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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Harry learns more about his mysterious nemesis -- and the brutal reality of being 16 -- in J.K. Rowling's tricky, but ultimately satisfying, penultimate volume in the "Harry Potter" series.
Jul 17, 2005 | Editor's Note:This review discusses plot developments in the newest Harry Potter novel. Care has been taken not to reveal crucial details -- but if you don't want to know anything about the story, please don't read it.
The penultimate book in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series was always destined to be the trickiest of all seven novels. The books are a clever mixture of two hallowed genres -- the British boarding school adventure and epic fantasy -- with the earlier installments being more of the former and less of the latter. With each new volume, the balance edges more toward what we all know is coming at the very end: a major confrontation between good and evil, when Harry will face off against his nemesis, Lord Voldemort. The sixth novel, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," has the unenviable job of preparing the field for the final showdown, and for the first time, Rowling wobbles just a bit in pulling off the task she's set for herself. In the end, though, she regains her footing and "Half-Blood Prince" comes together, making it not quite the most graceful novel in the series, but perhaps the most impressive.
You'll read elsewhere that this book is "darker" or "the darkest yet," which is as big a revelation as saying it is printed on paper and bound between two pieces of cardboard; Rowling has been announcing exactly this intention for the past six years. In the fourth novel, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," a likeable minor character died; in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," a more likeable and more significant character was killed. So it's no surprise that a downright agonizing loss occurs in "Half-Blood Prince." (Expect an unusual number of tearful children this week.) In fact, any reader who's at all sensitive to the larger narrative arc Rowling is plotting will probably be able to guess where this book's blow will land.
What's even more interesting for an adult reader is that "Half-Blood Prince" is the book in which Rowling breaks her formula. By "The Order of the Phoenix," the basic devices of a Harry Potter plot had become set. It includes an indistinct but growing menace, misguided suspicions entertained by Harry and his friends Ron and Hermione, overlooked details that end up being crucial and a denouement revealing the disguises, deceptions and other tricks by which Harry and company have been threatened from an unexpected quarter. The first few times around, this was great fun; by the sixth book, the prospect of one more lap on the same course had grown less exciting.
But one more lap is not what we get. I won't elaborate further, except to say that "Half-Blood Prince" relies far less on complicated surprises and twists than any previous Harry Potter book. You could say that this novel is more concerned with difficult truths. By the end of "Half-Blood Prince" most of the coziness has been suctioned out of the series and a much more precarious state of affairs prevails. Rowling has always said that the seven novels -- substantially planned out from the very beginning -- correspond to the seven years of Harry's education at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. Perhaps more than any actual character, Hogwarts could be the single most beloved element of the Harry Potter books, an institution that -- the real-world grimness of boarding schools notwithstanding -- children all over the world yearn to enter. By the end of "Half-Blood Prince," even the future of Hogwarts is in peril.
What Rowling clearly didn't plan out in advance are the novels' alternately amusing and somber reflections of current events. While there's nothing in "Half-Blood Prince" to match the superbly chilling Dolores Umbridge, an acid satire on Britain's educational reformers from "Order of the Phoenix," here the echoes show an eerie sense of timing. Now that even the bureaucratic Ministry of Magic has finally admitted that Voldemort is back and can strike anywhere at any time, a rash of mysterious deaths and acts of violence have the wizard community spooked.
In the wizard world's version of the War on Terror, friends, neighbors, even relatives, might be under an "Imperius Curse," forced to secretly aid the schemes of Voldemort and his underlings, the Death Eaters. The newspapers are full of stories of unexpected and untimely deaths, the Leaky Cauldron tavern is deserted because people are afraid to leave their homes, and half the shops in Diagon Alley are shuttered, their windows plastered with posters listing the "simple security guidelines" that will "help protect you, your family and your home from attack." The Ministry of Magic hasn't really got a handle on the situation, but it has managed to arrest three harmless people, including the friendly driver of the Knight Bus, in order to convince citizens that it's doing something.
