Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince

JKRowling (author)

Bloomsbury, UK: 2005; 607pp)

ISBN: 0747581088

Genres: adventure, fantasy 

Issues: corruption, friendship, grief, values 

The worlds of Muggle and Magic are colliding. An unseasonal mist enfolds England as Cornelius Fudge tells the Prime Minister of the rise of the Dark Lord, whose actions are putting both worlds in danger.

Rufous Scrimgeour, the new Minister for Magic, has little time for Muggles, however. He is more interested in Harry Potter, who, rumour has it, is the Chosen One. The only one who can vanquish the Dark Lord. And what he wants most is for Harry to become the public face of the Ministry's fight against He Who Must Not Be Named.

Harry Potter knows that Lord Voldemort wants him dead. What he doesn't really understand is why. Although he has been ‘marked by the Dark Lord as his equal', he doesn't fully understand what that means or what he is meant to do. Dumbledore is the only person who can guide him along these dark paths. Private ‘lessons' with the Headmaster of Hogwarts' School of Witchcraft and Wizardry turn out, to Harry's initial disappointment, to be more in the nature of history lessons. Dumbledore takes Harry voyaging through significant memories that he has collected - memories that all, in some way, reveal a little more about the dreadful metamorphosis of Tom Riddle. Only by understanding this is Harry likely to develop any idea of how he might defeat the Dark Lord.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the depth of Harry's emotional development between books. In Order of the Phoenix Harry was a fairly unstable teenager, full of angst and resentment. In Half-Blood Prince he is quiet, determined and very much in control of his emotions - most of the time. Is the change too extreme to be believable? Perhaps; perhaps not.

The death of a significant person can cause a child to grow up very suddenly, to develop a maturity beyond their chronological years. It is also worth bearing in mind that much of Harry's anger in the fifth novel came from the feeling that he was being left out of Dumbledore's confidence. His favourite and most trusted mentor was apparently unavailable and not interested in him - and that hurt Harry deeply. In Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore is not only involving Harry, he is giving him information unavailable to anyone else. The combination of the impact of Sirius' death and the renewed relationship with Dumbledore makes Harry's new maturity quite reasonable.

What is even more interesting, however, is that in this book Harry is no longer quite so reliant on the support of Ron and Hermione. When they disagree with his theories about ‘Draco the Deatheater', Harry doesn't lose confidence in his own opinions. He simply bides his time and keeps following his instincts. We are seeing a Harry who is beginning to realise that his path lies apart from others, even those he loves most - hence his later decision to part from Ginny.

For Rowling, the writing of Half-Blood Prince must have been rather like completing a fairly sophisticated ‘join the dots' pattern. There are times when the need to communicate certain information, to show certain events unfolding, does feel a little contrived, less natural than Rowling's style in earlier books. Despite that, however, this sixth novel in the series is a very polished piece of writing. The Pensieve is a remarkable creation by Rowling and here it comes into its own as a narrative device. To communicate an enormous amount of backstory in a way that retains reader interest is a difficult task. The Pensieve, however, allows Tom Riddle's past to be shown as a live-action sequence, rather than a static story as told by Dumbledore. It enables the reader to see what Harry sees and come to their own conclusions. We, too, can watch Tom Riddle as he moves into the wizarding world and realise that, despite his environment and family background, he could have made other, more positive choices. We, the reader, can also see that as he became Lord Voldemort, Tom's choices were motivated on the deepest level by his own insecurity about his origins; that he saw the Dark Arts as a defence against his feelings of inferiority.

Given the emphasis that Dumbledore has placed all along on kindness, courtesy and compassion - the essentials of love - surely the reader is being encouraged to perceive that Voldemort's weaknesses are not magical but personal? Not only his inability to care for others but the fact that he sees power as the only way to attract and control others are surely elements that can be used to defeat him.

There are many superficially interesting narrative twists along the way for fans - the final coming together of Harry and Ginny; Ron's rather funny but typically teenage passion with Lavender Brown; the trio learning to apparate; the development of a relationship between Tonks and Lupin; the remarkable success of the Weasley twins' joke shop. All of these, however, are not deeply significant to the main theme - the growth of Harry as a wizard and as a person to the point where he is ready to confront Voldemort.

The death of Dumbledore, which has shocked so many readers, was a predictable necessity in a fantasy of this kind. A hero cannot develop his true identity, come into his full powers until he has lost his key mentor - the ‘wise man' archetype that Dumbledore so fully personified. A hero must, in the end, face his nemesis alone, knowing that there is no back-up, no one to rescue or protect him. While there has been considerable discussion about the significance of the mysterious phoenix shape that rose out of the smoke from Dumbledore's pyre, narratively there is very little left for the Headmaster to do that cannot be done by others. While it will be difficult, Harry has been given all the information that Dumbledore had that might lead him to the Dark Lord's Horcruxes.