Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

By J.K. Rowling

Scholastic; 652 pages; $29.99

A major character dies by the end of the latest Harry Potter book; readers who bore easily may feel a bit done in themselves. It’s not that "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" is dull, exactly. In places, it rises to a pitch resembling suspense, or at least a passing curiosity about what might happen next. No, the main problem is that J.K. Rowling has now written six of these bricks. Even if they were getting better, they’re certainly not getting any fresher.

To enlighten folks who haven’t already been reading themselves cross-eyed since midnight Friday, the new book typically finds Harry afflicted with crises both magical and mundane. On the one hand, intimations abound of impending Armageddon — as you might expect for a series supposedly one book shy of the ultimate confrontation between good and evil. But Rowling also finds time for all her customary wizard-school shenanigans, and Harry puts in long hours mediating between Ron and Hermione, his hopelessly lovesick friends.

The book begins at the notably unmagical address of 10 Downing St., where a nameless British prime minister is coping with a mysterious onslaught of bad news. Trouble has spilled over from Harry’s world into ours. Matters deteriorate so far that, by book’s end, a prolonged battle will leave the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry half in ruins. Like all the best writers for young people, Rowling knows that kids can take a lot more reality than they usually get credit for. Without it, in fact, they start to suspect they’re being patronized, or conned.

Close readers and other killjoys will see all this darkness as a sign of our paranoid times, and it would be a hard point to argue. Students pass through sensors on their way into and out of Hogwarts. A security curfew appears in effect for much of the book, and reference is made to some kind of invasive search that Rowling rather cleverly calls a "Probity Probe." There’s even a minor character named Shunpike, never seen but only talked about, who functions solely as a martyr to Guantanamo-style preventive detention. (Clearly, Rowling’s unobtrusive liberalism doesn’t stop with Hogwarts’ exemplary racial pluralism.)

Alongside all these doomy portents, of course, we also get the usual complement of wizarding lessons and Quidditch matches. Harry has a new teacher in his Potions class, Horace Slughorn — an annoying and altogether credible social climber who sucks up to his own students, provided they come from influential enough families. Helping Harry in Slughorn’s class is an old textbook annotated by someone calling himself the "half-blood prince," though he winds up more of a quarter-blood instead.

All this Buffy-style combining of kid’s stuff and saving the world is, of course, part of Harry Potter’s tremendous appeal. It usually builds to some apocalyptic showdown that leaves our heroes wounded but determined, and the forces of darkness routed but regrouping — and everything else pretty much back where it started.

Until now. As everybody and his Aunt Lillian must already know, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" is the penultimate book in the series. To tide us over, this one often plays like a mere overture to the finale to come — a finale that, if Rowling has been working toward it all these years, might ideally feel less like an undercard , and more like the main event.

If only Rowling didn’t so often fall back on repetitive magical shootouts. A sentence like "He put his head down and sprinted forward, narrowly avoiding a blast that erupted over his head" is flat and familiar, regardless of whether that blast comes from a magic wand or an M-16.

And now, a word about love. Much has been made of Rowling’s attempts over the last couple of books to tell the hormonal truth about what it’s really like for a group of friends to go from 11 years old, in the first book, to roughly 16. To her credit, at least within the constraints of a book suitable for children, she hasn’t ignored the plangent crushes and unbearable jealousies that not only teenagers are heir to. Maddeningly, though, the novel ends with Harry telling his new ladylove, "I can’t be involved with you anymore. We’ve got to stop seeing each other. We can’t be together ... I’ve got things to do alone now."

This might have passed without comment if monkishness hadn’t become almost a prerequisite for saving the world lately. Not just Harry but recent film incarnations of Batman and Superman have all included scenes where the hero piously accepts that fighting evil and having a girlfriend just don’t mix. But why? Why, in a culture otherwise fascinated with the sex lives of total strangers — at least so long as they’re halfway famous — have we become so puritanical about characters we actually like?

In the new book’s best scene, Harry’s mentor Dumbledore solemnly tells him that, "You are protected by your ability to love." In other words, the only thing that distinguishes Harry from his evil adversary is the simple capacity for human tenderness. And yet for Harry, as for the new breed of movie loner-superhero, to express love is finally seen as a distraction or, worse, a weakness. When the seventh and final Potter novel finally arrives, would it be too much to hope that the hero prevails, not because he can manfully sacrifice his capacity for love, but because he can’t?