Enthusiasm and delight greeted the publication of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Elaborately stage-managed as the hoopla might have been, no one can doubt the excitement of all those children queuing for their copies. But then none of them had yet read the book. For, in truth, this sixth Harry Potter novel is designed to dampen any readerly high spirits. Concluding inconclusively, with puzzles unresolved and prophecies unfulfilled, there may be plenty to guarantee the mega-sales of number seven, which will complete the sequence. Yet Harry Potter's fulfilment of his destiny has now become grim-faced. "There was no waking from his nightmare, no comforting whisper in the dark that he was safe really." This is from the end of the novel, a gloom not to be dispelled.

Some might feel a little like Ron Weasley when he sees Hermione Granger reading the unreliable, indispensable wizard tabloid, the Evening Prophet. "Anyone else we know died?" enquires Harry's bosom pal, with a "forced toughness" in his voice. Well might he ask, for the body count has been mounting. Just as Jane Austen's sixth novel, Persuasion, was full of deaths, so is Rowling's. It begins, in the non-magical world of us Muggles, with reports of murders and "dozens" of fatalities from a collapsing bridge (arranged somehow by the wizard villain Voldemort). It ends with the notably unconsoling funeral of one of her chief characters. In between there are plenty more deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause.||

---

---

Personen: Rowling, Joanne K.

Interessenkreis: Englische Literatur