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I seem to be starting a number of these
Off-Topic commentaries with disclaimers about my lack
of background, but given how steeped I am in Trek lore,
I sort of feel like I'm cheating my readers if I don't
admit up front that I'm not equally conversant with
the history of whatever else I'm discussing. I have
read all the Harry Potter books, but only once, because
I lent them to a certain someone who only later cheerfully
admitted that he takes very bad care of books he's been
loaned. I may have to submit a very specific Christmas
list to this person. (And those would be hardcover
books you owe me, not trade paperbacks, buddy.) At any
rate, there are plenty of details from previous books
which I've entirely forgotten, so if I garble something
feel free to email me and tell me about it.
 Half-Blood
Prince moves along at a good clip, which is
a nice change of pace from the previous two (Goblet
of Fire
and Order of the Phoenix). While those two books
needed to be as long as they were in order to tell
their
entire stories, in this one Rowling apparently felt
she could skip certain things like long chapters of
classroom
action,
partly because this is Year 6 already and we know what
happens in these classes and partly because it's less
a part of the eventual plot. It's definitely tighter,
and doesn't meander into side trips to Hogsmeade or
midnight tussles with Filch and Mrs. Norris. But that
editorial trimming leaves the 652-page book feeling...
unfinished.
There were several characters who got
a lot of face time in Phoenix who barely had
cameos in Half-Blood Prince, like Neville, Luna,
Dobby and Kreacher, McGonagall, and nearly the entire
adult complement of the Order. Cho is completely gone.
The trio is no longer taking Hagrid's class, so we don't
spend nearly as much time with him as we have in past
books. Draco shows up more in Harry's obsessions than
in the hallways. Voldemort himself only appears in Pensieve
flashbacks. I found myself wanting to know what my other
friends were up to.
Because we miss out on what happens to
the secondary and tertiary characters, and for a few
other reasons I'll outline below, I wonder if Book
VI should simply be considered the first half of a
two-parter
with Book VII. (We pause for a moment to allow the
audience a chorus of wails and groans, since Jo takes
two or
three years per novel, and she ain't gonna rush the
ending.) That would explain a lot of the lack of followup
-- it's just later on in the "arc."
That having been said, I did enjoy
the book. Rowling's turns of phrase sing. She has a
knack for marvelous descriptions which never run too
long, and her constant nameplay in and out of different
languages and various mythologies is always good for
a laugh.
I liked Harry and Ginny as a couple,
and I didn't expect to. It helped that Ginny has grown
up
to be brave, sensible, and fierce -- rather like Hermione
without the nagging -- and so makes a good partner
for
the teen who's going to take on evil incarnate. I think
Harry was stupid to break it off with her at the end,
for two reasons: 1) the argument "you'll be at
risk if we're dating" is garbage, because she's
already at risk just being the sister of Harry's
best
friend. Everyone already knows they're dating; the
damage is done. 2) Dumbledore said over and over
that Harry's
greatest weapon and defense against Voldemort is Love.
Why, then, is he walking away from it? His friends
and
adopted family (the Weasleys) are what give him love
and strength. Yes, I know that Rowling had to get
back
to the Luke-Han-Leia trio and Ginny didn't fit,
but it still felt wrong. Neville and Luna and the
rest
of the D.A. were around a lot in Phoenix,
weren't they? Why can't Ginny be an equally present
second-tier
character? (Because we'd miss all the angst and longing
to get back to his "normal life." Common
sense doesn't always make for compelling drama.) Near
the end, when
Harry is helping Dumbledore out of the cave, he tells
the headmaster not to worry
because he can Apparate them back to Hogwarts. "I
am not worried," Dumbledore responds, "I
am with you." I am not alone, I am not defenseless,
I am protected because I am with someone who loves
me is the unspoken message. But Harry is still
slow on the uptake.
I hope he's not as slow in putting the
pieces together in Book VII, in regards either to Voldemort
or Snape. I don't think Snape is one of the bad guys;
I think he was a grumpy double agent for Dumbledore.
What did Dumbledore ask him when he was collapsed against
the tower wall, weakened from drinking the toxic waste
from Voldemort's jewel pool? He said "Help, Severus."
He specifically told Harry to get Snape, because only
Snape could do anything for him. Sometimes "help"
means delivering coup de grâce. Sometimes it means
doing a deed so someone else doesn't ruin himself. If
Draco's task was to kill Dumbledore and he couldn't
do it, Snape had made the Unbreakable Vow to do the
task for him. Dumbledore did want to die, but he didn't
want Draco to murder him. By asking Snape to do it,
both Snape and Draco were freed. Draco doesn't have
a murder on his conscience -- listening to Dumbledore
still treat Draco with kindness and pleasantries even
as he's dying, even as Draco is gearing up to kill him,
is touching, and a fitting final act for a great man
and a great teacher; in his last moments he's still
trying to reach out and save one boy -- and Snape now
looks to Voldemort like the Dark Lord's unassailable
servant. That puts Snape in an excellent position to
help the Order's side, even if they don't know it.
But nobody else connects those dots. Nobody
else even hints that Snape could be anything but evil.
Harry knows that Snape can cast telepathic curses, but
it doesn't occur to him that he might actually have
done so against Dumbledore while shouting the Unforgivable
Curse as a distraction or a cover. And that's why I
didn't find the ending to be satisfying. There wasn't
closure. I felt like I'd figured out something the characters
hadn't, and I've never been one step ahead of the Scoobies
before. It was disappointing. The emotional payoff wasn't
there -- I kept waiting for a reveal which didn't happen.
Draco's confession was only about his emotions, not
about his actions, if that makes sense. I don't feel
like I really know what was happening behind the scenes
the whole year. Okay, he was trying to fix a piece of
magical furniture. I'm crappy at carpentry; I know how
draining it can be when you can't get two boards to
align or make a straight cut to save your life. But
the narration repeatedly describes him as pale or gray,
thin, exhausted, and weary, and even Moaning Myrtle
says he's crying in the bathroom. So what was going
on all that time? We got a lot of Harry's guesses,
but no concrete explanations. I would have liked to
hear his story of getting the Dark Mark. (We do assume
he's got the Dark Mark, right?) What kind of deal did
he make with the devil, and at what moment did he regret
it?
That kind of explanation is one of the
things missing from Half-Blood Prince. I don't
expect answers to all the questions, or for ongoing
plots to be tidily wrapped up at the close of each book,
but I did want to know what Draco was doing all the
time Ron and Hermione and Ginny were all trying to make
people jealous and Harry was sneaking around in his
Invisibility Cloak. I wanted to know what Voldemort
was up to, through his minions. I wanted to see more
of Snape not through Harry's perspective, more
of the Death-Eaters and what they were doing, more
of
Fudge and Scrimshaw or whatever the hell the new Minister
of Magic was called. (Scrimgeour is a real name, apparently,
but how do you pronounce it? Fortunately he's
not in the book enough for me to work at it or particularly
care.)
The classroom scenes and magical politics
might not have been necessary, but I missed it all.
If Harry taught Dumbledore's Army in Defense Against
the Dark Arts last year, how did those students stack
up against the ones who weren't there? Was Snape surprised?
Did he figure something out? Why did Snape leave the
book in the Potions room where he'd taught for so many
years? In fact, why didn't he keep it somewhere private,
or destroy it? Did Snape intend for Harry to find it,
or did Dumbledore order Snape to arrange it? Was either
of them somehow behind Harry getting into Potions at
the last minute so that he didn't have any books, and
had to use that one? How was Harry going to pass the
Potions final if he couldn't use that book? Did Snape
have any part in Slughorn getting the Potions job? Did
he suggest Slughorn because he knew Dumbledore needed
the memory to figure out the link between Voldemort
and the Horcruxes? Does anyone else in the Order know
about the Horcruxes? How are things going at the Ministry
of Magic, or at St. Mungo's Hospital? I would have liked
even hints, so we could make intelligent guesses and
know that Rowling had at least thought about these issues.
Right now it feels surprisingly like these items were
dropped in, and the other five books were not
arbitrary about plot points.
Draco and Harry both talked about not
finishing Year 7 at Hogwarts. It'd be very disappointing
not to complete the last year of the series at the school.
Besides that, it would be a serious dent in Harry's
education, and if Rowling's universe is comparable to
ours, wouldn't the lack of a magical high school diploma
make it hard for him to find a job? (And did the kids
ever take basic skills like math or science or
typing?) It's strange to think of what Harry would do,
for a living, with his life, after school is over. We've
only seen him in context of the school years. What kind
of job would you have when you've spent your teenage
years having such adventures?
Rowling continues her light but sure touch
with relationships and characters in Half-Blood Prince.
I was very happy to see that Harry has gotten past his
Annoying Sulky Adolescent phase and is starting to take
his first steps into adulthood and maturity. Ron and
Hermione pick up the Adolescent part without the Annoying
-- they fight, flirt, try to make one another jealous,
spend half the book not speaking to one another, and
come together in the end, but they were acting like
normal 16-year-olds. In Order of the Phoenix
I kept wanting to smack Harry upside the head for being
such a prat, and I didn't get the urge once here. As
far as the rest of the characters, everyone feels real
and normal, down to Mrs. Weasley and the other siblings
being annoyed about Fleur and Bill. Mrs. Weasley's irritation
and reconciliation with her future daughter-in-law probably
happens around the world every day of the week and twice
on Sundays. (I'm glad only one of the brood is going
to be on the outs -- Percy's estrangement is difficult
enough without also having Bill half-ostracized for
having a PITA wife.)
The "lucky charm" was an interesting
Potion of the Month. I particularly loved that Harry
placeboed Ron into thinking he'd taken it, boosting
his friend's self-esteem simply because he could (not
unlike Hermione surreptitiously getting in the way of
Ron's Quidditch competition). It was fun to see Harry
giddily taking risks when he himself drank the Felix,
and knowing that for once nothing bad was going to happen.
(I had to skim the scene where Harry's hiding in the
Slytherins' compartment and Draco finds him -- I hate
stuff like that.)
Is there anything significant to Dumbledore
drinking 12 cups of the green stuff? or that the 13th
cup was the water which revived him? The last thing
he yelled while under the influence was "I want
to die." Was it still affecting him? Is that why
he called for Snape, because he'd bespelled himself
and a clean wand blast was less painful than whatever
the potion was going to do to him from the inside out?
(I could see why he paralyzed Harry, to prevent him
from interfering in a dangerous but necessary event.)
While the point of all the kayaking down
Memory Lake is to give us the history and therefore
motivation of Voldemort, in the last few books we're
getting quite a bit of that for Snape as well. He was
the odd duck, the target of torment by the popular kids,
and his self-esteem never entirely recovered, it seems.
Even in trying to give himself a boost by playing on
his mother's maiden name, he can't help but be self-deprecating:
"Half-Blood Prince" is the ironic name he
gives to himself. I don't think James ever used the
term "mudblood," but it's not a new epithet,
and Snape was probably trying to come up with something
better-sounding. Even if he's on the good guys' side,
he's still bitter about how he was treated, and gripes
that Dumbledore is taking him for granted. He rages
when Harry (whom Snape is, ultimately, trying to help)
tries to use one of his own spells against him -- the
upstart child of his hated enemy, trying to continue
his father's legacy of attacks.
John
Cook of Sev Trek made a good point in his all-spoiler
review: it was strange that Harry could use the Sectumsempra
curse without knowing what it did -- if you only need
to say the words, what's the point of schooling? Anyone
with magical abilities could start shouting a spell
encyclopedia at random and get all manner of hexes off.
One final thought: I read Phoenix
having seen the first two movies, and was still picturing
the kids as they were in the illustrations. But after
seeing the excellent film for Prisoner of Azkaban,
I was envisioning everyone as the actors. The casting
was just as perfect, but the staging and directing of
Azkaban set it so much apart that the actors
finally came alive as characters on screen.
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