Books: Love Potions and Tragic Magic

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Harry's adult readers, this one included, tend to want Rowling's novels to Mean Something, and in this somewhat transitional book there are a few too many ingredients in the cauldron for it to come to a 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.

Love is much more important to Rowling than magic. The real mystery, for her, is the human heart. She has always been more interested in the hand that wields the wand, the way the enchantment illuminates the wizard who casts it. --L.G.