Prisoner of Azkaban: Page 238

The anonymous Firebolt, an utter failure of Wizarding criminal investigation, how Hogwarts should promote equality in broom quality, and a new slogan for Ron.

On this fine morning, we cover a sensitive page of Prisoner of Azkaban: Harry gets his Firebolt, Hermione doesn’t want him to ride it, and Ron doesn’t like that. There’s a lot to unpack there. Enjoy! Subscribe! Live life to the fullest!

Page 238 of Prisoner of Azkaban (the British version, remember!) takes place at what turns into a sensitive moment. Harry has just received his firebolt in the mail from an anonymous benefactor. Harry is confused; Ron is overjoyed; Hermione is suspicious. When Harry announces that the broom didn’t come with so much as a card, Hermione’s face falls; she bites her lip. Ron already seems to sense trouble.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asks, probably more aggressively than he needs to.

Hermione is still figuring it out, so she’s talking slowly, thinking as she does. Still, though, her reasoning is airtight: this is the best broom in the world, and Harry’s just gotten one from someone who didn’t even sign their name. It’s more than a little suspicious.

I can’t help but think that it also raises plot issues about the whole process. Sirius explains it later: the way I remember it, he sent Crookshanks to the post office with the order form, which uses Harry’s name but includes instructions to draw the gold from Sirius’ Gringotts vault. That seems like the kind of thing that should set off more than a few alarm bells. To recap:

1)    A cat mails a Quidditch store an order form for the most expensive broom in the world.

2)    The order form instructs the store to draw the purchase price of the broom from a bank account belonging to a notorious mass-murderer. 

3)    The order form also instructs the store to mail the broom to a boy who is an international symbol of resistance against a certain dark wizard, coincidentally a certain dark wizard with whom the notorious mass-murderer whose bank account is written on the form seemed to align himself before finally being captured.

And yet, the store...just goes along with it. Imagine if tomorrow, a bowling shop got an order form: “please send Greta Thunberg the world’s best bowling ball. Sincerely, Greta Thunberg. Take the money from a bank account that belongs to Chevron.” That’s almost literally what’s happened here.

We’ve spent time before on the incredible surveillance system that Voldemort is able to create with “The Taboo.” There’s also the trace, which similarly manages to monitor every wizard under age 17 in the country without any visible infrastructure. Here, though, the wizarding world has the opposite problem: there’s no surveillance going on at all. How in the world could it be that, in the middle of a national manhunt for a suspected murderer, the government isn’t monitoring his bank account? 

Obviously, Sirius takes some ingenious steps to avoid attracting attention. Still, though, they’re only possible because the process was so lax in the first place. What’s the first thing they do in the muggle world, whenever someone escapes custody and they need to hunt him down? “Freeze his assets! If he so much as sneezes, I want to know about it!” In the Wizarding World, apparently, it’s still possible to buy a top-of-the-line racing broom and have it shipped to the boy that the entire world thinks you’re determined to eliminate. And that’s not even to mention that it’s apparently just fine to submit mismatched name and bank account information. If I’m ordering a new hat, the order won’t go through if I type in my old zip code instead of my current one — but Gringotts will apparently allow money to be drawn from any vault, even one that doesn’t match the name of the person on the form.

There’s one version of this that might work out, if you interpret things charitably. It basically goes like this: Sirius writes Harry’s name down on the form, but also includes a whole procedure for verifying his Gringotts vault. He writes down his mother’s maiden name, or something, or he fills in which squares have traffic lights in them. It’s not completely out of the question that Gringotts would disregard the name on the form if the orderer also included all the secret security information, so they knew that the money was coming from a vault to which the person on the other end of the transaction had legitimate access. But even if we accept that, the entire thing still hinges on the Gringotts goblins either not realizing that the vault in question actually belongs to Sirius, or just not doing anything about it. It doesn’t help their case that the Gringotts goblins seem like they basically have the entire bank memorized, and have very close personal relationships with their clients. There should be multiple avenues that lead to a goblin getting that form in the mail, looking at the vault it asks that the money be taken from, and saying “wait...isn’t this guy on the run for murder?”

But they don’t. Sirius gets the firebolt to Harry, which I’ve always thought was sort of strange. Harry goes from flying a Nimbus 2000 — a really good broom, one of the fastest ever ­— to a Firebolt, an even better broom, literally the fastest ever. How come we never see him forced to ride a mediocre broom in a Quidditch match, relying on his talent and nothing else? The firebolt is cool, of course, but it just doesn’t seem to add much to the story. It would be like if in “Miracle,” the 1980 U.S. Hockey Team started out as a band of ordinary hockey players, did a regular, mundane training program without working particularly hard, and won the Olympics because they had the coolest skates. 

It also raises the issue of how fair it is to hold Quidditch matches in which everyone is flying a different broomstick. You could compare it to a NASCAR race, and say that obviously, all those drivers are driving different cars, and no one calls that unfair — except those drivers are all driving roughly equal cars, and the only differences are the choices they’ve made. It’s not like one guy drives a race car and the next guy drives a 1987 Toyota Sienna — but that’s basically what happens in Hogwarts Quidditch matches.

Harry, with his firebolt, is basically unbeatable. He’s probably twice as fast as everyone else, he handles better, and he’s more precise. This goes far beyond people using different but roughly equal products; it’s a complete subversion of the competitive spirit of the game. It would be like if in baseball, each team had to pay for its own mitts, but one team couldn’t afford them. 

There are two ways that Hogwarts could handle it, which, interestingly enough, basically boil down to progressive versus neoconservative. On the one hand, they could just buy a bunch of identical brooms and provide a bunch to each house Quidditch team. You get 50 recent-model Cleansweeps, or something like that, then everyone has a broom that can fly, but no one is ahead of the competition, so matches come down to athletic ability and teamwork rather than who has the best brooms. On the other hand, they could give each house team a broom budget, and let the captains make broom choices for themselves. Maybe you order a Firebolt for the seeker, Cleansweeps for the chasers and beaters, and an old enchanted log for the keeper, who, let’s face it, doesn’t need to move around that much. Then Quidditch matches might come down to who has the better broom in a key spot, but that would be a team decision, so choosing broom models would just be part of putting together a good Quidditch team. 

The one way that doesn’t work is the status quo, in which — as happened the previous book — Draco Malfoy can buy his way onto the Slytherin team and provide them with an enormous economic advantage in the form of brooms, and now, one book later, Harry can utilize a strange anonymous gift to give the Gryffindor team a similar advantage. Frankly, it’s sort of surprising that the Slytherin team doesn’t immediately start badgering Draco to cajole Lucius into upgrading the team’s brooms again. They might actually have a lot of leverage, because if Draco says no, then it can’t be that difficult to find another Slytherin who wants to play Quidditch whose parents are enormously wealthy. That, basically, is the incentive system that the current broomstick rules at Hogwarts have created: it might make strategic sense for a team to accept a bad player over a good one, as long as that bad player could buy the team new brooms. 

There’s also a whole discussion to get into about broomsticks. How do they work? Why are some different than others? Do they have any kind of limitations? But that starts to get beyond the scope of this page, so we’ll leave it at that for now.

We return, almost refreshingly, to the men of the trio being completely oblivious to the world. Hermione says that she doesn’t think anyone should ride the broom just yet, which makes sense: it’s clearly a suspicious, anonymous package that might well have ulterior motives behind it, and there’s also the fact that Harry is, you know, being hunted down by an escaped mass-murderer. When Hermione points this out, Ron could argue her conclusion. He could say that while it might be suspicious, it’s not enough of a risk to justify not riding the fastest broom in the world. He could argue that they’ll start by riding it close to the ground to see if anything goes wrong, with people nearby to bring the broom down in case it goes haywire. He could contend that Harry especially needs a broom at this moment, with a Quidditch match upcoming and his Nimbus destroyed, so right now, it’s worth it to give the firebolt a shot.

But he doesn’t. Instead, he disputes the very fabric of reality in which Hermione and the rest of the informed world exist. Suspicious package? How could it be suspicious? It’s a firebolt! All his rational thoughts and logical processes go out the window as soon as anything remotely interesting happens. Come to think of it, that could almost be a slogan for Ron: 

Ron Weasley: All his rational thoughts and logical processes go out the window as soon as anything remotely interesting happens.

If you disagree with this characterization of Ron’s thoughts at this moment, look at this actual exchange:

Hermione: who’d send Harry something as expensive as that, and not even tell him they sent it?

Ron: Who cares? Listen, Harry, can I have a go on it? Can I?

Hermione: I don’t think anyone should ride that broom just yet!

Ron: What d’you think Harry’s going to do with it — sweep the floor?

Hermione asks what is by far the most relevant question — who in the world would do such a thing? Ron’s response? “Who cares?” Not only does he not remember that Harry’s being hunted down by a murderer, he can’t even understand that even in normal life this would be a really strange package to receive, and something you would probably want to look into before taking it out for a spin. It’s another one of Ron’s Doug Heffernan moments. Believe me, I didn’t plan to make a running joke out of a King of Queens reference, but I’m so glad that it’s happened.

The page suddenly ends on a line right out of left field. Ron makes his indignant remark, but before Hermione can answer, Crookshanks springs from Seamus’ bed, right at Ron’s chest...and the page is over. 

Ah, Ron and Crookshanks, the book-long rivalry that just won’t go away. It’s almost Ron’s fault at this point. He’s seen Crookshanks’ single-minded devotion to devouring Scabbers; he really needs to either get Scabbers some sort of cat-proof covering or just not bring Scabbers anywhere near Crookshanks. It’s one of the stranger plots that J.K. Rowling ever cooked up, that Hermione’s cat would spend a year trying to kill Ron’s rat which would turn out to be Peter Pettigrew, who would turn out to be an animagus who actually betrayed Harry’s parents and basically provided the impetus that got the whole series started. But at least it’s action-packed and thrilling. It’s not like she took off on a tangent about Hogwarts broomstick budgets.