Ok, Laydees & Men (I don’t consider men gentle..) This review reveals the plot & the climax in detail.
I’m Bach!!!!(Not the musical Bach but the Arnold a.k.a. Terminator Bach). And so is Harry Potter, and this time he shares the title with our beloved Professor Snape. Now, what can I say about Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince? Actually quite a bit.
My first sentiment being, man oh man, oh sweet lord! (I would love to express my sentiments with impressive sounding foreign phrases; unfortunately my knowledge of foreign phrases is limited to RSVP, Guten Taag and such.)
What I intend to imply is that, this book ROCKS!!! It is definitely an improvement above book 5; Harry Potter and the order of Teenage angst, woes etc you get the picture.
Alright I shall not dither (any longer, that is) and get to what this book is about.
This time thankfully, HP (Harry Potter) is not moping around the Dursley house for want of other forms of recreational activity. Barely 15 days into his summer vacation, HP is visited by Dumbledore and is subsequently whisked away to Ron’s home. En route Dumbledore enlists HP’s help in recruiting a Potions teacher (No, Snape hasn’t left; he is now Defense against the Dark Arts teacher). One wonders what this world is coming to, if even in fiction Headmasters are increasingly looking towards their students for help.
Anyway, HP arrives at Hogwarts in his usually unusual manner, escorted by an auror (Tonks) after being frozen and beaten by Malfoy. Undeterred HP advances through the next chapters bravely, where he suspects Malfoy to be a Death eater, and Snape to be in league with Voldermot and Dumbledore tutors him about Voldermot’s vague past and all such balderdash. By the way he is now the Quidditch captain, yes the infernal game where the golden snitch is prized (One wonders about Rowling’s mental health when she designs a game in which everyone flies about trying to catch the elusive golden snitch, but then I don’t understand football and cricket either).
What I like about the book is its sense of humor and its shocking ending which I shall discuss later.
The book has some hilarious moments like when Luna is made commentator of a Quidditch game, Hermione dates McLaggen and so on. And, the tomfoolery has just begun, as Hermione and Ron like each other in the romantic sense but date someone else, and then fight about it constantly; Harry likes Ginny but she is dating someone else and he thinks he will be betraying Ron if he dates Ginny; Ginny is overcome by the shouting mania which held HP in thrall last year, so the nonsensical teenage melodrama continues.
Meanwhile, Dumbledore tells HP about Voldermot’s beginnings and how he was a demented child to begin with and coming to Hogwarts just about pushed him over the edge, in other words. He also talks about horcruxes (I wonder how much time Rowling spends dreaming up these words). Horcruxes are things in which people store parts of their souls after they split their souls, which can only be done right after one murders somebody. Simplicity, my friends is a thing of the past as plots get more and more convoluted.
Naturally Voldermot has split his souls in 7 parts (not difficult given that his body count rivals Rambo). And of course one has to destroy the 4 horcruxes before killing Voldermot otherwise he shall just keep on reappearing like so many bad sequels. Four because one horcrux is of course Voldermot himself, one HP destroyed (diary in HP2) and one Dumbledore destroyed which led to his blackened hand.
In the interim, HP’s suspicions about Malfoy & Snape take on obsessive proportions as he takes to following them around and setting house-elves on them. Of course nobody believes his theories and Dumbledore reprimands him for his over-active imagination.
We now approach the last chapters of this daytime soap like book, where we see Hermione and Ron are together again and so are Harry & Ginny (Funny, how fiction makes romance so easy). Dumbledore again enlists HP’s help. This time around he has found another horcrux and Dumbledore and HP are off to destroy it.
What ensues is the almost tragically comic mission to recover a horcrux, where they find a cave which has a magic door and then they have to cross a lake in a boat to get to the island where the horcrux is. On the island there is a bowl filled with greenish liquid. At the bottom of the bowl is the horcrux, and the only way to get the horcrux is to drink all the green liquid. Looks like Rowling spends a lot of her time watching Sesame Street and Nickelodeon.
Dumbledore with a number of maidenly screams and HP’s help downs the entire potion. Oh, what comic horror! They finally return to Hogwarts to find that Death eaters are in Hogwarts. They rush to the scene of the crime, where Malfoy disarms Dumbledore. HP has again been frozen, not by Malfoy this time, by Dumbledore. As he is wearing the invisible cloak Malfoy doesn’t see him and HP gets the first row seat to the climax.
So, Malfoy wants to kill Dumbledore but can’t as he is actually a nice person, but he is being threatened by Voldermot. Ho Hum, this plot is so dumb. Well Malfoy dithers for innumerable pages when Snape arrives. Now, Malfoy thinks Snape is going to help him, Dumbledore thinks Snape will help him, what a dilemma. Fortunately for us Snape is a man of action he quickly murders Dumbledore and then makes good his escape. Harry of course gives chase and is just beaten for his effort. And to think he is the chosen one, more beatings like this and we won’t have a HP7, probably Voldermot; Book One, or given the people thrashing HP in this, Just about anyone; Book one.
Given the shocking events, one would think HP would be sensitive and wait for a better time to dump Ginny, well one would think wrong. HP gives Ginny the heave-ho at Dumbledore’s funeral, and then claims that he will not continue studies and instead invest his energies into bringing about Voldermot’s fall. Well, given his grades that’s a sensible option.
Such was the shocking end to the immensely enjoyable 6th HP Book. Till the next book, Hasta la vista baby!