Geekery: Book Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
by
Michael O’Rourke
Every writer of commercial fantasy dreams of hitting the jackpot with a series of books that will make him/her rich, that will live through the ages, or that will do both. If anyone with commercial aspirations tells you that he/she doesn’t envy Jo Rowling, then you can bet your bottom dollar you’re being lied to. Not since The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia have a set of books—books, mind you!—engulfed the imagination of the world. Star Wars and Star Trek did it, but those were movies and TV shows; they had the advantage of using moving pictures and dialogue delivered by actual human beings who lived outside the viewers’ heads. With books it’s harder to involve your audience. With books, in this age of the Playstation 2 and a Laser Tag franchise in every town, it’s often a Sisyphean task.
Rowling has caught the proverbial brass ring. I can’t promise you that the Harry Potter books will still have a lively following in fifty or a hundred years, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Taken as a whole, they represent one of the finest works of the human imagination in decades—and they’re supposed to be for kids.
They aren’t, of course, not really. Harry Potter the character is growing up fast, as is his audience, as are his books. When Voldemort flash-fried Cedric Diggory in The Goblet of Fire, both Harry and Harry lost their innocence. The Order of the Phoenix saw Harry turn into a typical teenager (only with a wand and an invisibility cloak, of course)—surly, rebellious, impatient, and more than a little annoying.
Yet there we all were, with our midnight vigils and our Amazon.com pre-orders and our drool, waiting for The Half-Blood Prince to reveal itself to us, magical, like a beautiful memory poured into Dumbledore’s pensieve. The wait did nothing to quell our enthusiasm. Harry’s changes—wonderfully, unexpectedly—actually made us care about him more, not less. Even the clunky title—it rolls off your lips like a boulder in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon—did not deter us. We wanted our sixth year at Hogwarts, and we were going to have it, by God.
And now that we’ve all made Jo Rowling that much richer, we have to ask ourselves a fair question and demand a fair answer—could the book have possibly lived up to the expectations that we ourselves foisted upon it?
Of course not. That has nothing to do with the book’s quality; it’s quite good. It simply can’t be as good as all our dreams; reality never is, not even Harry’s. But it’s good enough, and that’s all that really counts.
Is this the best book of the series? No, it isn’t. That honor still belongs to The Order of the Phoenix, the book in which Harry truly came of age and gave a big middle finger to all the adults who never listen to him, no matter how many times he’s proven to be the only one who knows what’s going on. I’d also put this book behind Goblet and The Prisoner of Azkaban, making it the fourth-best of the series. But that’s like coming in fourth in the Olympics; even if you don’t win, you’re still one of the best in the world.
Look, Half-Blood Prince is as much exposition for book seven as a stand-alone novel. The point here isn’t really who the Half-Blood Prince is or how he relates to Harry; it’s how Harry comes to realize that, like Frodo and Luke Skywalker and Peter Parker before him, he cannot escape his destiny. The point is how he comes to embrace that fate, rather than run from it or allow others to take it from him. The point is who has to fall by the wayside before he will finally, honorably, grandly stand on his own two feet.
This brings me to one of the book’s flaws—a preponderance of adverbs like “honorably” and “grandly.” As Stephen King once pointed out, Rowling loves these lazy modifiers. Nobody can just shout; they have to shout “mightily” or “thunderously.” I don’t even know what some of her descriptors are supposed to mean, in terms of how they relate to human speech.
One might also feel, with some justification, that the supporting cast—except for Ron and Hermione and Dumbledore—has gotten short shrift in this book. The Weasleys are all too scarce. Neville Longbottom (who has changed, in his own ways, as much as Harry) and Luna Lovegood and even Hagrid only show up intermittently. That’s annoying.
But for the first time, Lord Voldemort—his past selves, anyway—takes a strong role. He’s no longer the seldom-seen boogeyman; he’s in-your-face, a Darth Hitler bin Laden with father issues and a Freudian fascination with wizarding artifacts. The climax is coming, people, and the bodies will most likely hit the floor.
But not yet. For now, we have to say goodbye to more friends and watch Harry, Ron, and Hermione take the final steps toward becoming what we always knew they were supposed to be—no less than the saviors of their people. It’s not apocalyptic yet, and it isn’t a new Battle of Helm’s Deep, as we saw in Phoenix. It’s simply what it is, what we need to experience in order to get to the end.
Speaking of endings, let me say that I don’t buy the ending of this book for a moment. Rowling may surprise me, but I think she’s swerving us on several levels. The real treasure? I can’t wait to find out one way or another.
B+