'Prince' shines amid growing darkness

July 18, 2005|Globe Correspondent

''Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" hangs on the two great and abiding themes of lasting literature: love and death. What is most admirable about this, J.K. Rowling's sixth book of the seven intended, is her unswerving dedication to these two primal elements, and her affirmation of their central position in human lives.

On the light side -- lightness being slimmer than ever in this darkening series -- there is a great deal of talk about love. The young heroes and heroines of the Potter series are now 16 and 17, and so they ''snog" and ''hook up" with one another, break up, and rejoin, in an almost bewildering romantic dance. There's an impending wedding between Bill Weasley and the ravishing but irritating Fleur Delacour. We hear about the dire effects of unrequited love, of hasty or ill-matched marriages. The Weasley twins, Fred and George, in their now-popular joke shop, Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, sell Patented Daydream Charms and the ''best range of love potions you'll find anywhere."

The book also focuses on the love of a parent for a child, of a teacher for a student, and on the surprising and inevitable romances among some of the main characters. The tale ends with the promise of a wedding, that most common ending in comedy -- and yet one would hardly describe this book as comic.

Indeed, beneath the seemingly smooth surface of the book's more than 650 pages lies a new charge of gloom and darkness. I felt depressed by the time I was two-thirds of the way through, and thoroughly so by the book's end, despite its clarion charge against despair. As Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of the Hogwarts School, advises concerning the evil Lord Voldemort: '' 'There is nothing to be feared from a body, Harry, any more than there is anything to be feared from the darkness. Lord Voldemort, who of course secretly fears both, disagrees. But once again he reveals his own lack of wisdom. It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.' "