Constant Vigilance!

I'm always intrigued by Mad-Eye Moody's character in Goblet of Fire, especially since we know (upon re-reading) that he's not really Mad-Eye Moody.

I think this character twist is one of the biggest that Jo Rowling's thrown down in the whole series. I for one was completely buffaloed my first time through. I had NO CLUE that Moody wasn't Moody. I certainly hadn't figured out the Barty Crouch Jr. connection.

I confess when I finished the book the first time, much as I loved it and enjoyed it, there was a tiny part of me that felt a bit deflated by the fact that one of the most complex and layered characters in the whole story turned out to be a bad guy only masquerading as that person. I never had that feeling with, say, Professor Quirrel, whom we hardly got to know. Plus it was different with Quirrel. He was weak and cowardly and Voldemort moved into the vaccum and possessed him. It was easy to feel sorry for Quirrel, who was really just a pawn in Voldemort's game.

But Crouch/Moody is different. Throughout GoF, I liked Moody -- well, liked isn't the right word perhaps -- but I respected him for the most part. I still do, whenever I read it, though I keep telling myself that it's really Crouch acting out of evil motivations every step of the way, no matter what it looks like on the surface. That's still easy to forget. Moody seems to be on the side of the right: not only because he has a reputation as an auror, but because of his actions throughout the story. He seems concerned to teach his students how to fight against the dark arts; he seems compassionate (he really does!) toward Neville; he seems impressed by Harry's ability to throw off the imperius curse and works him hard so that he'll be able to do it better; he has Draco's number as a manipulative back-stabber right from the start. All of these things are designed to gain Harry's trust, our trust. And it worked, at least with me.

Of course once you know Moody is Crouch, you can easily come up with a cauldron full of reasons for why he acts the way he acts in each case. You can argue that he's a fine actor, able to hoodwink Dumbledore into believing he's the real Mad-Eye, and that he does that by presenting an impeccable cover as a dedicated teacher. You can argue that all of his "compassion" toward Neville is really just a cover so that he can manipulate events -- make sure Neville has the book that mentions gillyweed, so that Harry will be able to find out how to breathe underwater, thus survive one more task on the road to the graveyard meeting with Voldemort. It makes my blood run cold to realize that Moody/Crouch, as he stood in front of those 4th year students teaching them about the cruciatus curse (and actually performing it on that poor spider...perhaps that should have been our first tip-off) knew what had happened to Neville's parents. "Longbottom, isn't it?" he asks so casually.

His encouragement of Harry is harder to figure...not that it doesn't make sense for him to gain Harry's trust and to keep him moving one step closer to the confrontation with Voldemort, but does he have to be so thorough? There's a real irony here that some of the best training Harry has ever had in defending himself against the unforgiveable curses, particularly the imperious curse, comes from a death eater working for his arch-enemy. I'd wager that Moody/Crouch's seeming admiration for Harry's skills (despite his sneering speech to Harry at the end, when his identity is revealed) is real though grudging. I think he recognizes skills in Harry, real abilities, abilities and skills perhaps they share in common. Because it turns out that Crouch Jr. has learned the hard way himself, through many long years, how to throw off that imperious curse. No wonder he has a fascination with the one student who manages to begin to throw it off right in the very first lesson. It appears to take tremendous will-power, a tremendous will to live.

I struggled for a long time with the whole "bouncing ferret" scene -- would Crouch/Moody, I wondered, actually do this to a fellow-death-eater's kid, just to gain Harry's trust? Wouldn't he actually be sympathetic to Draco and his ilk in Slytherin, even though he has to hide the fact while pretending to be Moody (I almost said while pretending to be "Dumbledore's man" -- you begin to realize after a while how many of these themes and questions of loyalties repeat across books and characters...). This time around it finally occurs to me how much Crouch/Moody must hate death eaters that got off scott-free -- he even says as much later, that there's nothing he hates more. He himself suffered for so many years, first in Azkaban, then by his father's attempts to "hide him" and keep him alive, though imprisoned. So perhaps it makes perfect sense that he'd terrorize Draco if given the chance. "...I know your father of old, boy..." he says, and while we think he means that he once went after Lucius Malfoy as an auror, the subtext (given his real identity) is that they were once death eaters together, and Crouch is hopping mad that Malfoy's been free all this time while he's been paying the price.

So many of these thoughts make me think of Snape, of course. We could ask so many of the same questions about Snape. Has he too been wearing a kind of "disguise" (though not a polyjuice one)? Has he too been playing fast and loose with loyalties? One thing that gives me hope about Snape's ultimate allegiances is that he appears in Crouch/Moody's foe glass along with McGonagall and Dumbledore at the ultimate moment. Snape's discomfort around Moody all year doesn't have to come from secret knowledge of Moody's real identity; it can be legitimate based on the fact that the real Moody chased him down and went after him when he was a death eater, and thus knows his secrets and his dark past.

One of JKR's talents is to help humanize even the "bad guys," even the people we know are Harry's (and Dumbledore's) enemies. Crouch is so culpable here. He's more responsible than almost anyone for getting Harry to that graveyard. And yet I think there are moments in the Crouch/Moody portrayal that come back to us later, not just as clever covers of identity, but of sad glimmers of possibilities that Crouch Jr. could have made different choices along the way and turned out to be a very different sort of person. Would it be awful to consider that he might have had a moment of real admiration for Harry, or even possibly real compassion for Neville? Could his suffering not have given him buried qualities that Voldemort hadn't yet had a chance to quite fully bend and corrupt?