HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD
Parts 1 and 2
A play by Jack Thorne
Based on a story by J. K. Rowling, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne
327 pp. Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic. $29.99. (Young adult; ages 12 and up)
A friend once told me about an infamous party she attended after the midnight launch of a mid-series Harry Potter book. A dozen people sat in a small Brooklyn apartment, reading newly purchased copies in silence. My friend was halfway through when the first reader closed her book and went to wait outside on the stoop until another reader, finished, emerged to talk about everything they had just read. The room emptied as the night wore on, the speediest readers exiting early, less zippy readers doggedly persevering. It was a night of three celebrations: first the midnight purchase, then the reading salon and, finally, the elated moment when you weren’t the last reader to join the discussion on the stoop.
I bought “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” around noon the day after it came out and the day before flying to Aberdeen, Scotland. I didn’t even crack the spine on the overnight flight. I had concerns. What if it was like a high school reunion? Harry Potter and I were both older. What if I didn’t recognize him? What if we no longer had anything in common?
During the layover in Dublin, my 7-year-old daughter wrote and illustrated the 11th book in her own series (about a rat named Ratso). I sat down on a hard chair in the wrong time zone, opened my book and was instantly transported back (forward?) to the lives of characters I remember in better detail than I do my own childhood.
What a remarkable thing! “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” is the bare-bones script of a play. And yet, it has the same addictive drive as Rowling’s novels. Of course, this isn’t Rowling’s writing, but rather the playwright Jack Thorne elaborating on a story conceived by Rowling, Thorne and the director John Tiffany together. And yet, Harry Potter and Hermione and Ron and Ginny — in their actions and dialogue, their preoccupations and loyalties — remain themselves. By which, since Harry and the rest are fictional characters, I mean Thorne has by some sort of alchemy written a book that I would previously have assumed only J. K. Rowling could write. The humor is Rowling’s, as is the tightrope-with-an-umbrella execution of a formidably complicated plot and Rowling’s sturdy, pragmatic morality, where the high cost of doing the right thing is nevertheless worth paying. How can a collaboration feel so singularly tethered to Rowling’s point of view? There’s probably a spell for this you could learn at Hogwarts if Hogwarts really existed, but the ingredients must be rare and difficult to come by.
Perhaps the qualities that make Rowling such a remarkable writer are the same ones that make a project like this possible. The world of Rowling’s series is so generously furnished by her redoubtable imagination; her sense of how magic could work is so practical and every day in its details, so fanciful in its delights. Her heroes and their friendships are easy to recognize, as are the villains who make the lives of those around them as grindingly, interminably miserable as possible. We know that they will receive their comeuppance. We know her heroes will do the right thing. The patterns of genre that Rowling inhabits must be a useful limitation for anyone working in her world, although it’s still a marvel how Rowlingian (please feel free to use this neologism to describe other writers I might enjoy) Jack Thorne’s approach to dialogue is. (The only difference I can spot is that his villains are just a bit more perfunctory in their awfulness. Dolores Umbridge is slightly less of a pill. The Dursleys, in Harry’s nightmares, seem slightly less nightmarish than they were in life. But perhaps on the stage they are just as ghastly.)
So what, then, to make of the new characters, Albus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy and Rose Granger-Weasley? How Rowlingian, exactly, are they? Much like Harry, Ginny, Hermione, Ron and Draco, this new generation of magical children feel like real people who want ordinary things in life (good friends, small adventures, to discover what they might be capable of) but who stumble into the extraordinary. I thought they were excellent company and that they fit in just fine at Hogwarts.
Harry Potter has, from the first book onward, been a communal experience. It seems appropriate that most nights a sold-out audience will literally see this new chapter come to life. Because the original story was a series, it seems appropriate that the play stretch across two performances. Because it is about time travel and how change ripples outward, it seems right that every live performance will allow the possibility of difference from the previous. There were moments where I paused in reading to think how much funnier or scarier or spectacular something must be onstage: when Harry’s son, the teenage Albus, transmogrified into the adult Ron, kisses Hermione vigorously to distract her; when Snape sends forward his Patronus; a moving, menacing hedge maze that must be navigated. But on the whole, I wasn’t sorry to be reading the script. The act of imagining how certain scenes or effects might be achieved has its own kind of pleasurable magic and appeal.
The appeal of all fantasy, including Rowling’s original series, comes from answering the question “What if?” What if magic existed? What if an owl delivered an invitation (to you!) to learn magic at a secret school? What if jelly beans came in every flavor, including earwax? What if you had to die to save the world? The questions of “The Cursed Child” are the ones you can ask only after a series has been wrapped up successfully and everyone has had their just deserts. What if Voldemort had a child? What if characters who died could be restored to the people who loved and missed them? What if things went differently? What if, like Dumbledore, Harry Potter had to choose between saving an innocent life and keeping the world safe? What if we could have a chance, one last time, to see people (characters) we loved dearly?
I’ve noticed, to my bewilderment, the question circulating of whether J. K. Rowling should have agreed to this project. What could be the case against it? That the play could dilute the accomplishment of the original series? That Rowling’s readers might revolt when asked to read a script? That characters and stories best beloved by readers no longer belong to their author?
What ungenerous, anxious, proscriptive lines of thinking. Here’s to a long and surprising career in which J. K. Rowling continues to move in and out of the kinds of genre and collaborative projects that interest her most. Readers are free to follow her or not. In the nine years between the publication of the seventh and eighth Harry Potter books, Rowling has written a doorstopper contemporary social novel and three books of a continuing detective series, as well as a Quidditch handbook, a handful of short stories and a wizard’s bestiary due shortly to appear as a movie (the script also by Rowling). Adjacent to the books she’s written, there are movies; theme parks; and Pottermore, which calls itself a “digital publishing, e-commerce, entertainment and news company.” Has there been any individual since Walt Disney who has had greater influence on the creative landscape? Are there any literary characters since Sherlock Holmes and Watson as beloved as Harry and Ron and Hermione? Here’s to the boy who has lived into middle age and to the writer who so vividly brought him to life. Here’s to reading parties where fans of this new book can choose parts and read the script aloud together, rather than going out to sit on a stoop and wait for everyone else to finish.
When I arrived in Aberdeen, my 11-year-old niece Katie was, as it turned out, halfway through “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” So we had a reading party of our own. I stayed awake longer to finish (the advantage of traveling forward in time-zone time). In the morning we agreed it was an excellent book. I said I wondered where Hagrid was, and Teddy Lupin, during the present-day scenes in the book. I was anxious about them. Katie said she was surprised when the Sorting Hat put Albus in Slytherin. I pointed out that in the first Harry Potter book, the Sorting Hat had debated whether to put Harry in Gryffindor or Slytherin, and Katie said, “Yes, but that was probably because Harry had a piece of Voldemort’s soul in him.” We agreed we would like to see the play. My 7-year-old picked up “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and read the first few pages. Then she put it down again. “Aren’t you going to read it?” I asked her. “No,” she said, sounding scandalized. “There are owls, and they’re flying in the daylight!”
Review by Kelly Link. She is a co-founder of Small Beer Press, is the author of four story collections, including “Get in Trouble.”
Original review here.