Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

or, goodbye to childhood, to hogwarts

I’m e rathke, the author of a number of books. Learn more about what you signed up for here. Go here to manage your email notifications.

Catch up here:

• The Sorcerer’s Stone

• The Chamber of Secrets

• The Prisoner of Azkaban

• The Goblet of Fire

• Order of the Phoenix

• The Deathly Hallows

I imagine that for people who read this novel when they were between the ages of 13 and 18, the murder of Dumbledore felt sufficiently Red Wedding-like to make this one of the most significant reading experiences of their lives.

I imagine it was like reading the Balrog pull Gandalf down into the depths in 1954 and then needing to wait an entire year before you discovered that he was back from the dead.

And I know for a fact that people believed Dumbledore would return for the final showdown between Harry and Voldemort.

I remember. I was there.

All the debates and conversations circling me as I dutifully did not read Harry Potter or really think much about it. Even I knew that Dumbledore had died probably within a few days of the book’s publication. Since I had no intention of reading the book, I guess I just didn’t care. But I’m also not overly bothered by spoilers, in general. Because I’m not a baby.

But for those who had been there since day one, fully enamored, this was probably the most gasp-inducing reading experience they had had. Possibly even still, nothing has shocked them to their core like Snape murdering Dumbledore.

I mean, I know this is true. This, along with so much else, is why Harry Potter grafted itself forever to people’s personalities like some terrible symbiote.

It was impossible. Unthinkable, even. Yes, we saw Cedric die and so we know the stakes were raised in the last few novels, but Dumbledore?

While I think Prisoner of Azkaban is where we moved from children’s book to YA (which, at the time, was a genre that didn’t exist), this is where we move towards adulthood. I’d consider this novel an adult novel, really. Not that it’s explicitly sexual or anything like that, but we’re now dealing with concerns far larger.

And someone is going to be like but YA is very adult oriented and I just don’t have the interest to argue the point so let’s all pleasantly agree that I am correct.

Thank you.

This aging up quality of the series is tremendously important to its success. Because it is really worth remembering that this series that began for children was denigrated by real writers and real critics even as it became, in my opinion, the most important literary work in decades.

And I do find that kind of depressing, to be honest, but I don’t think you can really argue otherwise. An entire generation grew up with these books—and almost exclusively these books—as a cultural glue. You may have been a goth or theatre kid, a varsity basketball player or just a regular ass kid, and you all had one cultural touchstone of commonality.

You didn’t listen to the same music or watch the same movies or even have the same friends but you all knew Harry Potter.

This may not seem important to Gen Xers and those older because you all had many of the same cultural touchstones. But we millennials experienced the immense splintering of culture caused by the burgeoning internet. When I was in high school, I could be friends with someone whose favorite band was in a genre I’d never even heard of, and rather than that genre being absurdly small and localized, it had legions of fans. Mine is the generation where Eminem and Christina Aguilera and Slipknot traded the number one spot on TRL, where a band like Gym Class Heroes went from a band that I saw at a metal show at a venue smaller than my garage (I hung out with whatshiname briefly—he was nice!) that then went on to fill stadiums a year later only to be completely forgotten a handful of years after.

Our media landscape was less designed by syndication and Neilsen ratings and more by the random shit someone you were temporarily friends with downloaded from kazaa or limewire and showed you on their computer during a sleepover where you drank Boone’s Farm wine and tried to not get caught.

Just this week¹ I was talking to my friends—who I did not grow up with but instead met as adults—about how you always met some new weirdo who would show you the most fucked up things in the world. I saw a man hit by a train, and if you’re within a few years of me, you probably know exactly which train video I’m talking about. I’ve seen a glass jar explode in some man’s ass. I lived through and vomited copiously to the time someone showed me two girls sharing one cup, and on and on.

The dirty, grimy, disgusting, and often horrifying parts of the old internet were as much a part of our media landscape as, like, Cheers was to someone born in 1975.

Harry Potter was what bound us all together. Even people like me who had tasted from that cup and passed it along and never looked back until we inevitably did turn and take another sip. Just by being alive while all this was happening made me intimately aware of the cultural force that Harry Potter was.

I started this experiment with rereading this series without much enthusiasm, I must admit. Whatever impetus I had for this project flailed after the first two books and, had the third not been readily available at the library when I finished the second, I might have given up rather than forced my way forward.

But I’m thoroughly hooked by now. Was, honestly, by the fifth book. Which is when I was finally hooked fifteen years ago.

The novels may not be as good as whatever else I could think to compare these to, but they are good, no matter the rubric. They’re addictively compulsive and still driven by good vibes and amusement, though the darkness has been dialed up considerably, to the point that the drama and terror is as much of the draw as all the rest.

This novel begins with Cornelius Fudge telling the UK Prime Minister that the non-magical world is imperiled by the return of a great and terrible wizard.

Here’s where we are confronted with a stark truth about this world whose utopic sheen wore off in the last book. Wizards and witches are pleasant totalitarians.

It’s all quite liberal and cheerful and kind, the way Tony Blair’s smile was when he gave confidence to a nation. But underneath that smile is something disturbing and rotten. The muggles have the illusion of freedom and agency, but their entire world and all their experiences of reality have been designed by the magical government whose primary purpose seems to be keeping muggles from understanding the truth about reality.

What does this tell us about wizards?

I think one thing it tells us is that, implicitly, they believe they are superior to muggles. They may put this in a nice way and even laugh and makes pleasant and good-natured jokes about their industriousness, their inventions, and so on, but it is a joke to them.

All the toil and greatness of non-magical human ingenuity can be accomplished by a teenager at Hogwarts on accident.

So insignificant is muggle culture and muggle technology that the vast majority of wizards have no idea what any of it is even for. And while I do think this is a bit worldbreaking, in terms of worldbuilding, it just is what it is at this point.

However, when we meet the new Minister of Magic, we suspect he’ll be a stronger anti-Voldemort force, a steadying hand to the broader political situation.

And he seems to be doing all right, as far as we can tell from our limited glimpses, but then we discover Umbridge is still a high ranking official.

Umbridge, for those who don’t remember, is not a dark wizard in league with Voldemort but she does firmly believe in the importance of genetic purity.

With her status within the wizarding world, we see that Voldemort’s worldview is actually quite commonly accepted by other wizards and witches. They might not say it to anyone’s face or anywhere that it can be overheard, but they very much believe that the magical and non-magical world should remain separate.

They might even say they should be separate but equal.

This complicates the world quite a lot! It also helps explain why Voldemort had so much power. Yes, he’s the most powerful wizard in generations, excepting Dumbledore, but one wizard alone can only do so much. With his league of Death Eaters, he had his own private army.

But his real strength came from all those wizards who disapproved of the killing and the rhetoric but quietly agreed with the underpinning philosophy.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

—commonly, though incorrectly, attributed to Edmund Burke

This quote seems relevant to the whole Voldemort rising narrative. Consistently, Voldemort’s return is downplayed or suppressed by the government. And so these good wizards and witches did nothing and evil thrived.

However, more than that, it seems clear that some amount of these supposedly good witches and wizards believed that Voldemort was more or less right about genetic purity.

We even see this kind of lackadaisical approach to resistance within Hogwarts from the previous book. While many of the teachers were against what Umbridge was doing, they mostly went along with it, preferring not to stick their neck out in case the axe came swinging their way.

While this is perfectly normal and understandable, it’s not great! Though, as one of my friendly commenters mentioned last time, this is a moment when the adults begin treating Harry and his fellow students as equals, as comrades in a single conflict, and so they’re relying on them the way they’d rely on another adult.

This is also, likely, an important part of the success of the series. We, as teenage readers, were brought into the central conflict as active participants rather than as flimsy dolls that needed shelter.

But when I put my dad hat back on: these teachers are meant to protect the children in their care and they allowed this woman to carve words into their charges while their primary form of resistance was a simple slowdown.

Effective as that labor tactic can be…um, listen McGonagall, your students are being tortured. Maybe try something with a bit more urgency.

Anyrate, what I find interesting, alongside all of the above, is how Hogwarts-centric this book is. The last few seemed like they couldn’t wait to get beyond the walls of Hogwarts, but this book spends nearly all its time within Hogwarts.

It’s a clever send-off to a location that has been central to the series because I think this is the last glimpse of it we see until the dramatic conclusion of the series.

All this stuff with the Ministry and even Voldemort’s rising and the Order of the Phoenix’s resistance is all in the background while Harry, Ron, and Hermoine go on with their studenting.

And though I did say this is the novel reaching for adulthood, it’s still full of teen drama. Especially the trouble of having a heart full of hormones. Ron and Hermoine’s attraction and affection for one another spills over into months where they don’t speak. While this is going on, Harry discovers his own attraction for Ginny.

I need to briefly mention the movies here. Because I watched the movie series last fall, the Ginny of the movies was the one in my mind when I entered this book. And, no offense to that actor, but she is terrible. And some amount of this no doubt falls onto the writer and director, but the movies turn a character who is vibrantly alive and evocative into the dullest, most awkward character I’ve ever witnessed.

Harry and Ginny’s first kiss in the movie adaptation of this book is so cringe inducing that it gives me a nosebleed.

So it was quite nice to experience this very different version of Ginny.

She’s alive! She’s fun and funny and strong and willing to fight for herself and those she cares about. She’s capable and seems a natural fit for the trio at the center of this series.

And I remember falling in love for the first time. I remember like it was today because I remember certain memories all of the time. And this bubbling discomfort, this slow revealing of your heart to yourself, feels exactly right. Genuinely, I remember the moment when I realized my friend was someone that I had fallen in love with, someone I wanted to forever hold me.

I remember how it hurt. How it turned once comfortable companionship awkward.

Because they’re teenagers, even though they’re dealing with cataclysmic problems, like the rise of magic Hitler, they still can’t see past their own hearts. And, I mean, even now, as adults, living in the real life world we real lifely live in, many of us can’t see past our hearts to do something about, like, islands made of plastic the size of Texas floating in the ocean.

But that’s life, baby.

More than any other novel in the series, the ending here feels incomplete. Because Harry has vowed not to return to Hogwarts, we, as readers, are ready for the real quest to begin.

All culminating in the final battle with Voldemort.

And hopefully we’ll cut down Snape and some other Death Eaters along the way. There’s much that I could say about the Malfoy of it all, but there’ll be room for that next time, yeah?

Eh, well, in the months between writing this and publishing it, I’ve decided I’ll talk about Malfoy right now.

Malfoy, a boy we’ve largely despised since the first time he appeared on the page, adorned in jerkisms layered so thick we could barely make out the sheen of his white hair, appears, for the first time, human in this novel.

His parents are essentially being held hostage. While his task to murder Dumbledore is meant to be a path of salvation for him, it is designed for him to fail.

He’s only a teenager after all. Just like Harry but so unlike Harry.

We know Harry cannot beat Voldemort and yet he does it, over and over again. But he does it with great help from those more powerful and clever than him.

Who does Draco have?

Rather than work with his friends to develop a plan, he isolates himself. His pride gets in the way is one part of this. He wants to kill Dumbledore by himself because he wants the fame and recognition.

He wants to be the savior of his parents. Wants to show that he is worthy of standing beside Voldemort as his greatest lieutenant, as one of the greatest dark wizards the world has ever known, who will help the Dark Lord marshal in an age of wizarding supremacy.

Draco is a product of his upbringing. He has been taught to hate by his parents and their social circle. A social circle, I may remind you, that is comprised of magic Nazis.

And then even outside of his Nazi upbringing, he enters a world that tacitly agrees with this Nazi worldview, at least with regard to blood purity and racial hierarchy.

Of course, Draco is initially a simple stand-in for every rich kid you’ve ever met. Where does the Malfoy wealth come from?

Who knows.

The economics and worklife of the wizarding world make no sense.

Snape tries to reach Malfoy, to help him, to be for him the person he needed when he was young and being pulled into darkness, and I’m reminded of my AP Lit teacher who tried to help me. A teacher who saw how miserable I was.

She came to me while I stood in the hallway, my eyes blackened by insomnia, and told me that she’d heard I wasn’t sleeping. “That may be a sign of depression,” she said.

And I wonder, now, if she had been thinking of talking to me for days before she finally did. She was my teacher. She saw daily what a disaster I was. She was younger than I am now and she was an awkward lady, so I imagine coming up to an 18 year old that she once described as an intellectual bully was not an ideal situation for her. Possibly she was filled with her own anxiety, afraid of how I’d respond, or simply afraid of entering into a discussion of mental health with a male teenager in 2006.

I am not proud of the person I was when I was eighteen. Probably few are.

I told her that being up all night gave me a lot of time to self-diagnose and then I quickly ended the conversation.

Don’t know why I reacted this way. Fear, almost certainly. The terror of being seen was, in some ways, worse than feeling invisible.

I wonder, now, what she felt when she had to stand before me two hours later and discuss William Blake’s Chimney Sweeper with me and the rest of our class. She had instituted a limit on how many times I could speak during class because I had a tendency of dominating conversation and leading the discussion in my own directions.

Who would’ve thought I’d eventually write thousands of words each week about literature and shit!

I’ve been thinking about this interaction a lot lately, most likely because we see Snape have a very similar interaction with Malfoy, and the results are almost identical, though I like to think I was less of an asshole about it.

What’s interesting, here, from our view of Snape is that Snape seems to genuinely care about Draco. This is such a profound contrast to his treatment of Harry that it’s slightly staggering.

Harry, of course, sees this as simple favoritism, because why wouldn’t he?

But I think this is the first human glimpse of Snape we get as well. And it’s dropped at the perfect moment for this series to work and even for his arc to work, to the extent it does (I don’t think it works, honestly).

There’s a tenderness to Snape. And, sure, we can say it’s because of the unbreakable curse, that Snape is only preserving his own life, but I think there’s more to it than that. Even when we get the reveal that Snape was doing this on Dumbledore’s instructions, I think it doesn’t lessen this moment.

Snape cares about some of his students.

I think this actually says worse things about him, really.

Like that commenter said in her reaction to my Order of the Phoenix review: the adults in the series are viewing their students as fellow adults. And we see that with Draco.

Or at least that’s Draco’s belief. He thinks Voldemort sees his potential. But his mother, Snape, Beatrix, and so many others see Draco as a child shoved into a cage where he must murder his way out.

And even if you are a Nazi, do you still not love your child? Would you actually want to know they’ve committed great acts of violence?

After all, you’re still his mother. You watched him born, learn to walk, say his first words. You saw his first smile and heard his first laugh. You wept when, for the first time, he said I love you, mommy. This little ball of sweetness.

Your boy.

Your dear sweet boy.

He meant so much to you. Everything. You had no others. Just him. Just your boy. Your boy who has become a man filled with pride and ability.

That’s what you wanted. You wanted him to be strong, to be pure, to be powerful.

And yet.

You cannot help but weep for the child he will always be to you.

He’s only a boy. And your Dark Lord is asking him to destroy that child. That child born from your womb, who you carried, who your nursed, who you sang to, who you held through nightmares and fevers.

What will it mean for your boy to kill the child he was?

What will it mean for you, his mother?

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1. by the time you read this, it will have been months ago.