Sorcerer's Stone: Page 3
How cats read maps, the Grunnings corporate structure, Uncle Vernon's meteoric career arc, and how Harry Potter is sort of like "Grey's Anatomy."
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Page three of Sorcerer’s Stone, honestly, might be one of the least exciting pages of the series. Reading it in hindsight, of course, we know it’s just the calm before the storm, the brief period of normalcy before Harry shows up and changes everything. But for now, we don’t know any of that: it’s just a page about Uncle Vernon driving to work and sitting at his desk.
As the page begins, Uncle Vernon is attempting to shake his mind out of what he thinks must be a weak moment of imagination. He’s just attempted to shoo off a cat at the corner of Privet Drive, and instead, the cat just gives him an annoyed look. Then he thinks he sees the cat reading a map, only to look back and see that there is indeed a cat, but there’s no map.
I wonder, though: in what position did Vernon think he saw the cat reading the map? Was it just standing over it like a normal cat, with the map lying on the ground? That doesn’t seem too outlandish: a cat walking along might step on a map on the ground, and stop to stare at it for a second or rip it up with its claws before walking on. Even a completely muggle, non-strange cat could do it without raising an eyebrow.
So let’s say that’s not what Vernon saw. Let’s say, instead, that he came across a cat holding up a map, comparing it to the street the cat was looking at, like a slightly lost tourist. Here’s where that leaves us, of course: as far as I’m aware, cats don’t have fingers, so they’d find it incredibly difficult to hold up a piece of paper. Even assuming for the sake of argument that a cat could find a way to hold up a piece of paper, it would certainly take both front paws. Because cats need their two front paws to stand, this would mean the only way for a cat to read a map would be while sitting. So assuming the McGonagall cat actually was reading a map, she was almost certainly doing it while positioned like this:
That, I think, is something that didn’t get covered in the movie, and wasn’t even explored in-depth in the book, but definitely deserved to be.
There’s also the issue of whether there actually was a map. It makes sense that there would be: McGonagall doesn’t know the area, and Uncle Vernon definitely thinks that he sees one. If there is a map, it disappears almost instantly: where does it go? As far as we know, animagi can’t do magic when they’re in their animal forms. So if there actually was a map, it probably disappeared by non-magical means: Professor McGonagall was looking at her map when the saw Uncle Vernon looking at her, and quickly tossed the map into a shrub or something. Which, itself, would have been great to see Uncle Vernon observe:
As he watched, the cat glanced at him and noticed him looking, then panicked, flinging the map into a nearby shrub as if trying to dispose of a secret.
“Silly thing!” Uncle Vernon chortled. “Must have heard a mouse!”
There’s also the possibility that this is all part of the very early development of the series, before the rules of magic were fully finalized. Was Rowling thinking in-detail about an animagus scene she was going to write three books later? Probably not. I tend to treat the entire first chapter of Sorcerer’s Stone with caution as it relates to the rest of the books: Rowling was still building the world and its laws. It also takes place in the 1980s, so who knows what those teachers were getting up to.
Anyway, Uncle Vernon shakes his head and clears his mind, thinking about nothing but a large order of drills he’s hoping to get that way. Which brings us to the single most underrated element of the entire series: Grunnings.
What, exactly, is the deal with Grunnings? For one, how did it get the name? We can only assume that it was founded by someone named “Grunning.” If that’s the case, it sounds like someone who would get on fantastically with Uncle Vernon. Just imagine that job interview.
“Hello, Vernon Dursley. Charmed.”
“Hello Vernon, I’m Barnaby Grunning. Delighted.”
Just imagine how much fun Grunning and Dursley would have in the office in the ‘80s, complaining about how everyone else didn’t realize how great Margaret Thatcher was.
Some other questions about Grunnings: what kind of company are they? As far as I can tell, they’re a wholesale drill manufacturer/supplier. We know from later books that they supply construction companies with drills; they might also supply hardware stores and similar businesses, and maybe they even sell their drills directly to consumers. They’re not just a middleman, though: Rowling explicitly states that Grunnings makes drills. So it’s not like they’re buying them in bulk, packaging and bundling them, then shipping them out for a profit: they’re both the manufacturers and the wholesalers.
Uncle Vernon seems like he works at Grunnings’ corporate headquarters. He’s certainly not working in a drill factory, at any rate. All of his involvement that we see is on the sales side. So I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that Uncle Vernon is basically the Jan Levinson-Gould of the drill business.
That’s another thing about Grunnings: they seem to be doing really well! As we see later, Mr. Dursley’s office is in the ninth floor of the Grunnings building, meaning Grunnings owns or leases a building that’s at least nine floors high. Seeing as Surrey is basically a sleepy countryside village, that would pass for a skyscraper compared to its neighbors, especially in 1980. So this isn’t just a drill company: it’s a thriving drill company, the kind that’s going to be in the bidding for every major contract that comes up.
It also shows a certain admirable drive on Uncle Vernon’s part. Dudley is only one year old, which means that as parents go, Vernon and Petunia are fairly young. According to Rowling, the two met at work, when Vernon was a junior executive and Petunia, presumably, was a secretary (she’d just completed a typing course). Obviously, this doesn’t match up with Vernon’s portrayal in the movies, but based on the book timeline alone, Vernon is still young. He’s maybe 30 or 35, 40 at the oldest, and he’s the director of this major drill company. Vernon, at least in 1981, might be fairly well known — a rising star in the business.
Before Vernon gets to his office, though, he’s distracted by something else: as he drives to work, he notices a bunch of weirdly-dressed people. People in cloaks, whispering to each other. At first, he supposes it’s some sort of stupid new fashion, but then he notices that some of the strange people are even older than he is. Eventually, he settles on an explanation: they’re collecting for something. Maybe they’re like those Salvation Army workers who ring the bell outside of Macy’s around Christmas. It’s not the worst idea Vernon has ever had.
Except, shouldn’t he eventually realize that that can’t possibly be it? If he saw a few small clusters of people in cloaks, maybe he’d think to himself, “ah, they’re dressed as Robin Hood because they’re redistributing wealth to those in need, that makes sense.” But as he keeps seeing them, one cluster after another of people in cloaks on the side of the road, not organized in any way but just talking to each other, shouldn’t he realize that that’s not how charity workers behave? If this was some sort of convention of roadside donation collectors, maybe his thought would make more sense, but these people aren’t doing anything; they’re just standing around talking to each other.
Vernon’s mind, of course, defaults to an explanation that won’t scare him. Still, though, it would have been fun to listen to his thought processes as he drives past one cloak after another, still not seeing any collecting tins, furiously rationalizing the nonsense that he’s looking at.
You know what this reminds me of? The morning the election was officially called for Joe Biden, when people just swarmed the streets, COVID be damned. I’m far from the first person to compare Trump and Voldemort, but the sensation feels like it could be similar. An enormous weight is lifted from a community, and all of a sudden, despite restrictions saying otherwise, everyone needs to take to the streets for a big party. Thinking like a wizard, it actually makes perfect sense. The “nothing can hurt me now” mentality would take over, and wizards would bounce happily out the door, wearing their brightest, most celebratory cloaks. If you’ve ever been lucky enough to celebrate an unambiguously fantastic, absolutely wonderful situation, you know the feeling: at a certain level of satisfaction and happiness, regard for quibbling issues just goes out the window.
We also see that Mr. Dursley, for a man who seems to worry a lot — and, indeed, who already knows from Petunia that wizards exist — is really good at compartmentalizing and not getting paralyzed by worry. That might not be a compliment: he might just be naïve. But still, even after all these strange things that have happened, he just sits at his desk, utterly ignoring the outside world, and concentrates on drills. There’s a whole rarely-explored alternative reading of the Harry Potter series here, where Uncle Vernon is a drill executive, happy with his job and at peace with the world, and all his animosity towards Harry comes back to this morning at Grunnings, when, for a few hours before wizards intruded on his life, he was completely satisfied, almost zen, with the way things were going.
Of course, that’s not to excuse Uncle Vernon’s actions throughout the seven books, because he turns into an unambiguously terrible person. But it’s worth looking at just how happy Uncle Vernon seemed up until noon on the first day of the series, and compare it to what happens next. It sort of reminds me of how, on Grey’s Anatomy, Seattle Grace is just a normal, healthy hospital, then Meredith Grey shows up and everyone starts dying. The first day Meredith showed up, in fact, I’ll bet the Chief felt exactly the way Uncle Vernon does when he crashes into the man as he walks across the street and gets almost violently hugged around the middle.
For now, though, Uncle Vernon is just happy, sitting at his desk making phone calls and yelling at his secretary. It’s like an image out of “Death of a Salesman.” Of course, we learn as the page ends, he doesn’t notice the owls outside his window, but honestly, more power to him. He’s about to be aggravated for seventeen straight years; this is basically one last bastion of relaxation and self-care. Soon he’ll have a magical nephew and owls swooping in and out of his house and Dementors trying to suck out his son’s soul — but for now, he can just walk down the hall and, taking a moment to soak in his feeling of utter peace and happiness, say:
“All right, Barnaby? How about that Thatcher, eh?”