There was a feeling among fans that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,
the fifth episode of JK Rowling’s series, had a few longueurs. Its
highlights included Harry’s first kiss, an astute satire on the worst of
British educational bureaucracy and The Death — the painful loss of one of
Harry’s friends; but there were also more accounts of Harry packing his
schoolbag and walking the corridors of Hogwarts than seemed quite necessary.
Rowling herself admitted that it was an interim book, both tying up plot
strands and setting up new ones. Apart from The Death, and The Prophecy, the
book ended up more or less where it started, with Voldemort returned and the
need for a united resistance; it took a year and 766 pages to convince
everyone else in the story of facts that Harry and the reader already knew.
The 600 pages of volume six drive forward more satisfyingly. At the outset,
Cornelius Fudge, whom we have met as the Minister for Magic, updates a
Muggle prime minister about the dark times — raising the intriguing
possibility that a real British prime minister might be tempted to play a
bit part in a future film. (On the launch weekend’s only television
interview with Rowling, a contender, Gordon Brown, showed enthusiasm for
Harry Potter by putting a question to the author. Unfortunately, the
question — “Where does Harry get his money from?” — revealed that he could
not have read even the first few chapters of the first book.)
What Fudge tells the prime minister is that several recent calamities that
claimed Muggle victims were the work of Voldemort. The device of this
meeting in the PM’s office gives an opportunity for a certain amount of
(rather dull) recapping — for those who will read only this volume, perhaps?
They would be unwise to do so. A great deal of the pleasure of this book
comes from seeing developments unfold that careful readers will have
predicted. This is the book in which everything in the series starts to come
to fruition.
A sinister early scene sets up a theme: we see Snape persuading Death Eaters
of his loyalty to their side. Is this what it appears to be? Or is Snape
fulfilling Dumbledore’s orders to infiltrate the enemy as a means of
fighting them? Throughout the book this complicated uncertainty is
important. Even at the end, when Snape’s actions apparently come down on one
side rather than the other, there is room for a different interpretation. It
is one of the achievements of this volume that we are left questioning what
we know in order to understand Snape and his motivations.
This ingenious setting-up is intriguing for aficionados, who have been hungry
to discover what happens next. But the book really takes off when Dumbledore
arrives to collect Harry from the Dursleys. This is where we start to hear
Rowling’s heart sing. We share her delight as Dumbledore, being scrupulously
polite, manages at the same time to be devastatingly rude to Harry’s foster
family. From then on the book is aloft.
We might have expected this volume to be grim — Harry has to cope with grief,
and the danger to the wizarding world is as great as it has ever been. And
yet the novel has notable joie de vivre, partly thanks to the blossoming of
young love, in directions Rowling neatly and cleverly encouraged us to hope
for. Rowling, as her detractors have eagerly pointed out, is capable of
mundane phrases (“utterly terrified”, “mysterious disappearance”), but when
her playfulness bursts through, there is no doubting her wit, inventiveness
and talent for comical changes of register. Dumbledore, reporting his
enjoyment of Muggle magazines in a delicious aside, tells us: “I do love
knitting patterns.” A serious conversation with Harry, in which the boy
gives an impassioned and courageous speech, concludes with Dumbledore
saying: “I take my hat off to you — or I would, if I were not afraid of
showering you in spiders”.
Here is some of what is new in the plot. There is a wedding in the offing.
Harry gets his OWL results. The Weasley twins’ joke shop is a success. Luna
Lovegood commentates eccentrically on a Quidditch match. There is a mystery
about Malfoy’s allegiances. Dumbledore takes Harry back through the Pensieve
to learn more of the early life and antecedents of Voldemort. Harry has
become a heartthrob, and groups of giggling girls gather near him in the
school corridors. There is prolonged snogging, interrupted in one instance
with “a noise like a plunger being withdrawn from a blocked sink”. Ron,
Harry and Hermione come closer to identifying their romantic soulmates. And
there is a new member of staff at Hogwarts, Horace Slughorn, a walrus of a
man who loves to network.
This character, it is hard not to feel, may be inspired by Rowling’s
experience of celebrity hangers-on, just as Rita Skeeter seemed imbued with
her experience of poison-pen journalists. Slughorn says to Harry: “Where is
the biography of Harry Potter for which we have all been waiting? . . . I
would be delighted to write it myself . . . If you were prepared to grant me
a few interviews — say, in four or five-hour sessions, we could have the
book finished within a month . . . My dear boy, the gold you could make, you
have no idea.” If something similar hasn’t been said to Rowling, I’ll eat my
hat, spiders and all.
There are moments, too, when the writing seems to be influenced by the films.
In the first movie, there was the running joke of Hagrid’s repeated “I never
said tha” when he let slip information that was meant to be secret. It was
not something he reiterated in the books. But Rowling, in tribute to the
screen, sees fit to give him the line again.
The levity of the book’s finest moments does not last all the way to the end.
As expected, the story concludes with a dangerous action adventure,
involving images of horror. In this morally complex sequence, there are
agonising issues of responsibility and sacrifice. It ends in shock and
tears, and its consequences will resonate to the end of the seventh book,
the outline of which is revealed here.
It is impressive, given the unprecedented pressure that Rowling is under to
sustain a sequence that she planned in obscurity, that she maintains its
emotional energy, humour and the many spinning plates of its plot without
showing the strain. There will always be those who say that Harry Potter,
measured against Great Literature, is not worth the hoo-hah. But the hoo-hah
is born of genuine enjoyment, and those who have enjoyed the first five
volumes can’t possibly abandon the story now. Rather than miss this, most
enthusiasts would, as Peeves the Poltergeist urges in the book, set fire to
their own pants.
HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE by J K Rowling
Bloomsbury £16.99 pp600
