Word: voldemort
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...guess: The wizarding world ain't big enough for the two of them, and it's hard to see Harry coming away with the silver medal in that showdown. But Harry has been discovering his darker, angrier side. Maybe Voldemort will take a turn for the better before he heads to the other side of the veil...
Which isn't a terrible thing necessarily. But the series' major shortcoming to date is the flatness of Harry's antagonist Voldemort (whose name Rowling pronounces with a silent t). In the past few books, Voldemort has managed to assemble a body, but he still lacks any kind of realistic motivation. You get no sense of where his boundless enthusiasm for being evil comes from. "You will," Rowling says. "There is obviously a big gap there, and in six Harry finds out a lot of Voldemort's history. Though he was never that nice a guy." She laughs...
...wasn't. Half-Blood Prince goes a long way, finally, to working through Rowling's take on the psychology of evil, largely through a kind of Pensieve-aided documentary of Voldemort's early life. Much of Rowling's understanding of the origins of evil has to do with the role of the father in family life. "As I look back over the five published books," she says, "I realize that it's kind of a litany of bad fathers. That's where evil seems to flourish, in places where people didn't get good fathering." Some of that must surely...
...Gryffindor's Quidditch team, and he has stumbled on a mysterious potions textbook that was formerly the property of--wait for it--a certain Half-Blood Prince. Meanwhile, Dumbledore and Harry, with the help of that always handy expository aid the Pensieve, are poring over the details of Voldemort's early backstory for clues to his intentions. Oh, and somebody's trying to kill Hogwarts students. As Hagrid puts it, with the barest trace of a wink, "Chamber o' Secrets all over again...
...boil. But if there's an abiding preoccupation here, it's love: both requited and un-, misplaced, perverted, denied, repressed and obsessive. Rowling plays that theme as both comedy--watch for the long-suffering Ron to get dosed with a love potion--and tragedy. The story of Voldemort's early life plays as a dark parody of Harry's--Voldemort too was a Muggle-raised orphan, desperate to feel special--but while Harry's power comes from his mother's true, pure love, Voldemort is the product of a twisted, sorcerously coerced love, from which only evil could arise...