drscott | Harry Potter #6

Instead of patching up the mortar in one of the shower stalls as originally planned, I finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The last 200 pages really pulled you along, so I gave up and finished.

As numerous reviewers have pointed out, the plot and themes resonate strongly with Joseph Campbell's Monomyth. Dumbledore is Harry's Obi-Wan, etc. The previous book in the series, Order of the Phoenix, introduced an element of political satire and echoed the struggle against the appeasers in pre-WWII Britain, with Dumbledore in the Churchill role, down to his extra-governmental network of supporters who believed it necessary to gird for struggle with dark forces. This wasn't entirely successful -- satire and politics don't mix all that well with adventure and fantasy. But the latest volume has less of that and is all the better for it, as it returns to a more personal struggle between good and evil. As in the other stories which conform to this archetype, the elder advisor's willingness to see the good in even the seemingly lost eventually leads to his "death" (although, as with those other stories, there are hints that Dumbledore will continue to influence events.) Sacrifice of the physical body for the sake of belief in the possibility of redemption for anyone appears to make the wizard even more powerful, and his protege (Harry in this case) more prepared to take on the evildoer.

I was touched by the story -- particularly the discussion of love as the most powerful magic of all. Like the moment where Sam Gamgee carries Frodo on his back to the top of Mt. Doom to dispose of The Ring, the sturdy English values of loyalty and friendship are shown to be stronger than mere magic.