Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: Dobby’s Warning, a Flying Car and a Monster at Hogwarts
In this second book of the saga, Harry and his friends live through another great adventure. While he waits at his unbearable aunt and uncle’s house to go back for his second year at Hogwarts, a house-elf appears in his bedroom and warns him of the danger he faces if he returns to school.
Author: J.K. Rowling (born 1965)
Title: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998)
Format: English paperback (Bloomsbury Children’s Books), 384 pages
Series: Book 2 of 7
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/1408855666 (ASIN 1408855666)
A Flying Car
Despite the elf’s insistence, Harry decides to go, travelling with his friend Ron in a flying car. It is one of the funniest and most memorable scenes of the early books.
The Chamber Is Opened
Harry will have to face giant serpents, angry ghosts and other dangers, because someone has opened the Chamber of Secrets once again, releasing a terrible monster that threatens life at Hogwarts. Once more, Harry will have to face his most fearsome adversary.
Dobby
The house-elf who appears in Harry’s bedroom is Dobby, a nervous, self-punishing servant bound to an unnamed wizarding family, who tries to save Harry by sabotaging him at every turn: blocking the barrier to Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, sending a rogue Bludger after him in a Quidditch match. Dobby is both comic and pitiful, and through him Rowling introduces the theme of enslaved house-elves that runs through the rest of the series. His fate at the end of the book is one of its most satisfying moments.
Lockhart and the Heir of Slytherin
The new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, Gilderoy Lockhart, is a vain celebrity author with dazzling teeth and a bestselling series of books about his own exploits; he is one of Rowling’s funniest satirical creations. Meanwhile, students are found petrified, a message on a wall announces that the Chamber has been opened, and the school begins to suspect that Harry himself, who has discovered he can speak to snakes, is the heir of Salazar Slytherin. Hermione’s ingenious plan to investigate, involving a forbidden potion brewed in a girls’ bathroom haunted by the ghost Moaning Myrtle, goes memorably wrong.
Blood and Prejudice
This is the book in which the series’ central moral theme comes into focus. Draco Malfoy calls Hermione "Mudblood", a slur for witches and wizards born to non-magical parents, and we learn that Slytherin, one of the four founders of Hogwarts, wanted to exclude them from the school. The ideology of "pure blood" that drives Voldemort and his followers is introduced here, along with the Malfoy family, whose father, Lucius, will play a growing role.
A Diary
An enchanted diary that belonged to a former student, Tom Riddle, is at the centre of the mystery. Rowling herself later revealed that it matters far more to the story than this book lets on. At the end, Dumbledore offers Harry one of the series’ key ideas: that it is our choices, far more than our abilities, that show what we truly are.
On Screen
Chris Columbus directed the film version in 2002. Kenneth Branagh played Lockhart.
Ginny and the Weasleys
The book also brings us properly into the Weasley family. Harry spends the end of the summer at the Burrow, their ramshackle, magical home, with its de-gnoming of the garden, its clock that shows where each family member is and Mrs Weasley’s formidable cooking. Ron’s little sister Ginny, shy and tongue-tied around Harry, starts her first year, and her experience at school turns out to be central to the plot.
Why Read It
The second book deepens the world of the first, introduces some key pieces of the saga’s mythology and keeps the mystery going until the very end. It is darker than the first volume but just as enjoyable.
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