Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Those looking for obvious signs of fatigue in these stories must think again. True, the writing is sometimes tired, with ‘watery depths’ turning up on the second page and too many redundant adjectives elsewhere slipping once again into over-used grooves. And when Harry talks to Hermione in ‘a darkly significant voice’ the effect is more Daisy Ashford than anything else. But the overall sweep and mood of this story is impressive. With only one big climax, there is plenty of time to create an uncomfortably realistic picture of a society in fear of itself, with terrorist-type attacks leading to innocent deaths followed by what sometimes turn out to be false arrests. Harry is now more solemn than ever, and who can blame him? Even a long deferred and then extremely chaste love affair can’t lift his gathering sense of a destiny which seems likely to lead not just to his own doom but to the deaths of various others he holds most dear.

There is still some fun, though, with Hogwarts’ magical extravagancies as inventive as ever, plus a few lavatory jokes for younger readers (do adults reading this book smile at these too?). But throw in some comic English as spoken by a beautiful Frenchwoman, numbers of conveniently overheard conversations at crucial moments, a continuing obsession with games and house points, a sarcastic teacher and a gang of friends, and we are back in the traditional boarding school story as it used to be written. Harry at one moment is described by his noble headmaster as ‘a soul that is untarnished and whole’. When he decides at the end of this story to renounce domestic happiness in order to follow his personal quest for justice, he is taking the same selfless route as many a former pure young adventurer. Such heroics still obviously strike a chord in the imagination today, just as they always did in the past, and who would want to complain about that?