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That world—let's start there—has been a source of great delight to me over the years. Rowling's imaginative universe takes every dusty old piece of furniture from the common stock of tales about witches—pointed hats and cloaks, flying broomsticks, eye of newt and toe of frog, the whole shebang—cheerfully accepts it, and raises it to the next power. She adds to that the love of odd names that also characterized Charles Dickens, matching his Dick Swiveller with her own Argus Filch, and his town of Eatanswill with her village of Hogsmeade. It is tempting to heap up examples. She has a keen ear for the absurd, and has picked up curious words and phrases from all over the place: the names of two of her main characters, Dumbledore and Hagrid, seem to have been taken from a passage about country dialects in Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge. (A "dumbledore" is a bumblebee, and to be "hag-rid" is to be worn out.) The portraits at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry talk, and the subject of any one will occasionally depart to visit the inhabitants of the others; in the great wizard shopping street called Diagon Alley one can buy Self-Stirring Cauldrons; rooms and tents and even automobiles are often bewitched so that their insides are larger than their outsides. Each book in the series has added to this storehouse of treasures and curiosities.

But Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince does so less than any of its predecessors. Such new information about the magical world that we acquire is disturbing if not terrifying: we learn, for instance, of the Horcrux, an object enchanted to receive a portion of a person's soul—but only when that person has severed a bit of his soul by murdering someone. One of the few light-hearted moments in the book comes early on, when Harry and his friends visit Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, the joke shop run by Fred and George Weasley, and see a variety of magical pranks and tricks. But one of the new comical items Fred and George are proud of—Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder—much later in the book enables one of Harry's enemies to escape capture, and this escape leads, indirectly at least, to the death of a beloved character. There is no less magic in this book than in any of the others, but any distinction between serious and frivolous magic is being occluded, or even erased.

So too is the distinction between "good" and "dark" magic—or, as the magicians of the Renaissance would have put it, between magia and goetia. In the previous installment of the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, a group of students wants to learn how to defend themselves against possible attacks by Dark wizards, especially the Death Eaters, the most trusted servants of the greatest and Darkest of Dark wizards, Lord Voldemort, Harry's great antagonist. They are all taking a course called Defense Against the Dark Arts, but it is useless, so they determine to study under the tutelage of Harry, who by this time has had to defend himself against the Dark Arts more than a few times. Harry's dear friend Hermione Granger invents a way to inform people of future meetings: she enchants coins so that their serial numbers are replaced by the date and time of the next meeting of the Defense Association. Clever indeed! But the same enemy who buys Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder from Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes learns of the trick and employs it to bring Death Eaters into Hogwarts Castle. Moreover, the meetings of the Defense Association take place in a place called the Room of Requirement, which alters its shape, size, and furnishings in order to meet the needs of the people using it; and this room is also commandeered by Harry's enemy, again following our heroes' example.

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