Eichmann in Hogwarts: Harry Potter and the banality of evil.

• Author: Sanchez, Julian

When we first met the young wizard-in-training Harry Potter some six years ago, he had spent a decade in the care of his overbearing "muggle" (non-magical) aunt and uncle after surviving the murder of his parents by the evil Voldemort. At the close of the fourth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Lord Voldemort has returned to full power.

The Harry we encounter in the recently released fifth installment, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Scholastic, 2003), has picked up some internal scars to match the lightning bolt--shaped mark on his forehead. Now 15, he is every bit the troubled teen, picking fights and flying off the handle at his closest friends. He is also schooled in some very important and lasting lessons about the nature of power and bureaucracy.

Harry Potter's appeal, at least initially, had its roots in an escapist fantasy that all children have entertained at some point: Your parents are not your parents; you have strange and wonderful powers; you are famous in another world. In the early books of the series, the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry provided relief from the compulsive conformism of Harry's adoptive muggle family. With the return of Lord Voldemort, however, we see that the wizard world has its own status quo, one that the magical government, in the form of the Ministry of Magic, is reluctant to upset.

Indeed, Cornelius Fudge, the minister of magic, has had the magical media brand Harry an attention-seeking lunatic for his attempts to spread the word about the Dark Lord's return. Harry's chief antagonist for most of the book is not the self-consciously evil Voldemort or his acolytes, the Death Eaters, but the magical establishment, as represented at Hogwarts by the officious Dolores Umbridge.

Umbridge is a Nurse Ratched figure who, like so many government busybodies, is "here to help." Appointed professor of "defense against the dark arts" by ministerial fiat, she soon becomes High Inquisitor at Hogwarts, charged with ensuring that neither Potter nor the powerful Hogwarts headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, upsets the magical world's insistent denial of the ugly truth about Voldemort's return

Yet as Sirius Black, Harrys wizard godfather, explains at one point, "the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters." Umbridge and Fudge may be power hungry, but their malevolence is not the raw nihilism of a Voldemort. Umbridge is particularly insufferable precisely because her...