Harry Potter and the Half-Brewed Pants (Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling)

Member Name: andrewl

Product:	Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling
Date:	05/08/05 (214 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Jolly adventure, bit exciting

Disadvantages: Convoluted, clunky, expository, morally suspect. Sorry

So, a new Harry Potter novel. Once again, the publishing and bookselling industry is pushed to the point of collapse to accomodate the insane media-whipped frenzy to acquire the latest brick-thick installment in the moppet wizard’s education.

Was it worth it? Is it ever? Well, let’s see, and I’ll keep it free from major spoilers.

Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince sees the young orphan wizard enter his sixth year at Hogwarts School for Wizardry (or something) under a bit of a cloud. After all, his parents’ murderer is still at large and he’s still reeling from the death of a major character in the last book (although it was so clearly signposted it can hardly have been much of a shock). This Wizard’s War is starting to take its toll on all the characters, and many of them are starting to look a bit shell-shocked. This will be a dark year indeed...

Oh, come off it. I really wish people would stop expecting the J K Rowling equivalent of The Empire Strikes Back. Half-Blood Prince, as we shall call it from now on, is basically more of the same, a jaunty little romp through wizard land with Quidditch matches, classmates Ron and Hermione falling out and Harry getting frustrated at no one believing whatever conspiracy theory he’s hit on this year.

Yeah, there’s a darker thread running through, as we are introduced to the backstory of the Dark Wizard Voldemort and his quest to become immortal, but basically this is a huge smelly turd of clumsy exposition that Rowling plonked in this book to ‘set the scene’ for the no-doubt climactic finale in the next novel. The flashbacks are livened up a bit by the horrendously convenient Penseive (it lets you view other people’s memories), but it’s still clumsy and it even reeks of padding, for all the threads are tied up towards the end.

Also, I have a real problem with the author’s decision to depict the infant Voldemort. The blatantly evil 10 year old leaves a sour taste in the mouth, it suggests rather strongly that Rowling considers evil to be bred in the bone, that some people are just ‘born bad’. I don’t give two hoots about all the loony Christians whinging about the books exhorting kids to practise witchcraft, but this kind of absolutism doesn’t seem the greatest example to set for the children. With the always-intriguing Snape becoming ever more suspicious from the very start of the book, we seem to be getting a bit of a message that things like redemption and repentance are impossible. I don’t like that, as I do feel identity is essentially transitory. You are not the same person you were five years ago.

And of course the other problem with showing the evil wizard as a kiddy is that it instantly and entirely robs him of any great credibility as a potent threat to our heroes.

But let’s draw back a little. Would I recommend this novel to a theoretical consumer who’d never heard of Harry Potter before?

No.

It’s a well-written, if slightly flat, adventure story, but the fact is that the books have now become so convoluted that there is no way you could pick up and read Half-Blood Prince and hope to understand a lot of what was going on. I have read all the books once, and only once, and I was lost a lot the time. There was someone called Mundungus Fletcher that Harry apparently knew, and the name was familiar, but two weeks’ thought has not left me any the wiser as to which book he first appeared in or what he did. They keep going on about someone called Dolores who doesn’t appear at all. One regular character pops up for six pages just to resign his job, which is bewildering in its pointlessness.

Still, the characters are well-drawn, and fairly engaging. This is perhaps no less than you would expect after six novels of writing for them. The only new character of any note is called Slughorn, which I think says it all, really. Still, some of the relationships portrayed become quite interesting, particularly the conflict between Harry and Draco Malfoy.

The silly plot contrivances which used to be quite sweet (the cloak of invisibility and daft moving map) are stretched beyond breaking point as Harry gets himself a Luck potion which he INGENIOUSLY puts to good use to get Ron to play better Quidditch (an insanely predictable segment that had me puking freely by the end).

But, on the whole, I found it curiously uninvolving. And it took me two weeks to work out why. Most of these books follow the passage of the school year with the odd little interlude that paves the way for some dramatic action at the end. And Half-Blood Prince is no different. But it’s difficult to get excited about the plot, and Harry’s suspicions, when the start of Chapter Two features Snape and Draco’s mother discussing Voldemort’s plan for so long it gets a little boring. Harry knows Draco is up to no good and that Snape is involved, the reader knows and so, frankly, the constant bickering with Ron and Hermione, who don’t believe him, gets really rather dull.

That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of exciting stuff in the climax, but I’d rather have seen more of the fire-hating Inferi and less of Harry and Draco hanging around toilets.

In many ways, I feel J K Rowling has shot her bolt a little here. A lot of readers have been left feeling just a little disappointed with Half-Blood Prince without even really knowing why. By grimly insisting on EXPLAINING things (even things that happened four books ago that you didn’t care about then and certainly don’t now), she has bored a few people and tarnished her crown of hype ever so slightly. It’s not quite Matrix Reloaded (which of course missed the mark so badly that no one really CARED about the finale), and no doubt the frenzy for Book Seven will continue unabated regardless.

Oh, and who is the Half-Blood Prince? Well, that would be telling. Let’s just say that it’s blindingly obvious, yet utterly superfluous to the plot. No doubt this will also be EXPLAINED next time.

Summary: Not that anyone's going to take any notice of this, but it's really gone off the boil.