Crouch Sr

[charisjulia]

No: HPFGUIDX 37567

Eileen bought up in a very interesting post the subject of Crouch Sr. 
Alarmed by the mysterious, (despite the grey hair) lack of sexy 
Crouch acronyms she proceeded to investigate the case thoroughly. 
Observing that as 
>he was extremely attentive of his looks, he was a very popular 
politician
and all in all 
>quite a striking personality
he must indeed be dead sexy and demanded an acronym. However 
somewhere along the way to this conclusion she apparently got rather 
lost in tangles of Crouch related subjects of all sorts leading to 
quite a few thought—provoking points 

                                                                      
                             *    *    *


I think that the confusing thing about Crouch's character is that 
there are so many different accounts of it. Of course JKR loves red—
herrings and is continually setting her readers up for Great Plot--
Twists and Dumbfounding Apocalypses. Yet the Crouch case is much more 
complex than, say, the Black one. With Sirius there's no problem—
you're told he's mad and dangerous in the beginning, he than proceeds 
to progressively accumulate more badness, till finally it turns out 
that—hey! Guess what! He's really OK after all!


Now that's easy. That's simple. That's something one can handle. You 
are told what to believe and you promptly gulp it all down like a 
good little reader.


But with Barty Sr—well, who * is* telling the truth? Furthermore do 
any of the people expressing opinions on Crouch throughout the book 
really have the authority to do so? Does anyone actually * know* him 
at all? The very fact that nobody has any idea what his life is 
really like is what he's all about after all.


Let's consider our sources a moment --and for one character who's not 
even major there's a great many of them. First of all we've got Barty 
Crouch himself—obviously our most trustworthy origin of information, 
though the scenes in which he appears offer a wide range of 
behaviours and mental states. As for the rest, well. . . there's 
Percy's raptures over his boss-- Sirius's account—and finally Barty 
Jr's narrative. The last two stories seem to tie well enough 
together, but, hmmm, I think Percy would beg to differ, don't 
you?. . . It's really rather bewildering. After all none of these 
characters are completely objective judges, are they? And really, why 
accept their opinions as if they we're written in stone? 


Eileen comments that Percy is not Crouch in miniature. Good point. 
Yet we are rather encouraged to think so, wouldn't you say? One of 
Harry's first observations on meeting Crouch is that the reasons for 
Percy's idolising for him are obvious.


Eileen continues:
>First of all, all evidence does point to Percy's assertion that 
>Crouch is indeed a brilliant man. But he has more than that. A 
>certain style, a calmness in the most bizarre situations (the only 
>time he loses his temper is right at the very end of the trial 
>scene), a methodical way of going about things. This is a man that 
>people pay attention to, as they did when Voldemort was alive. 
>Meanwhile, Percy, no matter how brainy, comes across to everyone as 
>an annoying puppy, bounding about and showing off. 


Exactly. Of course the two of them do have quite a few traits in 
common: The in—your—face rule—loving thing obviously, a certain 
pompousness of manner, a feeling of self—importance, ambition. . . In 
fact I think that part of the reason Percy gets so irritating (in an 
endearing fashion of course:--)) in GoF is that he's trying to 
imitate his hero but isn't really pulling it off so well. This is 
rather sneaky of JKR, don't you think? Not only is she trying to 
twist our perception of Crouch's character, but also attempting to 
get us to believe that Percy could ever really "pull a Crouch"! 
<snorts loudly and indignantly> As if!


Percy certainly does beat the drum for Crouch of course, but does 
that really mean that he actually knows anything about his boss as a 
person? Note that he's stubbornly slow on the uptake when it is 
evident something is seriously wrong. It would seem to me that Percy 
is just too caught up in, initially his own excitement over a new job 
that he's clearly * really* into and later his stress and work 
overload, to see beyond the end of his own nose. Much as I love Percy 
I have to admit that in GoF he is rather wrapped up in himself to 
take serious notice of what's going on around him. 
Crouch's "overenthusiastic" comment is indicative of this IMO. Percy 
is trying so hard to please him he can't even tell when he is 
genuinely doing so and when he's just, well, making a nuisance of 
himself.


And then there's Sirius. Sirius is the one character who actually 
does attest that he "knew" Crouch. Yet what he actually seems to mean 
is that he had one brush with the man in his life which resulted in 
quite calamitous and utterly unjust results for himself. Now 
obviously Sirius carries a bit of a grudge. And who can blame him? 
Perfectly understandable. It does however place is assessments of 
Crouch Sr in a rather dubious light, no?


And in fact I think that the whole of "Padfoot Returns" raises quite 
a few questions as far as Crouch is concerned. Clearly of course he 
did have some rather, hmmm, extremist ideas of how Voldemort was best 
to be fought. However. . . 


Well, take the granting of new powers to the Aurors. Powers to kill. 
Ermm, really, how can I put this delicately? Errmm, well, hmmm, 
but. . . * look who's talking*?! And after all there was a war going 
on. To say the truth I had been rather taking it for granted that 
there must have been killings and was quite surprised that the fact 
was referred to with such a scandalised manner. It was the rest of 
the Unforgivable Curses that shocked me.


And then there's everyone's reaction to Crouch's handling of his 
son's crimes: Hermione whispers "Did Crouch try and get his son off?"-
-What, was he supposed to do that? Evidently as the truth apparently 
appalls Harry: "He gave his own son to the Dementors?" he asked 
quietly.


Of course everyone's welcome to have their own opinion on the matter, 
but I can't agree with the general sentiments of our protagonists 
here. The fact that Barty Jr just happened to have a father in high 
places should not affect the enforcement of justice. Of course in 
this case it in fact * did* and the outcome was not very advantageous 
for poor Barty. That is of course equally unacceptable. However 
that's another matter altogether and one that rather deals with the 
oh—so—very—easily corruptible law system the wizarding society has 
working (or not working) here. But it still doesn't alter the fact 
that Crouch using his power and positioning to get his son off would 
* not* have been right.


Eileen wrote:
>Crouch did not sacrifice his son to his career ambition. This seems 
>to be a red herring in the plot.


Indeed. As a matter of fact I don't even think that later on when his 
career tumbled down around him he really gave two figs about it. He 
had much greater troubles to worry about. This is replayed 
effectively in the Dark Mark scene with Winky's dismissal. It was 
not, as we were all led to believe, the taint on his reputation that 
bothered him. Winky is just offered up in an attempt to keep much, 
hmmm, larger skeletons in the closet and the reader is being led off 
course.


Which appears to be a general motif throughout the book. JKR is 
continually spooning us indications of Crouch Sr's Big Baddiness. 
Even his son's crimes are blamed on him. And Eileen mentions
>Ludo's significant offhand introduction of Crouch, "Talk of the 
Devil"
and the
>significance of Barty Jr. being fair-haired, while his father was 
dark-haired.

Yup. Yup,yup,yup. All red herrings. All of `em. Set us off the scent.


The whole thing is of course marvellously contrived. From their 
initial introduction in the chapter named after them Bagman and 
Crouch keep us right at the end of our seats pin—pointing one and 
then the other as a possible villain. As it in fact turns out neither 
one is the Big Bad Wolf in this case, though Crouch's explanation is 
of course infinitely more interesting than Ludo's.


Both of them are, it would seem, grey characters. (though the jury is 
still out on Bagman's general innocence) I like that. It makes a bit 
of a break in the Good Guys/Bad Guys game and hopefully indicates 
more such characters to come as Harry moves further afield and out of 
his close circle of friends. Now all we need to find out is that 
Crouch Jr was a bad egg of Ravenclaw (he's not really ambitious, just 
extremely vindictive and of course devilishly clever) and there you 
have it! A precedent is set!


Some more things on Crouch Sr:


Eileen wrote:


>While under the Imperius curse, Crouch sometimes acts like an 
>automaton. However, he breaks through it with his own personality at 
>the end of the Goblet of Fire scene. "I've left young Weatherby in 
>charge ... very enthusiastic ... a little over-enthusiastic, if 
>truth be told ..." which goes against Ron's assertion that Crouch 
>has no sense of humour, and makes one wonder if Crouch would have 
>been an entirely bad influence on Percy. There's a lot of lessons 
>that Percy has to learn, but this "over-enthusiasm" as Crouch puts 
>it, is getting in the way of learning any of them. He wouldn't 
>ever .drop it on Gred and Forge's suggestion, but could contact with 
>Crouch have cured him of it? 


Hmmm, I don't know about that. To be honest I never really liked the 
way Crouch treated Percy, at least if his behaviour at the Quidditch 
World Cup is any indication. I mean, he hasn't even gone to the 
trouble of learning his own personal assistant's real name for crying 
out loud! Remember Sirius's comment about looking at how a man treats 
his subordinates to understand what he's really like? Crouch's whole 
attitude towards Percy in the scene borders on the dismissive. After 
all he's in Percy's environment, surrounded by Percy's friends and 
family, he could give him the time of day or at least drink the lousy 
tea! Percy's obviously bending over backwards (or hunching over 
frontwards as the case may be) to please him and he can't even manage 
anything more than "mild surprise" at seeing him. And I bet Crouch 
never even read the cauldron report . . . <sigh>


However, yeah, maybe Percy could learn a few necessary things from 
Crouch if the latter bothered himself with him. But then again he 
could also have learned a great deal not—so—very--good things as well.


>Barty Jr. is an ungrateful b-eeeeeeeeeep. Don't care how unloving he 
>thought his father was. Being under Imperius curse was a heap nicer 
>than Azkaban, especially since he was guilty.


Agreed. IMO Barty Jr' s attitude towards his father speaks far more 
of his own complexes than his father's failure. No doubt Crouch Sr 
did indeed leave much to be wished for as a father. But I don't 
believe Barty's assertions that his Dad never really loved him. Quite 
to the contrary he seems genuinely proud when he talks of his son's 
academic success. He just probably was not in the habit of showing it 
much. Sad, but it hardly let's Barty off the hook.


Actually that high—wrought "I have no son!" begs, at least to my 
mind, for comparison with "The fiddler on the roof". There we have 
another father who dismisses a child over his beliefs with the exact 
same words, yet can there be any doubt of the effort it is costing 
Tevye? Hmmm, well obviously the similarities stop there, but, errr, I 
just thought I'd mention it.


>J.K. Rowling said that it's the unhappy people who come back as 
ghosts. I can't think of >a person in all the books who dies more 
unhappily than Crouch Sr. 

Oooh excellent! I like it! Yes, and of course it would be a perfect 
pretext to bring up the whole ghost thing as we have been promised!


Charis Julia, who really thinks Crouch Sr was hard, harsh and cruel, 
but can't help pitying and even rather liking him. He's definitely 
better than Bagman, who as we all know is in fact the one who is the 
real D.E.V.I.L.! <g>

P.S: C.R.A.B.C.U.S.T.A.R.D.! Lol! T.A.G.S. does it again!