Harry Potter — yeah, why not?

  • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6)What the heck, might as well talk about the Harry Pot­ter book for a minute. It takes my mind off the ter­ri­ble prob­lems of the day and you can prob­a­bly only find reviews in 3,000,005 other places on the Web.

    So I’ll start off by say­ing that this one really doesn’t take your mind off the prob­lems of the day. Wor­ried about vio­lence in the streets and the loss of children’s inno­cence? Try a scene early on where one boy smashes his foot down on face of another while he has him par­a­lyzed. Wor­ried about ter­ror­ism? Well, then talk of an evil lord who recruits young peo­ple to com­mit mur­der is just the thing. Tired of the weary­ing effects of air­port secu­rity, home­land secu­rity and any other kind? Then you’ll want to con­tem­plate the chang­ing world of Potter’s six­teenth year:

    Diagon Alley had changed. The col­or­ful, glit­ter­ing win­dow dis­plays … were lost to view, hid­den behind the large Min­istry of Magic posters that had been pasted over them. Most of these somber pur­ple posters car­ried blown-up ver­sions of the secu­rity advice on the Min­istry pam­phlets that had been sent out over the sum­mer… Harry noticed that many of the peo­ple who passed them had the same har­ried, anx­ious look as Mrs. Weasley, and that nobody was stop­ping to talk any­more; the shop­pers stayed together in their own tightly knit groups, mov­ing intently about their business.

    Is this a bad thing? I guess I can’t really decide. It makes the books seem more rel­e­vant, surely, but I’m sorry, I could’ve used a bit more escapism. Oh well, maybe that’s just me. J.K. Rowl­ing started tak­ing this dark turn sev­eral books ago when a child died. It seems to be her intent to add more and more vio­lence, betrayal, mur­der, mal­ice and evil from here on out. One hardly knows how the poor lit­tle world of Harry Pot­ter can take much more of this. It all must be lead­ing up to a big fight in the eighth book, which is sup­posed to be her last.

    But by that time will there be any­thing the least appeal­ing or sat­is­fy­ing about read­ing these books? I’m afraid that I read this one just because I didn’t want to miss out. I think I’ll read the next two more out an even more grudg­ing sense of obligation.

    In short, if you haven’t read any of the books, don’t start with this one. On top of the joy­less, air­less feel of it, it is so com­pletely rid­dled with back-story ref­er­ences that I think it wouldn’t be com­pre­hen­si­ble. If you’ve read the oth­ers, you know you’ll read this and the next two. So it’s a bit of a sim­ple deci­sion really, and there’s not too much point really in com­plain­ing about the direc­tion these have taken. Heck, you know you want to stick it out and see Harry squish Volde­moort once and for all.


    Related posts:

    1. And speak­ing of Harry Potter …
    2. Guerilla patri­arch (and pope)?
    3. Howard lay­ing it down
    4. That con­cludes our trav­el­ogue. Please tip the narrator.

    July 30th, 2005 | Grace | No Comments |

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