Lupin's falsehoods (was: Lupin and Sirius and being single)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 164170

Pippin wrote:
<snip>
>  I think Lupin is playing a larger role already than most people
realize. Right now, Harry thinks that Snape has been a villain all
through the series. If Snape steps out of that role, if he is not the
Quirrell face of evil, the moral coward who made it possible for
Voldemort to operate in plain sight, right under Dumbledore's long and
twisted nose, the one that Dumbledore trusted so recklessly, then who is? 
> 
> The only other credible option is McGonagall --  but she's no
coward. Lupin is, by his own admission.  And however close he might
have been to James and Sirius in his marauder days, something seems to
have happened afterwards. Lupin doesn't appear to have been at James
and Lily's wedding. He wasn't at Harry's christening. By the time of
Godric's Hollow, Sirius and James no longer trusted  him-- and they
may have been right.
> 
> Aimless and alienated, unable to find work, while James finds
> happiness with Lily and Sirius lives it up as a rebel, wouldn't
> Lupin start to resent his independently wealthy friends just
> a little? He has his work for the Order -- but what hope is 
> there that life will be better for werewolves when Voldemort
> is defeated? It must have seemed rather pointless. <snip>

Carol:
While I'm not going to chime in on ESE!Lupin (just because Snape isn't
a traitor doesn't necessarily mean that someone else is), I do think
this last paragraph is an accurate portrait of young Lupin after
Hogwarts, and I think that Peter Pettigrew could easily have made use
of Lupin's resentment and envy of his friends, of his general
unhappiness and discontent, to subtly raise the Potters' and Sirius
Black's suspicions of their werewolf friend without ever openly
suggesting that he was the spy. (At the same time, he could have
subtly inflamed Remus's jealousy of Sirius and played up the Black
family's Slytherin/Dark wizard connections.) IoW. I'm certain that
Wormtail was both the spy and the traitor, but I'm equally certain
that he had material to work with. He knew the other Marauders well
and could play them against each other without being suspected given
their underestimation of his own talents and cleverness (which, BTW,
might have added resentment to his motives for betraying James Potter).

But to return to Lupin. We've seen both Snape and Dumbledore dealing
in secrecy and partial truths, so Lupin's secretiveness is not in
itself suspicious. He has a lot to hide in PoA. Keeping the fact that
he's a werewolf from the students and their parents is certainly
understandable, given the prejudice against werewolves in the WW.
Keeping his knowledge that Sirius Black is an Animagus from Dumbledore
is explained by Lupin himself as resulting from his fear of
Dumbledore's disapproval, which somehow outweighed the apparent danger
that Sirius Black (apparently) posed to the students and particularly
Harry. He does not, however, mention that he also neglected to turn in
to Dumbledore the map that could have led Sirius Black to Harry if he
found it, and which proves that Black knows secret passages into the
castle that he must have used when he slashed the Fat Lady's painting
and again when he slashed Ron's bedcurtains. He hypocritically tells
Harry that he's astounded that Harry didn't turn the map in, 289, but
doesn't do so himself. And he lies to himself that Black must have
learned Dark Arts from Voldemort that enabled him to escape from
Azkaban and enter the Hogwarts grounds. (Could Lupin really have
believed his own lie?)

But Lupin also underplays his Hogwarts friendship with both James and
Sirius to Harry, and does not tell him until the Shrieking Shack (when
it's clear that Peter Pettigrew was the spy and that Harry was never
in danger from Black and his own identity as a werewolf has been
revealed) that his three friends were Animagi who wandered the grounds
and Hogsmeade with him on full-moon nights and that the four friends
were the joint makers of the Marauder's Map. Exactly why he doesn't
trust Harry with at least some of that information (the friendship and
his identity as one of the map makers) is unclear--maybe he thinks
that it will lead to the revelation that he's a werewolf, but
certainly it would also reveal that Black knows how to get into the
castle, information that Harry has every right to know. (He's also
concealing the same information that the other adults are suppressing,
that Black was Harry's godfather and the ostensible Secret Keeper,
presumably for the same reason as Mr. Weasley, to keep Harry from
going after him.)

But in addition to concealing important information from Dumbledore
and suppressing important details by telling Harry half-truths (the
Whomping Willow was planted the same year he came to Hogwarts; he knew
 the makers of the Marauder's Map, etc.), he actually tells some
flat-out lies (in addition to lying to himself, as previously
indicated). For example, he tells Harry that Sirius Black "must have
found a way to fight [the dementors]" (PoA Am. ed. 188). He tells
Snape (in front of Harry) that the Maruader's Map "looks to me as
though it is merely a piece of parchment that insults anyobody who
reads it. . . . I imagine Harry got it from a joke shop--" (288). When
snape intimates that Harry could have gotten the map "direct from the
manufacturers," Lupin evades him by asking Harry whether he knows any
of the "men" whose names are on the map and repeats his lie to Snape,
"It looks like a Zonko product to me." (Interestingly, even when Lupin
says, "I'll take it *back* now, shall I?" Snape, who obviously knows
that lupin is lying, doesn't blow his cover. Nor does it bother Harry
that Lupin would lie to Snape; when Lupin says "Yes, I know it's a
map," 289, the earlier lie doesn't even register.) His response when
Harry asks why Snape thought Harry got the map from the manufacturers
(Because . . . because these mapmakers would want to lure you out of
school") is more a half-truth than a lie, but it's certainly evasive,
and its intention is clearly to conceal rather than reveal. (It
doesn't answer Harry's question, either, but again Harry doesn't notice.)

Given all these statements by Lupin that can be shown to be either
lies or half-truths, what are we to make of his remarks about himself?
He says, for example, "I don't pretend to be an expert at fighting
Dementors, Harry . . . quite the contrary" (189). Does this statement
mean that he's teaching Harry to cast a Patronus without being able to
cast one against a Dementor himself? (Yes, he can cast a Patronus to
communicate with other Order members, but that's not the same thing,
and it's unclear whether anything besides silver light comes out of
his wand when he drives off the dementor on the train.) Or does it
mean that here really are other effective methods, such as the
unidentified method that Snape teaches in HBP, that Lupin doesn't
know? Or is he lying, covering up his expertise with false modesty,
for which there seems to be no good reason? He also says that he *led*
three of his friends into becoming Animagi (355), a point that Black
doesn't dispute even though elsewhere the implication seems to be that
it was James's idea. And, as Pippin says, he calls himself "cowardly"
and gives his reason for not revealing that Black is an Animagus as
being "Dumbledore's trust means everything to me" (356). The statement
seems to be true enough, though hardly adequate as justification for
concealing something so important, so perhaps it's another half-truth.
Or perhaps his self-contempt for his cowardice is insufficient to stop
him from being a coward, just as it didn't stop him from letting his
friends get away with bullying when he was a Prefect. 

Not being an ESE!Lupin advocate (I think that Lupin is perfectly
sincere when he tells Black that Harry has the right to know the truth
about Pettigrew, 350), I'm not sure what to make of all these lies and
half-truths, only that they cast doubt on the truth of Lupin's various
statements about Snape (other than "superb Occlumens," which is backed
by canon) and about himself.

Carol, hoping that someone else will examine Lupin's remarks in OoP
and HBP to see whether they, too, show signs of evasiveness or deception