A bookstore employee in Singapore displays new arrivals of 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince'. Picture / Reuters
Muggles who have rushed out and devoured the sixth Harry Potter book to its catastrophic finale must be hoping author J.K. Rowling won't prolong the misery. Next please, and don't take too long about it.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the long-awaited second-to-last book in the series, has done
its job, setting up the story of Harry the boy wizard and his mortal enemy Lord Voldemort for a ripping conclusion.
Hogwarts School's very future is threatened and the now nearly grown-up Harry finally must confront his dreadful destiny.
It's a workmanlike effort, however. At 607 pages, the sheer length of the book overstretches Rowling's narrative powers.
The story gets off to a slow start and it takes about 100 pages for anything much to happen.
There are a few too many digressions as Harry learns not only all about Voldemort's sad childhood, but even the problems of the evil one's poor mum. It pays to know your enemy, but Tolkien's dark lord Sauron, for example, didn't need a psychological profile.
It takes a third of the book before Harry comes across the mysterious Half-Blood Prince of the title, and his chief protector, Professor Dumbledore, racks up the tension with his fateful utterance: "Being - forgive me - rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger".
Fortunately, Harry has got over the adolescent sulks that plagued the last book.
Now his problem is convincing best mates Ron and Hermione, and the adult wizards, that fellow pupil Draco Malfoy and the dodgy Professor Snape are cooking up something truly nasty.
His peers have other things in mind, chief among them who's snogging who.
The delight of the Harry Potter books has always been in Rowling's richly imagined and complete magical world.
Even after six books, she still has the ability to charm with the details, or as one teenage fan put it, to always come up with something cool.
With all that Voldemort background wrapped up in the penultimate book in the series, let's hope she reins her story back in - and the raging teen hormones - for a taut and tense finale.
