malfoy, all begging him to resume his post as headmaster after Ginny’s abduction – listens to Harry’s story and gently tells a distraught Ginny that Riddle’s victims have been restored to their normal selves, and that no lasting harm has been done. Though Harry retains some anxiety over his ability to speak to snakes, Dumbledore theorizes that Voldemort accidentally transferred some of his own gifts to Harry on the night he tried to kill him, and affirms that Harry belongs in Gryffindor rather than Slytherin.
Shortly after this conversation, Lucius Malfoy shows up in a fury, dragging Dobby along with him, and tries to intimidate Dumbledore, but is forced to leave when Dumbledore reveals that the other governors only agreed to remove him after Malfoy threatened their families. With Dobby’s quiet help, Harry realizes Lucius slipped the diary to Ginny during his fight with her father in Flourish and Blotts, and that he is in fact wholly to blame for the events of the entire year. There’s no way of proving that, but Harry does manage to trick Lucius into freeing Dobby, so at least there’s a happy end somewhere. With the threat of the Chamber removed and the basilisk dead, the school feasts; final exams are canceled as a school treat (to Hermione’s disappointment), Hagrid returns from prison, and life goes back to normal. There is of course the fact that Harry knows the Dursleys will be pissy over his failure to die despite multiple opportunities to do so, but that is an unfortunate part of the normal.
JUST ONE QUESTION: How exactly was the entrance to the Chamber created? If it’s hidden behind a sink that has never worked and is marked with a little snake, who created the sink in the first place, and has no one ever tried to fix it? I’m assuming the castle did not spring out of thin air with communal bathrooms firmly in place. Is that something Riddle rigged up during his time at Hogwarts, or is it something that was added by other Slytherin heirs? Riddle wasn’t born in a vacuum so obviously Slytherin had other heirs, even if they aren’t mentioned or remembered, but would that then mean that the Chamber was opened at other times by other heirs? That Muggle-born students have been targeted at other points in the school’s history, perhaps without any written record of the attacks? The book makes it sound like Riddle is the sole heir and that basilisk waited a thousand years for him to roll along because he’s just that sPeShUl, but I’m not buying it. There have to have been others. It doesn’t make any sense for there not to have been.
Whatever the case with Slytherin and his nasty descendants, this book marks a number of series milestones: it introduces Ron’s house and the bulk of his large family, who will become Harry’s family too over the course of the series; it documents the first of the Horcruxes, whose existence will become the focus of Half-Blood Prince; and it begins to incorporate some of the darker aspects of the wizarding world, starting with the complete subjugation of house elves and the mostly unspoken hierarchy among human wizards. Most notably, it introduces the terms “Mudblood” (an extremely offensive slur used against wizards with any Muggle ancestry whatsoever, however faint; the wizards appear to follow the one-drop rule) and “Squib” (a non-magical person born to magical parents), which are used to illustrate the divide between the self-proclaimed pure-blooded wizards and the wizards who happen to know that blood doesn’t count for shit, and the non-wizards who – like Filch – are forced to live on the periphery of the magical world, aware of it but not fully inside of it, frequently treated as oddities and outsiders. This does not, of course, excuse anything Filch says or does, and I still think he has no business working around children. But it is an isolating position to be in, and, as Hermione will later point out, this comes down to a certain level of entitlement that tends to be baked into people who are raised with magic.
“Pure-Bloods vs. Everyone Else” is a division that will grow deeper and more entrenched with time, but this seems to me an appropriate level of introduction in a series that will only grow darker from book to book. There’s plenty else to think about in the meantime, such as how annoying Dobby and Colin are and how much I detest Hagrid’s habit of making trouble for the kids, and how much imaginary gold I would pay for the privilege of shoving Lockhart under the Knight Bus and rolling it over him again and again and again until he turned into paste on the ground. Hagrid at least is unintentional in his habit of making the kids clean up his messes; Lockhart is far more deliberate and opportunistic with his messes. I’m still not over his lazy ass making three students round up the pixies he unleashed on the class. I hate him more in this book than I hated Snape in Sorcerer’s Stone, and I hate Snape a lot. He gets what he deserves in the end with even more irony than I could’ve asked for, and I suppose it is mildly grating that he gets away with a clean conscience but then he doesn’t really seem to have any conscience to speak of so I guess it’s just as well that he can’t listen to it now.
As regards wizards who actually know what they’re doing and have plans that encompass more than their fifteen minutes of fame, Dumbledore continues infuriating, as I knew he would. As with Sorcerer’s Stone, I believe he knows more or less what is going on inside his school; I also believe he should absolutely have known better than to ask Harry such a stupidly vague, open-ended question as “Is there anything you want to tell me” when the school started going to shit. This is the master Dark wizard-fighter and child-wrangler? (Also, why couldn’t he have just used Legilimency, which he is supposed to be good at and seems to have no qualms about using? Had Rowling not invented it yet?) I believe he had the means to curb Lockhart’s behavior and his insultingly bad curriculum but chose not to interfere with either, and I believe I will never believe another word he says about species equality when he just sits on his ass and watches with complete serenity as Lucius Malfoy beats Dobby to a pulp. Though he will later lecture Harry about Kreacher’s feelings on the literal worst day of Harry’s life, he shows no such concern for Dobby at the moment Dobby most needs help, thus leaving Harry to save the day yet again, and I find that deeply infuriating. I bet he’d be great in an emergency – oh, wait.
And yet for all that, this is still my favorite Harry Potter because it retains some of the charm of the language used in Sorcerer’s Stone while completely maintaining the lighthearted whimsy that drew me into the wizarding world. To this day, the de-gnoming at the Burrow remains one of the greatest Harry Potter scenes ever written. (Okay, maybe that’s weird, but keep in mind that Peeves the Poltergeist was my favorite character the first time I read Sorcerer’s Stone.)
Harry learned quickly not to feel too sorry for the gnomes. He decided just to drop the first one he caught over the hedge, but the gnome, sensing weakness, sank its razor-sharp teeth into Harry’s finger and he had a hard job shaking it off – until –
“Wow, Harry – that must’ve been fifty feet…”
As a general note, I just love the Weasleys. Ron was never my favorite and frankly never will be, but his family is a delight. Even if Ginny isn’t too prominent or memorable in this book, I know she will grow into an absolute badass, because if there’s one thing Rowling does well it’s young girls with big attitudes. I especially love that Hermione is already such a badass that she manages to solve a generations-long cold case from her hospital bed, and she does it merely by having the research in her hand for her fumbling assistants to find. (The series should’ve been called Hermione Potter, she is the daughter the Potters should have had, I said what I said, Lily would’ve loved her, I will die on this hill.) I am ashamed to admit that I didn’t appreciate Hermione upon first acquaintance (we’re talking literal first acquaintance – so, like, middle school), but over the years I’ve learned better and she has become quite possibly my favorite character, aside from her ridiculous and improbable romance with Ron. She literally is such a vibe in so many ways, which is hilarious when I hated school and never wanted to do my homework. Still, vibe. She almost makes me want to go and get a PhD.
In summary: charming set-up, wonderful magical academia vibes, warm and lovable characters (mostly), a handful of assholes, and Hagrid getting the kids into serious trouble, so basically all the hallmarks of a Harry Potter book. I really don’t know what my problem was back in 2019, when I just barely made it through Goblet of Fire, because so far this reread has been so cozy and so comforting, irrespective of my problems with it. Maybe it’s time and distance; maybe it’s the current political climate, which obliterates any thoughts of shunning any sort of comfort I can find; maybe it’s Maybelline. Whatever the case, I am grateful, and I will be back with more thoughts after I get done with Prisoner of Azkaban.
