If writing was a religion, it shall be easy to deem ‘Harry Potter and the half-blood prince’ as the penultimate blasphemy, an utmost sacrilege. A book that discredits its own magnitude, it is a joke in the Queens’ English that bravely illustrates the argument for its painful ineptitude. J.K. Rowling seems to have found the ostentatious airs of a billion dollar grandeur luxurious and tempting, and so overtly has this affected her capability as an author that after scraping off powerful authoritative fictional successes like “The order of the phoenix” and “The Goblet of Fire”, she has downgraded her own standards of preferential fiction. “Harry Potter and the half-blood prince”, ironically speaking, lacks the magic. Rowling underscores maturity in her characters and this maturity seems to accompany an intricate and moodily interesting loss of realism. Or is it artistic failure? The dialogues come out as surrealistic even for a surrealistic world like Hogwarts. The book seems to be dependant more on the ratio of its popularity versus its compatibility as a novel. It lacks the individual integrity that places a novel in conjunction with what authors relate to as a total mortality in script; the aggressiveness and energy is averted thoroughly and Rowling seems to be postponing the ideas or concocting ideas that postpone the entire strength of the story-line to what we might perceive will be the subsequent edition. The book seems to be a mere pillar poising the life and breath of the seventh Potter venture. It fails to rejuvenate interest stirred by the earlier specimens, and has more of an exhausted inclination to incite sheer pity for a wasted six hundred pages and a gracious lot of unlimbered bucks.

The book is a disappointment in stages. Anti-climax seems to be the understatement for Rowling’s ability. A suspense that harbored on for the past five books seems to have lost

As an author, fictional intercourse with a tension of idiosyncratic subjectivity, has never been Rowling’s foremost area of expertise, but the novel convincingly projects the fact that six books old, Rowling still is astonishingly inept, even amateurish. Under the brutal alibi of ‘Children’s Literature’, which the current novel typically and leisurely defies with tinges of what one might term minor profanity, the book passes clear of some very feasible errors in inventive description, a great mishandling of inklings of Gothic and the author’s obvious paranoia.

Part Hardy Boys, part Mills and Boons, the gall of the novel surpasses a proper coherency. It works inside a sphere, a particular boundary of solid circumstances supported by bleak and irresistibly weak reasoning; Rowling plays ‘safe’ with a mass repetition of tried and hackneyed formulas, grossly iterating some of her very own. A prudery, least expected in a narrative of epic proportions.

Also, in an attempt to amuse, a slight assortment of new characters and new elements come into the picture - Rowling’s classic technique of steady plot expansion - which again, seem to be hollow and unworthy, adding to a menacing negativity; the attempt seems to be directed at elevating the heroism, proof of her undying motive to sensationalize an ensuing successor to the series.

The book seems more or less a rape of a grand concept and verily, an atrocious, dismaying member of a so far satisfying pedigree. Readers are forewarned to anticipate still more pessimistically.

Any queries? Revert to - mosaics12@rediffmail.com

• Why Malta? A Mystery-Thriller Author Tells Why


• Lethal Option - Book Review


• ARTURO EL REY - Book Review


• Book Review: Money Without Matrimony


• For Fans of Seinfeld-like Coincidences


• Washington Historian Remembers Harriet Lane, the Greatest First Lady


• The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators, by Gordon Grice


• Beyond Bodybuilding: Stranger in a Strange Land -- A Book Review


• 72 Hour Hold


• Dragon Tales - Book Review


• Constantine


• Erasure and the Othering of Texts


• Undercurrent Blues Has A Rhythm of Its Own - Poetry Book Review


• Fading Towards Enlightenment - Book Review


• Cancer Can be Defeated: Hope, Courage, and a Strong Willpower