Half-Blood Prince: Page 253
Multiple levels on which Malfoy's plan was terrible, some cursed necklace discussion questions, Dumbledore's restorative Horcrux-hunting, and Harry's annoying personality.
Welcome back to Potter Pages! This week, on page 253 of Half-Blood Prince, we cover a fascinating magical object: that ridiculous silver-and-opals necklace. Who made it? Why? We’ll find out. Well, we won’t. We’ll talk about it. Enjoy!
Page 253 of Half-Blood Prince is a fun one, because it brings us into contact — not literally, thank God, not even through a tiny hole in a glove — with one of those objects that you — or I — can explore for pages on end. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you start writing a newsletter like this. It starts out fairly innocent: “I’ll do a deep dive into a bunch of different elements of Harry Potter!” But then you actually do the deep dive, and it turns out to be a lot of things like “is this moment actually inspired by ‘The King of Queens’? Is Harry actually Doug Heffernan?” and “is Eldred Worple really the narrator?”
In this case, it’s the necklace. That damn cursed necklace, “silver and opals,” the whole deal. There are so many questions — who cursed it? Why? How does the curse work? How did it get to Borgin and Burke’s in the first place? There are answers, of course, but once you back out of the Wizarding World universe, it all seems — as most pages do these days — a little strange.
The page starts in the middle of a paragraph, and it’s a weird sort of meta-paragraph. Rather than being dialogue, it’s a description of someone describing what people said before:
“how they had argued about the advisability of agreeing to deliver unknown objects, the argument culminating in the tussle over the parcel, which tore open. At this point, Leanne was so overcome, there was no getting another word out of her.”
The trio has just gotten back to the castle after witnessing Katie being cursed, which makes me wonder: Katie has just been placed under the Imperius Curse by Madam Rosmerta, herself under Malfoy’s Imperius Curse. That’s a chain of causality if I’ve ever seen one. So why didn’t Malfoy have Rosmerta order Katie to stay out of sight of anyone else, especially Harry? Obviously, Malfoy has limitations, because he’s orchestrating everything remotely and he doesn’t have any control over Leanne, but still, he should know that among the students milling around Hogsmeade, there’s exactly one person who’s somewhat interested in looking into Malfoy’s shady dealings with the dark arts, and that’s Harry. Come to think of it, Malfoy has already seen Harry follow him, invisible, into the Slytherin compartment on the train; he knows that Harry thinks he’s up to something. And yet, he can’t even get Rosmerta to give the necklace to someone who’s not one of Harry’s closest friends outside the trio, one of only six quidditch teammates.
Here’s the other thing: how has this plan gotten Malfoy any closer to actually getting the necklace into the castle? When the trio gets back to Hogwarts, we see Filch run at them enthusiastically holding his Secrecy Sensor; obviously, he’s searching the students coming back to the castle just like he’s searching the ones coming in. Later on in Half-Blood Prince, we see another one of Malfoy’s plans coming a lot closer to succeeding: he gets Rosmerta to ship a bottle of mead into the castle, trusting that Filch won’t use the secrecy sensor to check a sealed bottle from the Three Broomsticks. But here, there’s no trustworthy seal on the necklace — what’s Malfoy’s endgame? When Katie gets back to the castle, not in the real (as it were) world but in the hypothetical one where the package doesn’t tear and she just keeps walking, Filch will detect the necklace instantly. In fact, later in the book, we literally hear Hermione say that a powerful curse like that on the necklace would be detected by a Secrecy Sensor “within seconds.” Maybe the answer is that this is just a stupid, desperate plan that Draco has thrown together as a last resort and he doesn’t care that it’s going to fail because he has nothing better. But this plan just isn’t going to work.
There’s also the matter of the necklace itself. We know the basic history: Malfoy bought it from Borgin and Burke’s for 1600 Galleons, and presumably had it shipped to Rosmerta in Hogsmeade via owl order, after it had claimed the lives of several muggle owners. So, some questions:
Why would you go to the trouble of manufacturing a necklace that instantly kills anyone who touches it? You are a wizard; surely you can find a less theatrical way to kill whoever you’re targeting? Maybe it’s some complicated story involving, like, a reclusive fashionista who never takes outside visitors but tries on a new necklace every day. But it still seems like you could have just poisoned the coffee or something, rather than creating a cursed necklace that’s going to hang around forever killing random people. Maybe you just want to create maximum chaos, in which case, sure. Who is this witch or wizard who’s spending time and energy manufacturing a lethal precious stone necklace?
How did the necklace find its way to a bunch of different muggle owners? Let’s play this out. The first muggle gets the necklace as a gift or something, puts it on, and immediately dies. Sure. Fine. The police come in and find the dead body. Eventually, someone decides to pick up the necklace; they immediately drop dead. Maybe one more person hasn’t realized yet that the necklace is deadly, one more person picks it up, and THEY drop dead. Now tell me: how is that necklace going to make its way to several more muggle owners? Imagine if they decided to sell it at auction. People would be dropping dead left and right.
What is the curse on the necklace? How does it actually kill people? Obviously, when Katie picks up the necklace, she flies up into the air and sort of goes into a convulsion. So in more lethal instances of necklace-touching, does the same thing happen, only followed by death? That would seem to make it even less likely that the several muggle deaths that it would inevitably cause would go unnoticed. If anyone who touched a necklace immediately flew up into the air, convulsed, and died, I think even muggles would realize pretty quickly that something pretty bad was going on with the necklace. It also points once again to the fact that this is a completely theatrical way to kill people. You’re a wizard; you can just instantly stop people’s hearts from beating. But instead, whoever made the necklace decided to go with “they fly up in the air and have a seizure.” Seems like someone wanted some really noticeable revenge. Maybe it was the wife of Warlock D.J. Prod after he turned her into a Yak.
How can this thing possibly be on sale? The legal status of Borgin and Burke’s is sort of a gray area, so we don’t know for sure whether they acquired the necklace through ordinary channels or on the black market, but honestly, that’s not the point here. The point is, if there’s a shop selling this kind of thing quite publicly in an extremely well-known dark arts district, shouldn’t the Ministry immediately shut that place the hell down? Maybe there’s a weird sort of libertarian situation going on, where in the magical community there’s a portion of the electorate that’s really into civil liberties, so to avoid alienating that group, the government doesn’t want to just go into a private business and shut things down, even if there are clearly bad things going on. I mean, it’s England, so I doubt it, but who knows where wizards stand politically? Assuming the Ministry knows at least the rough outline of what’s going on — and that seems like a safe assumption, because Knockturn Alley is pretty much common knowledge — the other possibility is that there’s a silent agreement going on, where the Ministry doesn’t want to go in and shut things down, but they will if things get too hectic and dark, which is an incentive for Knockturn Alley merchants to keep things on the up-and-up and avoid the government scrutiny. But still, the necklace definitely shouldn’t be commercially available, let alone to a sixteen-year-old kid.
Where does the price of the necklace come from? It’s made of valuable materials, but theoretically, a witch or wizard could conjure those with just a flick of a wand, so maybe jewels and precious metals aren’t expensive in the wizarding world. Price, we know, is based on supply and demand; the supply of the necklace is fixed (1), so the demand must be high if Borgin and Burke’s can get away with charging such a high price for it. So why is the demand high? Who is buying this? Malfoy, of course...but it’s also been sitting on the shelf for at least four years before Malfoy comes in and makes his purchase, so it’s not like the cursed necklace is a huge seller. Surely that shelf space could be devoted to something that’s going to sell more than one unit of inventory every five years, minimum? Actually, the biggest plot twist of all would be if there are actually lots of necklaces, and the whole thing about there only being one is a complete fiction meant only to drive the price up. Imagine if Mr. Borgin is keeping a bunch of cursed opal necklaces in the back, and every once in a while someone comes in and he has to give them a speech about how the necklace they see on the shelf is the only one in the world and it was smuggled out of the Emperor of Japan’s castle (see “The Honeymooners” for full details).
Anyway, Professor McGonagall sends Leanne to the hospital wing, then asks the trio what happens. Harry explains that Katie rose up into the air, started screaming, and collapsed. I wonder: do particular magical ways of killing have different physical presentations? In the muggle world, if you get the chicken pox virus, you get red marks all over your skin. In the magical world, if you touch a necklace, fly up in the air, collapse, and start screaming, can a sufficiently smart witch or wizard look at that and say “must be the Transmogrifian Torture, better give her a restorative draught!”?
Harry wants to see Dumbledore, presumably so he can explain his theories, have Dumbledore immediately debunk them, and feel awkward for the rest of their hour-long session. But Dumbledore is away. We’ll learn later that all the time he’s spending away from school, he’s actually looking for horcruxes. It’s interesting, because you want to say “what could he possibly be doing away from school for days to weeks at a time? How long can it take him to find a horcrux when he already knows all about Voldemort?” But then you realize that he’s literally doing what the trio spends most of book seven doing. Maybe he’s sleeping in a tent and tapping his wand on the radio (not a euphemism).
He’s also — let’s face it — getting some time away from Harry. Everyone talks about how Harry is angry and annoying in book five, but to me, book six Harry is almost worse. Ron is right when he talks about how Harry is absolutely obsessing over Draco and Snape and the whole dark part of the world. Just play quidditch and enjoy yourself. It’s sort of interesting, when you think about it: Harry spends the entire book trying to figure out what Malfoy is up to, how Snape is involved, and what he can do to stop it. In the end, it turns out that Dumbledore already knew every intimate detail of what Draco was up to and how Snape was involved, and still couldn’t do anything to stop it, and also, it all pretty much went according to plan. Harry makes his contributions when he and Dumbledore are retrieving the horcrux, but I have to think that when it comes to actual events within Hogwarts, this is the book wherein Harry is the least helpful.
With Dumbledore away, Harry’s not sure he wants to tell McGonagall about his theory. “Professor McGonagall did not invite confidences,” he thinks to himself, which is basically just a way of saying to himself that his idea already sounds a little stupid, but Dumbledore wouldn’t say that to his face. But “this is a life-and-death matter,” he says to himself — see what I mean about how he’s annoying? — so he decides to go right ahead.
“I think Draco Malfoy gave Katie that necklace, Professor,” he says. Hermione and Ron are instantly embarrassed to be associated with him. They actually physically move away from him, which always stings. That’s where the page ends.
It’s a lot of necklace talk, but unfortunately not much important dialogue or action. That’s the kind of thing that happens in this series; there’s a balance between pages, where if you’re getting a fascinating object you don’t get much else in other categories, but it you get lots of important dialogue you don’t get a fascinating object to dissect, et cetera. At least, I haven’t found those pages yet. But this page is fine on its own. At least it hasn’t claimed the lives of 19 muggle owners to date.