When it comes to ranking the individual volumes of Harry Potter from best to worst, everybody’s a critic.  Order of the Phoenix tends to fall at the top or the bottom of lists: it’s the longest of the seven books. The first 156 pages in two columns takes Harry from Privet Drive to Grimmauld Place, the Ministry for the disciplinary hearing, back on the Hogwarts Express, and finally the Great Hall to hear the Sorting Hat warn of imminent danger with Dolores Umbridge seated at high table. Panicked students studying for the O.W.L.S. just aren’t as riveting as her brief reign of terror–or the Tri-Wizard Tournament in the previous volume.  After the magnificent  chaos of the Weasley twins’ exit, the pace accelerates exponentially in the remaining one hundred pages with the standoff in the Department of Mysteries, the death of Sirius loses his life, and the rout of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named by Dumbledore. The falling action slows to a crawl while the head master rehearse all the necessary exposition which will propel the plot over the last two books punctuated by the crashes of delicate instruments Harry throws against the walls. Order of the Phoenix this time around was more of a slog than I remembered.  Rowling’s challenge,  similar to Diana Wynne Jones’s Witch Week (1982),  was to integrate adolescent angst, test anxiety, and magic in a school story while building towards the outbreak of the Second Wizarding War.  Crosscutting between academics and the gathering storm isn’t always smooth, when so much more rides on friends’ standoff against the Death Eaters in the Department of Mysteries than their O.W.L.S., whose results won’t be revealed until the beginning of The Half-Blood Prince.   Piling on Harry’s halting, wooden conversations with Cho Chang and Hagrid’s taming of half-brother Grawpy dragged down the story, at least in my opinion. I also wished Rowling’s editor had pointed out that Harry doesn’t need to bellow in all caps because context makes is clear that he was upset, mad, frustrated, etc.

Kay’s strategy in the preceding four volumes played to his gifts–carefully observed drawings of fabulous beasts, architecture, and individual character.  Several lovely drawings are devoted to owls, which sharply contrast with the spread of the common doxy, all legs, sharp teeth and claws, sprayed without mercy by Mrs. Weasley and her gang of exterminators.  Thestrals appear twice with Harry—a haunting one of him looking up at a thestral and the much more frightening one of  him clinging to his skeletal mount as it wheels over the London skyline.

Grimmauld Place is a perfect subject for an artist with Kay’s flair for the dark and uncanny.   Open the book and the row houses’ facades, which have seen better days, appear on the front endpapers; flip to the back and number 12 has emerged black and looming between numbers 11 and 13.  Mrs. Weasley climbs the filthy, decaying stairway to the upper floors on an errand. In another Sirius and Harry clean out the grim cabinet of sinister curiosities in what was once a grand room.

New characters came to life in more portraits.  Tonks is charming in her robes over torn jeans. Dolores Umbridge presides over the tea table set with a garish pink service,stubby thick fingers grasping a knife dripping blood-red jam. Her mustard floral patterned robes are accessorized with a necklace of beads that look like staring eyes and two little smears of lipstick on her teeth.  In the less grotesque portrait of Luna Lovegood, the bulging misty blue eyes nearly overshadow the signature necklace of butterbeer corks.  With her wand behind her ear, she is odd but not unlikeable although difficult to size up.  One of Kay’s favorites, Hagrid is the subject of several rather unpleasant illustrations, painted in muddy colors with coarse brush strokes.  In this volume, Snape’s appearance is more ghoulish than human, a change that the text does not really call for, unless it is supposed to be Harry’s projection of the potions masterThe strain of doing justice to scenes revolving around individual heroism and those celebrating fellowship manifests itself most clearly in the absence of illustrations for dramatic confrontations between characters before witnesses–Umbridge’s attempt to throw out Sybil Trelawney, Ron letting through goals during the Quidditch match, Dumbledore defying Fudge in his office. The double-page illustration of the members of Dumbledore’s Army summoning up their patronuses doesn’t quiver with energy, except for the drawing of Fred (or is it George) in the lower left.  As in the previous four volumes, sections of colored pages signal the heightening of tension: during the course of the episode in the Department of Mysteries, backgrounds change from black, greenish-black, purple, pale bluish-green and back to black.  What Kay draws on those pages instead of falling bodies crashing into ranges of shelving, Hermione marking the exit door, or the blasting of the statues in the Ministry’s atrium, is a series of frightening faces from below.  They are the stuff of nightmares, but  the small eerie line drawing of Ginny was much more effective because the expression on her face communicated fear, wonder, and horror when confronted by the  glass bell.

Order of the Phoenix doesn’t feel incompletely realized—not because the illustrator’s heart wasn’t in it, but perhaps the story was putting too many daunting demands on him , even though Neil Packer, a long-time illustrator for the Folio Society drew many accomplished decorations and vignettes. I was not entirely surprised by Kay’s announcement when it was published in October 2023 that he was stepping away from the project to focus on his mental health (the dedication mentioned his doctors at the NHS, which suggests he must have been struggling for some time). At the beginning of this huge endeavor, I wondered how Kay could meet the grueling publication schedule (originally one volume a year) without collapsing or sacrificing quality.  He must have felt as if he were being eaten alive by the project and that it would be impossible to illustrate the last two volumes without an extended sabbatical to recharge his imagination.  He deserves nothing but good wishes from his fans for a well-deserved rest and for all his future endeavors.  Bloomsbury has promised to find a successor to complete the illustrated Harry Potter, but no one has been named yet, as far as I’ve been able to discover.