'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince': Her Dark Materials

July 31, 2005 , New York Times Book Review

By LIESL SCHILLINGER [An arts editor at The New Yorker and a regular contributor to the Book Review.]

Featured Author: J. K. Rowling : Collected coverage of Harry Potter: book and movie reviews, an interview with the author and more.

LATE on an ink-black night in June in the Lebanese hill town of Zahle, a teenage boy sidled up to two travelers as they strolled along the bank of a river. In French-inflected English, he asked an urgent question: ''Have you seen the new Harry Potter book?'' Despite receiving a negative reply, he pressed on, ''Have you heard what happens in it?'' When the answer again was ''no,'' he sighed in vexation. He had read the five other Potter books many times, he explained - both in French and in English, which ''takes longer, but it's better, because it's her words.'' ''Her,'' even to a boy growing up in the Bekaa, meant She-Who-Must-Be-Read: J. K. Rowling, author of the cliffhanger chronicles of the young British wizard Harry Potter and his pals, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, from the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
The boy's inquiry did not produce the results he'd hoped for, but it may have settled a larger question: is there a book-loving child on the planet who isn't obsessed with Harry Potter? Um (or ''er,'' as Harry would say), perhaps not. But, like other susceptible children (and grown-ups), who among them own 270 million copies of the first five books in the series, the Lebanese Potter fan had to wait until one minute past the witching hour of July 15, 2005, to satisfy his curiosity about what had befallen Harry since he battled the evil allies of Lord Voldemort (more prudently referred to as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named) in ''Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.'' What this young reader - and everyone else - will discover is that Rowling has succeeded in delivering another spellbinding fantasy set in her consummately well-imagined alternate reality.
These newest 652 pages - far darker than those that preceded them - are leavened with humor, romance and snappy dialogue, and freighted with secrets, deepening bonds, betrayals and brutal lessons, many of them coming from the sinister, Harry-hating Severus Snape, master of the dark arts. Up to now, Harry, while overcoming any number of harrowing trials, has managed to retain a trusting nature; but at 16, worsening circumstances force him to realize that even though he regards himself as ''Dumbledore's man through and through,'' he must also be his own man. Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts School and the only mature wizard who poses a real threat to the foul Lord Voldemort, cannot protect Harry forever - nor can Harry be sure that he can protect himself.
Because Rowling's gift is not so much for language as for characterization and plotting, to reveal much of what happens would wreck the experience for future readers. Suffice it to say that this new volume culminates in a finish so scorchingly distressing that the reader closes the book quaking, knowing that out of these ashes, somehow, the phoenix of Rowling's fiction will rise again - but worrying about how on earth Harry will cope until it does.
To read Rowling's novels as an adult is to sink into a half-remembered state of childhood rapture, the trance produced when you gobbled up fantasies for the first time. In the series's fourth volume, ''Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,'' Dumbledore lets Harry stumble across the Pensieve, a collecting dish for excess memories. To extract a memory, a wizard holds a wand to his temple, draws a silvery strand of thought from his head and taps it into the basin. Any wizard who touches the swirling contents of the bowl drops into the visions it contains, reliving them as if he had been present at their inception. Dipping into the fiction that is Rowling's Pensieve, adult readers tumble into an eerie but familiar realm, containing not only Rowling's images of Harry but their own memories of books they loved when they were Harry's age and younger.
That legion of honor might include classics like Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, P. L. Travers's Mary Poppins books, Roald Dahl's ''James and the Giant Peach'' and E. Nesbit's ''Phoenix and the Carpet'' - whose young heroes ''were not particularly handsome, nor were they extra clever, nor extraordinarily good. But they were not bad sorts on the whole; in fact, they were rather like you.'' Then there are the outright fantasies, one-offs like ''The Witch Family,'' by Eleanor Estes, as well as L. Frank Baum's numerous Oz books - which, when they first began appearing in 1900, were also an international sensation. When Baum went on an Egyptian tour in 1906, he met a child who had carried ''The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'' while traveling by camel across the desert. But never before has a children's series created a following on the order of Harry's.
The young readers whose minds are being imprinted at this moment with Harry's adventures have many contemporary rivals for their attention. There is Philip Pullman's engrossing trilogy, ''His Dark Materials,'' whose first volume predates Harry, and Jonathan Stroud's yet-to-be-concluded Bartimaeus Trilogy. On the lighter side there are the humorously dark fables of Lemony Snicket (a k a Daniel Handler). All these books are popular; but why is it Harry alone who prompts warehouses to hire security details to guard new releases? A definite answer cannot be given - you'd have to ask the collective unconscious. But perhaps part of the mysterious hold Rowling exercises over her readership comes from the fact that her fantasy world looks so much like home.
The wizard population she has invented coexists in her imagination with an England that you can chart on a map; indeed, child-friendly employees at London's King's Cross rail station posted a sign for Platform 9 ¾ (the one Harry, Ron and Hermione enter to board the Hogwarts Express) on a brick wall so Potterphiles could have their pictures taken beneath it. The Weasleys' uproarious dinner table resembles one you would find in any happy family, even if magic knives chop the potatoes. And the world of Hogwarts resembles the world of anybody's school days, with the same rivalries, insecurities, academic pressures . . . and terrors.
The first four volumes of the series, written before 2000, gave children a thrilling escape into fantasy. But the last two, written after Sept. 11, 2001, provide the opposite release: an escape from a reality that can now seem scarier than the prison of Azkaban. At the outset of ''Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,'' we learn that Voldemort is on the march, that his henchmen are wreaking havoc not only in the wizarding world but in England proper - snapping bridges in two, whipping up hurricanes and filling the air with a ghastly mist. The Minister of Magic visits the prime minister to warn that dark forces are spreading across the land, including the dementors, the life-sucking guardians of Azkaban. ''Didn't you tell me they're the creatures that drain hope and happiness out of people?'' the prime minister asks. ''That's right,'' is the reply. ''And they're breeding. That's what's causing all this mist.''
King's Cross station is now also linked to the suicide bombers who attacked London earlier this month. At a time when everyday life is increasingly charged with dark and deadly deeds, the temptation to believe that a good wizard is coming of age, a wizard who may vanquish the greatest evildoer, holds even more attraction. Give 'em hell, Harry! And now the wait for Volume 7 begins.