InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "baby, it's cold outside."

beholder_mod (beholder_mod) wrote in hp_beholder,
@ 2011-04-15 13:20:00

Entry tags:

beholder_2011, dawlish/scrimgeour, fic, john dawlish, rating:pg13, rufus scrimgeour, slash

FIC: "The Ministry's Man" for injustice_worth
Recipient: injustice_worth
 Author: musamihi
 Title: The Ministry's Man
 Rating: PG-13 
Pairings: John Dawlish/Bartemius Crouch (Sr.) (unrequited); John Dawlish/Rufus Scrimgeour. 
Word Count: 11,300
 Warnings/Content Information (Highlight to View): * Canon character deaths, dark themes.*  
Summary: John Dawlish has spent his career in the shadows of the Ministry's greatest men. One of the only things they all have in common is that they never stay for long. 
Author's Notes: I hope you enjoy, injustice_worth! Your inspiring list of characters was a joy to work from. Many, many thanks to melusinahp for beta-reading – all remaining mistakes are my own. And thanks, of course, to the wonderful mod, for running such a fantastic fest.

"The Ministry's Man"

(Don't forget to return to this post to leave feedback for the author!)

(Read comments) - (Post a new comment)

perverse_idyll
2011-04-23 09:23 am UTC (link)

This is phenomenal and heartbreaking and beautifully written. It flows like water, now warm, now cool, spilling with extraordinary smoothness over the edge into bottomless sadness. The complex grasp you have on the kind of person Dawlish is, and his need to look up to someone, to have his existence (and the world's order) justified by an heroic leader, is compelling and utterly plausible. It's also so painfully sympathetic that I wanted Dawlish, whose blind faith in authority would disturb me in real life, to have somebody reward his rather child-like dependence. He's a pitiful but not contemptible figure, too weak to survive on principle alone, aware and afraid of his own limitations and almost worshipful of those he perceives as inherently pure, incorruptible, or simply imbued with righteous defiance. He's touchingly self-deprecating and self-sacrificing. Even filtered through his central, consuming need, his perceptions of Crouch and Scrimgeour catch at something I can believe worth admiring. He's not entirely deceived about them—although how very different they look through his eyes than Harry's.

The voice pulled me in from the first paragraph, a fascinating mix of pitiful, stubbornly conservative, and strangely humble. The cross between hardline law-enforcement rhetoric and existential fear, each feeding off the other, and Dawlish's conviction that the Ministry is the only thing holding back the forces of nihilism, whisper of his weakness, his denial of a larger picture, the fact that he's a follower who longs for a black-and-white morality. Yet his devotion is almost moving; deluded, yes, constantly shadowed by his lurking sense that the world will fall apart without the supremacy of law. But you do a brilliant job of making us feel what Dawlish feels, and it's difficult to condemn him. His fixation from afar on Barty Crouch, the way he idealizes the singlemindedness and rigid purpose that make Crouch's public actions a personal tragedy, the way he goes from idealizing to idolizing, so that Crouch becomes his sole moral checkpoint, is breathtaking in its naturalness, its pathetic need. You describe Crouch—in fact all of those within Dawlish's orbit—with a masterful double vision: what Dawlish sees, and how Dawlish builds up a private emotional mythology, versus the shortcomings and shortsightedness, the inadequacy and sheer, exhausted human error of his heroes.

The trial is harrowing. Johanna Crouch's grief and Crouch Sr.'s insistence on presiding over his son's sentencing are terrible, and the aftermath is saturated with despair. Dawlish's wish to comfort Crouch, and the betrayal he feels when he hears Crouch calling upon his wife, which prevents him from humiliating himself by offering more than Crouch would ever expect or tolerate—it's all so intensely sad. Even if Dawlish's motives are largely selfish, his agonized wish to comfort a man shorn of his family and his purpose twists my heart. Which is why his ruthlessness is all the more hideous. Dawlish's susceptibility early in the fic to the Dementors' soulless horror makes it even more unbearable that he unleashes them upon Barty Crouch, Jr., revenging himself for what happened to the man whose crusade he embraced and whose downfall robs him of his sense of direction.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

pt 2

perverse_idyll
2011-04-23 09:23 am UTC (link)

His more jaded and critical view of Scrimgeour is equally insightful, and Scrimgeour's pragmatic employment of him, as both a dupe and a sexual outlet, implies that the new Minister has got Dawlish's measure. I like this portrait of an irascible, overbearing Scrimgeour, thwarted by Dumbledore's refusal to join forces and unwilling to abandon his post despite all the signs pointing to his impending doom. The detail about the crushed wire-framed glasses makes his death horribly vivid. All of your details are emotionally memorable and saturated with a fatalistic aura. I love the whole description of Scrimgeour's flat, the long, dusty hall and distracting doors, as paranoid and symbolic of the man's temperament as Crouch and his randomly chosen Floos flaring green in the dusk. Your handling of atmosphere throughout is spellbinding, and adds enormously to the desolate sense of futility and longing and crumbling certainties. The demoralizing of John Dawlish is executed with grace and inevitability, and the fact that he's self-aware enough to know how much is due to his own spinelessness, his lack of a genuine moral center, just kills me. The ending is, in a sense, poetic justice visited upon a man who can't withstand the emptiness of the universe on his own. Without someone else's example before him, without a focus for his devotional impulses, without someone standing fast between him and the void, Dawlish was bound to fall into the enemy's hands. The ending is his nightmare come true. This very fact implies that he was, to some degree, right to be afraid. The structures have failed; the good have been o'erthrown. His Confunding is therefore merciful, because as heartbreaking as it is that he longs for something and can't recall what haunts him, at least it spares him the knowledge of what he has become.

Dawlish ends submerged, a-drift in all he's lost and all he's betrayed. The fear that drives him at the outset, the looming Darkness he believes is threatening to swallow up the civilized world, is personally prophetic. The Darkness does consume him, and it doesn't spit him out; in darkness he stays, confused, not knowing what he seeks but searching compulsively.

I've just flailed incoherently all over your story, but I don't feel I've managed to convey at all how it made me feel. It's an astonishing feat of ventriloquism, walking the fine line between the character's perspective and the reader's omniscience. It chronicles the moral vacuum growing inside Dawlish, and although even the Death Eaters find him too insignificant to be worth destroying, the tale of his loss of faith is extremely moving. I read it last night, and I ached and marveled through every word. Even lesser people, the ungifted and confused and dangerously subservient, have a right to their stories. You've written a beautiful one for John Dawlish, and I'm so glad to have had the chance to read it.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

(Read comments) -