Tonight, tonight...

Jonathan Last has an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal today about tomorrow's release of Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince, specifically focusing on historical parallels between Churchill and Dumbledore.

...the early Potter tales were essentially Hardy Boys stories--each book confronted Harry and his friends with a series of small puzzles, the solving of which led to the resolution of a big case. In the fifth book, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," something interesting happened. The author, J.K. Rowling, abandoned the mystery genre and gave her readers something more challenging: a historical allegory.

It's an interesting piece, and I agree with most of it. The comparison that I'd use, as I've said, is the schoolboy stories rather than the Hardy Boys (mainly because Wodehouse and Rowling were much better writers than whoever happened to be using the Dixon pen-name at any given time), but as an analogy, it certainly works. I will say that I think the turn came much sooner than he gives it credit for, though. The transition from a set of individual stories to an epic fantasy came in the third book, with the unmasking of Peter Pettigrew. And the battle-lines were clearly drawn as early as the second book, with the terms "mudblood" and "half-blood."

It's a great piece, and anyone out there who happens to be interested in Harry would probably enjoy reading it.

(Thanks for the tip, Wendy...)