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| Thursday, 19 July 2007 |
| Rereading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince |
It was a thought I couldn't contemplate at time of first reading the book, but HBP feels entirely like the first half of a verrrrry long novel: the second half comes out in just 39 hours.
The back-story annoyed me. I felt that those interminable Pensieve scenes were unnecessary as well as being clumsy and repetitive: but perhaps the human angle of Voldemort will be important if Harry's going to defeat him. One gets the feeling that despite Dumbledore's insistance in the power of love, it might be knowledge that saves Harry. Otherwise, what is one to make of the Half-Blood Prince himself? It seems an awful lot of effort to go to just to get Harry to the top of the Potions class, and to win him the Felix Felicis (which Slughorn could very plausibly have just handed over to his favourite student!). One has to assume that Voldie's end is in his beginning - otherwise half the book was a waste of time - but I can't help feeling there's an awful lot of "twenty years ago, your parents..." yet to come.
I'm concerned, I have to say. I know (yes, I found the spoilers!) that DH is going to be a blood-bath, but I think we could all have guessed that. JKR is pretty big on the idea of sacrifice, and if you have to kill a big evil wizard, you're going to need a lot of sacrifices. But the game of Find the Horcruxes (surely, surely the plural of Horcrux is Horcruces?!) smacks right now of formula, "one for each of the founders but he'll never get goody-goody Gryffindor", a join the dots adventure. I've actually got what purports to be a copy of DH in a pdf on my hard drive right now: I think it's probably genuine, everything about it from the paper to the writing seems right, but I'm waiting til tomorrow til I can get my hands on the physical objet. It turns out that, after all, there's something about a book.Labels: Harry Potter |
| posted @ 09:02 |
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