Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Finished Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Earlier in the week I relieved our babysitter as I returned from my last Information Architecture class, and I found her teary-eyed over her own copy of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. She wiped her eyes and explained that she had cried over the death of Sirius Black in the last novel. At this point I was now certain about two things: someone important was going to die in the book near the end, and that our baby-sitter is more emotionally involved in the stories than myself. The death of Sirius Black in the last novel seemed a very matter-of-fact ending, since while Rowling is a master of narrative structure and form, in the end any character other than the protagonist Harry, is pretty thin.

And that's exactly what I find to be the case with the latest Harry Potter novel. While Harry's character has certainly evolved, I can't say the same for the characters he has grown up with. Despite the dust-up between them in the book, even Hermione and Ron seem little changed since their debut in the first novel. The story is compelling, but the structural artifice of the narrative moves the characters around on the stage that is Hogwarts without delving further into the characters. Instead we get endless harping by Harry about how so-and-so is bad and is up to something, and when he turns out to be right, there are no unexpected twists to the tale. Unless you call the death of Dumbledore unexpected, which, given the series' propensity to rob Harry of Father figures at every turn (first his real father, then his Godfather Sirius who must first go into hiding and then dies, and now Dumbledore) was predictable given the particular focus on him in this book.

So I didn't cry at the death of Dumbledore. In the end it was just flat words on a page for me, just another character removed from the stage out of structural necessity for the series to move forward.

More than anything I was hoping for something to surprise me in this latest installment. In the end it was a fun story, well-written and taught but ultimately thin, and holding no real surprises.