WARNING: PLOT SPOILERS AT LARGE Now that Rowling's released some hormones into the arena, they're rampaging freely through these middle pages: it seems that saliva is being exchanged liberally between almost everyone in the cast (nice boy Harry excepted, of course, 'cos he's still being tormented by thoughts of Ginny). After the briefest of Ons, Ron 'n' Herm are now definitively Off. For the moment.
It's getting late (or, I suppose, early) and I might be losing it, but do I detect, golly, a coy hint that Slughorn is getting a little too intimate with young Potter? Garbed in "tasselled velvet hat" and "smoking jacket" (suits you, sir), Slug hosts a Christmas bash in chapter 16 at which he grips "Harry's arm so tightly he might have been hoping to Disapparate with him". Blimey.
Unfortunately, however, this seems almost it as far as actual, well, action is concerned. The Draco-Malfoy pact creaks on, although little more hard news is being revealed. More intriguingly, perhaps, Dumbledore's excursions with the Pensieve in chapters 17 and 18 are dredging up more stuff on Voldemort's past, back in the murky days when he was still plain ol', smooth-faced Tom. The locket thingummy makes another appearance.
But frankly I'm tiring slightly of the Darkly Significant atmosphere of these bits, which is threatening to suffocate practically everything else. Rowling keeps lobbing stuff to the Potterati on the hunt for back-story and timelines. We mere Muggles want plot, dammit! Now!
But the pace hots up a little as we move into chapters 19 and 20, with a bish-bosh sequence of big events. First Ron gets into a spot of bother on his birthday with some accidentally imbibed love potion, then into bigger difficulties in the company of Professor Slughorn (not what you may fear – but I'm keeping schtum out of iron-willed journalistic professionalism).
Then Harry, who has meanwhile been spurning Scrimgeour's appeals for him to come and work for the Ministry (maybe that MI5 grooming I suspected wasn't so wide of the mark), has his own brush with mortality via the Quidditch pitch. Or the air above it. Whatever you call it. You know what I mean, even if I don't.
Still very little, it has to be said, on this Half-Blood Prince chappie, and it's practically daytime here in W10. Apparently he might be something to do with Horcruxes, which keep getting mentioned, whatever those are (even Hermione is a bit foggy in this area, which makes me feel marginally less inadequate). Plus apparently Vol once wanted to become Our Man in Dark Arts at Hogwarts, but Dumbledore said no. All faintly perplexing, and indeed to quote the big D himself: "I have ideas … but no more than that."
On to chapter 21, "The Unknowable Room". Indeed.
