Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

I read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince the summer it came out, in a borrowed paperback with a cracked spine and someone else's notes already in the margins, and I remember finishing it on a train with the ending sitting in my chest like a stone. I had spent five books assuming the school year was the point. This one taught me otherwise. What follows is the whole plot, twists and the ending included.

Published in July 2005, the sixth book is a murder mystery in which the murdered man is still alive for most of the story. Dumbledore has spent a year doing something he will not explain, and he finally starts letting Harry in, not by lecturing him but by dragging him out of his own memories. Between those excursions there is a new Potions master, a secondhand textbook full of corrections, a girl Harry cannot talk to, and a boy in a silver-edged cloak who is quietly going mad under the weight of a task he was handed at sixteen. The humor in this book is also the best in the series. Half the pages are comedy. The other half are about splitting the soul.

Slughorn comes back

The book opens with Dumbledore personally recruiting a teacher, which is a first. Horace Slughorn has been living in hiding, faking his own death to avoid Death Eater recruiters, and Dumbledore finds him by staging an attack on the house he is squatting in. Slughorn is genial, plump, and a collector. He remembers your name, your talent, and your future usefulness in that order, and he has spent decades surrounding himself with talented students who went on to become famous.

Harry is put in his Potions class because there is no N.E.W.T. level Defense teacher and Snape has moved across to Potions. The arrangement gives the book its engine. Slughorn's lessons are warm, he hands out cakes, and he runs a club called Slug Club where promising students are invited to dinner with an old man who has known everyone. The implicit bargain is that charm is a currency. Slughorn gave a young Tom Riddle introductions, connections, and a shelf of forbidden knowledge, and the book never lets you forget that being charming is not the same thing as being good.

The annotated potions book

Harry's copy of Advanced Potion-Making is a secondhand library copy, and it belongs, as he eventually works out, to someone who signed himself the Half-Blood Prince. The margins are crowded with corrections and improvements. Cut the sage leaves. Add just a twist of lime. Stir clockwise, then anti-clockwise at the end. Following that handwriting, Harry brews a perfect Draught of Living Death and wins a small vial of Felix Felicis, liquid luck, from Slughorn.

This is the best idea in the book and I would argue one of the best in the series. It gives Harry a source of competence that is not fame, not prophecy, and not his father. It also puts a second voice in his ear, one that is not Dumbledore's. The Prince's notes are funny, slightly cruel, and inventive, and Harry uses them openly for weeks without asking who wrote them, which is entirely believable for a sixteen-year-old who has been losing at everything for a year.

The revealed spells are not all benign. Sectumsempra, the Prince's answer to an enemy, opens a wound across Draco's chest in a bathroom and nearly kills him, and Harry only learns what he did afterward, from a textbook he should have put down hours earlier. The book is honest about this. The potion book is a shortcut, shortcuts arrive with someone else's intentions attached, and Harry's luck with it is exactly the kind of thing that should have made him suspicious much sooner.

Draco's vanishing cabinet

Draco Malfoy returns from summer thinner, paler, and carrying a task he will not discuss. He is given detention for leaving the Hogwarts Express, he is heard arguing with Filch near a broken cabinet in the corridor, and he spends the year repairing the pair of vanishing cabinets that the series planted back in the second book. The cabinets work by linking two identical objects. Break one and whatever is inside appears in the other. Draco's plan is to let Death Eaters into Hogwarts through the cabinet standing in Borgin and Burkes.

Rowling plays this as a slow mystery, and it works. Snape cornering Draco in the cold classroom, checking him with Occlumency, and swearing the Unbreakable Vow to Narcissa Malfoy in the opening chapters tells you exactly how serious the boy's problem is. What the plan requires, though, is a great deal of luck. Nobody notices a student spending months alone in a broken cabinet, Filch's complaints are treated as noise, and the only person who works out roughly what is happening is Harry, who cannot prove it. The reveal on the tower lands emotionally, but the mechanism is a boy alone in a corridor for most of the year.

Felix Felicis and the luck

Felix is the book's structural joke. Harry has a single dose of perfect luck, he uses it to get Slughorn drunk and sentimental, and the result is the memory the entire plot hinges on. Under the potion he walks into Hagrid's hut at exactly the right moment, meets a centaur who is normally rude to him, and leaves with a tearful professor clinging to a bottle of mead.

The sequence is comic and quietly sad at the same time. Slughorn's memory is not a villain's confession. It is an old man's shame. He told Tom Riddle about horcruxes, he knows he did, and he has edited the memory to cut himself out of the picture. Harry's success here is not combat skill. It is the ability to make someone want to tell him the truth, which is the skill the last book needs more than anything else.

The cave and the locket

Dumbledore's plan is a raid on Voldemort's past. Through the Pensieve, Harry is shown memories of Tom Riddle as a boy in an orphanage, then as a young man gathering followers and objects, then as a teacher at Hogwarts stealing from Hogwarts. The crucial one is Slughorn's true memory, in which Riddle asks how to split the soul into seven parts and Slughorn, flattered and tipsy, answers him.

Then the two of them go to a seaside cave where the young Riddle hid a locket, and the cave becomes the strongest chapter in the book. There is an invisible chain boat, a black lake full of Inferi that will rise if the water is disturbed, and a basin of green potion that must be drunk to reach the Horcrux at the bottom. The potion makes the drinker relive his worst memories and beg to stop. Dumbledore drinks all of it, because he knows what it is and knows Harry cannot, and he ends up shriveled and pleading for water.

Harry has to fetch water from the lake, which wakes the dead, and he fights them off with fire in one of the series' best set pieces. Back on the tower path, Dumbledore is weak and wandless, and Draco is standing there with a wand pointed at him, shaking, having already disarmed the most powerful wizard in the school with a single spell. Snape arrives. Snape casts the Killing Curse.

The tower and Snape

The death of Dumbledore is the hinge of the series, and Rowling stages it with unusual restraint. We do not see it from Dumbledore's point of view. We see Harry under the Invisibility Cloak, unable to move because Dumbledore has bound him with a silent spell, watching a boy beg for courage and an old man give a look that Harry reads later as permission.

The aftermath is the smartest part. Harry's first response is not grief, it is fury at Snape, who walks through the school the next morning as headmaster. The funeral on the lake, the boats, the white lilies, is one of the few ceremonial scenes Rowling allows herself, and it lands because the man on the water was the only person who knew the whole plan.

Rowling also plays fair with the reader. Snape's true allegiance is the question the final book is built to answer, and this book hands you every clue while making you certain of the wrong conclusion. The Unbreakable Vow. The rooftop. The fact that Snape is the one who told Voldemort about the Prophecy in the first place. Whatever you believe at the end of this book, you are probably wrong, and that is deliberate.

Ginny, Ron, and Hermione

The teenage plot runs alongside, and it is the reason half the readership bought the book. Harry spends the year wanting Ginny Weasley and being unable to say anything about it, partly because she is his best friend's sister and partly because Ron would break his nose. Ginny is written as genuinely funny, popular, and unimpressed by fame, which is a small miracle after four books of other people being impressed by fame.

Harry's dating life is a disaster of his own making. He takes an acquaintance to a party to make Ginny jealous and gets more than he wanted out of it. Ron's romance with Lavender, described with a withering precision about the kissing, is comic relief that also does real work. It shows Ron's insecurity, and Hermione's jealousy surfaces as a cruelty she would deny to her face. Their row after the enchanted goblet of fire in the common room, and the poisoned mead that puts Ron in the hospital wing, is the moment the trio stops being three children and starts being three people who will be jealous of one another for years.

Hermione, for her part, is the one who reads the annotated book correctly. She points out that a half-blood prince is a person, that the notes are getting more invasive, and that Harry is taking instructions from a stranger's handwriting. She is right. She is also ignored, which is the most realistic thing in the book.

What does not hold

The dating subplot is the weakest material in it. Lavender Brown is a joke, Romilda Vane is a joke, and the love potion that ends up in a glass of mead is a coincidence so convenient that it is doing structural work nobody should have to ask a book to do. Rowling is writing romantic comedy inside a novel about a murderer's soul, and the tonal jump is often one page wide. Ron in particular is written as oblivious here in a way that flattens him out.

Hogwarts itself is starting to wear thin. By the sixth year the reader knows the corridors, the common room, the Great Hall, and the exact rhythm of term, and the book spends its early pages on classes that no longer carry any tension. The series keeps needing bigger threats inside a building that has been fully mapped for four books, and the usual answer is to send the characters somewhere else, which is why the cave is the strongest chapter and the Quidditch match is not.

Draco's plan also needs more luck than it should. He is one student, alone, repairing a cabinet in a corridor for months while Dumbledore, Snape, the Order, and the entire staff apparently fail to notice. His success is narratively required, but the book does not earn it, and Rowling half acknowledges this by having everyone suspect him and nobody act. When the plot needs him to win, he wins.

None of this undoes the ending. The tower, the memories, and the cave are the point, and they work because Dumbledore has been made vulnerable first, by a potion that reduces the most powerful wizard in the school to a frightened man begging for water. The sixth book is really the fifth book's explanations stretched into a plot. It lays out the war, and then it starts one.