Goblet of Fire: Page 533

Percy's low-level job, his meteoric rise that nobody notices, two easy ways to hide in the Wizarding World, and a bit of Bertha Jorkins.

Welcome! Today we cover page 533 of Goblet of Fire: conversations about Percy, Mr. Crouch, and Bertha Jorkins. There’s a lot, so this issue is especially long: enjoy it! Pass it on to your friends! Subscribe!

“I can try,” Ron says doubtfully. “Better not make it sound like I reckon Crouch is up to anything dodgy, though. Percy loves Crouch.”

That’s how page 533 of Goblet of Fire starts, and isn’t it just a perfect opportunity to dive right into Percy’s ridiculous and hilarious relationship with his first boss? The dynamic between Percy and Mr. Crouch might be the most common comedic foil of this book, but it actually gets fairly complicated, as these things do. So let’s take a look.

We first hear about Mr. Couch when Harry arrives at The Burrow. Ron warns Harry that if he mentions Mr. Crouch, Percy will never shut up. But we see later that Mr. Crouch doesn’t know the first thing about Percy. Literally: he doesn’t know his name.

It’s worth wondering what exactly Percy is doing in the department before Mr. Crouch is placed under the Imperius curse. We only get a few hints. He’s working on a report on cauldron bottom thickness; Fred and George send him a “sample of fertilizer from Norway” that’s actually just dragon dung, but Percy doesn’t think it’s out of the ordinary, so maybe samples of fertilizer from Norway are the kind of thing he deals with; he’s involved in some capacity with organizing the Triwizard Tournament, but we don’t know exactly what his role is.

All this points to a conclusion that Percy isn’t going to like: before Voldemort takes over Mr. Crouch’s mind, Percy is basically just an intern. Maybe he’s a “staff assistant,” which is the entry-level job in most American congressional offices; you’re basically the interns’ boss, and you’re the actual employee who does the clerical work that interns can’t do because they’ll just mess it up. He’s right out of Hogwarts, and sure, he was Head Boy, but he’s still not going to go straight from school to a high-level government job as an eighteen-year-old. The cauldron bottom report, for instance: that’s a low-level task. Percy is the guy putting the statistics and information together so that the people with actual power can decide what to do about them. When I interned in Congress, my office’s Chief of Staff once assigned me to list the congressional committee and subcommittee chairs and ranking members by state. They once asked me to memorize the faces of every congressional Democrat so I could tell who a certain member of congress was talking to. Writing a report about cauldron thickness and resultant problems — “leakages have been increasing at a rate of almost 3% a year” — isn’t a senior task.

Of course, Percy’s role changes drastically when Mr. Crouch confines himself to his home and leaves Percy in charge. Right away, Percy basically becomes the de facto head of the Department of International Magical Cooperation. He’s basically the Secretary of State. That’s not even an exaggeration. At the Yule Ball, he tells Harry, Ron, and Ludo Bagman that in the new year, he’s meeting with the Head of International Magical Cooperation of Transylvania in the new year in an attempt to make Transylvania sign the International Ban on Dueling. That’s genuinely super-high-level governmental stuff.

Put it this way: Embassy and foreign service personnel usually meet with personnel from other countries of roughly the same stature. Low-level staffers meet with low-level staffers; high-level staffers meet with high-level staffers; etc. In cases where one country is especially important, staffers sometimes get to jump up a level: at the British Embassy in Washington, for instance, staff can meet with higher staff than themselves at other embassies (e.g. a lower-level British staffer could meet with a higher-level Transylvanian staffer) because Britain is an especially important, powerful country.

If that’s true in the magical world, it basically supports what I’m saying: Percy is now a higher-up. He may not quite be on the “Secretary of State” level, but he’s close: the power of the Union Jack is enough to vault him up to that level when meeting with other countries.

Here’s the problem: it should be obvious to Percy and everyone else in the department that Percy is the wrong choice for this position. It’s literally the equivalent of taking the kid hired out of college to run the front desk at The Pentagon, and making him the Secretary of Defense. Surely there are actual legal practices to follow in a case like this: surely Mr. Crouch has some sort of lieutenant, a Deputy Director of International Magical Cooperation or something like that, who’s the obvious choice to take over the department while Mr. Crouch is sick. I just can’t believe that Percy suddenly being the man in charge didn’t raise a bunch of major red flags.

In fact, the person for whom it should have raised the most red flags is Percy himself. Percy loves following rules and societal norms more than anything else in the world. So it should be a major sign to him that something is wrong when his boss circumvents established procedures and leaves an 18-year-old kid whose name he doesn’t know in charge of a major government department. Obviously, this will put Percy in a dire conflict with himself: on the one hand, he loves rules, but on the other hand, he really wants power. Here, Mr. Crouch is giving him power in a way that must be against the rules. So what does Percy choose: rules or power? It’s obvious, because we know what happens in the books: he chooses power. He probably manages to talk himself out of any reservations he might have by reasoning that Mr. Crouch probably left him in charge because of what a great, talented worker he is, and not for any nefarious reason.

People will probably point out that something very similar happens in book five: Fudge gives Percy a prestigious job within his own office, which Percy gladly accepts, all because Fudge wants an in with the Weasleys, and by extension, the Order of the Phoenix. But the situations aren’t quite equivalent. In that book five situation, Percy is being hired for a new job: it’s a giant promotion which he can probably tell deep-down that he doesn’t deserve (although, to be fair, it does seem like a job — mostly note-taking — that he’s well-suited for), but it’s still an ordinary promotion: regular procedures, job interview with the new boss, etc. Here in book four, though, there’s nothing regular at all about what’s happening. Mr. Crouch just disappears one day and leaves a note that Percy is in charge. In book five, Percy gets a modest promotion up to a job that fits him well. In this book, he gets appointed Secretary of State for no reason. They’re not the same, and Percy should absolutely notice that something is off. The only explanation, I guess, is that Percy’s hunger for power is even stronger than it might seem.

On the page, meanwhile, Sirius — who, it turns out, is who they’re talking to; I had no idea — responds.

“You might try to find out whether they’ve got any leads on Bertha Jorkins while you’re at it,” he says.

Now we can fill in some of the details of the scene: the trio is with Sirius and Buckbeak in the cave up in the mountains around Hogsmeade, and they’re seeing him for the first time in a while. The mountain cave is an illustrative hiding strategy, and it raises as many questions as it answers. Well, actually only one question, but it’s a big one: why is hiding in the Wizarding World at all difficult?

Sirius and Buckbeak are hidden in this cave not far from Hogsmeade and Hogwarts. They’re completely undetected, which makes sense: who’s going to find them? They’re off the beaten path, and even if someone walks past and happens to stick their head into a hole in the rock, all they’ll see is a dog and a hippogriff. Sirius and Buckbeak aren’t doing anything complicated to hide: they’re just staying in a place where people don’t go.

By contrast, look at what the trio does in book seven: they constantly move with the tent, always setting up their enchantments and charms. Look at what Ted Tonks, Dirk Cresswell, and the goblins do: they treck around the woods summoning salmon out of lakes, and they still get found. Here’s the solution: just don’t move so much.

For some reason, it seems like all the characters think that Voldemort and/or The Ministry have some amazing tracking technology: that if they stay in the same place for a while, the people chasing them will close in until they’re found. But that’s not necessarily true. It’s just as likely, and probably moreso, that if you pick a random spot far from heavy traffic, you’ll just be fine (as long as you don’t break the trace, which is a whole different story). Obviously, the trio has to keep moving because they’re trying to find the horcruxes and take down Voldemort. But for other people who are in danger, hiding shouldn’t be that hard. Find a random spot in the middle of a forest, or in a cave, or underground, or in a hotel room on the 14th floor in Manchester. As long as you don’t venture out into public too much without a disguise and you don’t leave a paper trail, you should be just fine. Voldemort and his allies in the Ministry aren’t actually that good at hunting people down. There’s no spell that says “figure out where Mr. Johnson is.”

Or, alternatively: use the freakin’ Fidelius Charm. This, to me, is one of the less talked-about major plot holes in the series. Once we learn in book seven that the people who need a secret kept can themselves be secret-keepers (e.g. Bill Weasley can be the secret-keeper of where Bill Weasley is, namely Shell Cottage), there’s no reason that every Wizarding family in the country isn’t using the charm as well. For argument’s sake, let’s say the charm has limitations: it can only cover single houses at a time, for instance, and not an entire town. That still shouldn’t be a problem. Every Wizarding family in England, especially the ones in danger, should bring the family together in their house, designate a secret-keeper, cast the spell, and have the secret-keeper tell every member of the family the secret. Zip, zip, zip, you’re safe. Hermione could have made herself secret-keeper for her parents and kept them in their house, instead of making them move to Australia. The Burrow could have been completely impenetrable (besides the wedding, but there are ways around that; just have the secret-keeper walk each person in). In fact, they do cast a Fidelius charm over The Burrow in the second half of book seven.

This seems like one of those cases where J.K. Rowling introduced a piece of magic fairly early-on, then started expanding it without fully thinking through what that expansion meant. Maybe there’s an interview somewhere where she talks about the limits of the Fidelius charm: maybe it’s just too complicated for most families to do, or something like that. But it shouldn’t be; the Weasleys can do it, and they seem like average wizards. More likely, it’s just a plot hole.

I mean, think about it: rather than spending several hundred pages camping, the trio could just set up their home in an empty rental building in London, or something like that. Then they just cast the Fidelius charm — I’m sure Hermione can figure it out — and no one knows they’re there, and they can still do all the stuff they have to do during the day, but return to a nice cozy home every night. And there’s no need to eat mushrooms stewed in a billycan, or any of those unsatisfactory tent meals.

Meanwhile, back on the page...Harry responds. Ludo Bagman, he says, told him they didn’t have any leads on Bertha Jorkins. Sirius responds by dismantling Bagman’s argument. While Bagman is quoted in the paper talking about how bad Bertha’s memory is, Sirius says she’s the opposite: her memory is a lot better than the rest of her mind. She’s “a bit dim,” but not her memory: that’s still bright (well, not anymore, because she’s dead...you know what I mean).

The whole Bertha Jorkins saga is strange. She’s in Albania, where Voldemort was rumored to be hiding last...then she disappears...then people argue about her for months, but no one mentions Voldemort that much. Really, this is when Mr. Crouch should be up in arms about getting her found, and sure enough, Percy does mention that Crouch has taken a personal interest in the case, but obviously, he’s so compromised by the fact that he smuggled his Death Eater son out of jail that he can’t tell people the truth, which could have solved the entire problem before it got worse. Maybe the problem is that no one seems to like Bertha Jorkins, so people don’t bother to think critically about her absence; she seems vaguely annoying to people of all different stripes, from Percy to Sirius to Dumbledore.

Either way, though, it’s a sub-plot that never really pays off. The reader knows about Bertha’s death starting in the first chapter. We see the Wizarding World trying to figure it out, but eventually Voldemort comes back and Bertha becomes unimportant. We could, for instance, see an Auror discover her body in book five, providing proof at a crucial moment that Voldemort has in fact returned. In the books, all we get is a brief appearance out the end of Voldemort’s wand, which, let’s face it, could have been done equally well by any number of dead people.

On an abrupt note, Sirius asks for the time, and when Hermione tells him that it’s half-past three, he sends the trio back to the school. He tells them not to sneak off to see him, and to just send him letters (changing owls, as they already have been), because sneaking off school grounds could provide an opportunity for someone to attack him. Harry makes a joke; he’s only been attacked so far, he says, by a dragon and a couple of grindylows. Sirius isn’t happy about that, and the page ends as he’s sternly telling Harry not to let his guard down yet, he’s still in danger, the tournament still has one more task, etc.

It makes sense, I suppose, that Sirius is nervous, but still, you’d think he would be savvy enough to just laugh along with Harry’s abrupt attempt at humor. Harry is sometimes funny; this joke didn’t land, but what Harry really needs right now, more than anything, is a good crowd. Laugh at his joke, slap him on the back, and send him on his way. The world is fraught enough right now; Harry has enough problems without being chastened by his godfather for making an offhand remark. I mean, for goodness’ sake, Harry doesn’t need another thing to worry about. Percy is the freaking Secretary of State.