*Mild spoilers ahead*
Waiting in line at the Landmark check-out counter in Hyderabad, I heard a man and woman behind me discussing the book. The man in particular seemed rather excessively annoyed at its existence, especially given that he was in line to pay for it on the very day of its release: “Harry Potter is over!”
The debate between the pair was one familiar to older millennials like me who had grown up with the series: What do we make of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child? The ‘book’ is actually the bound version of the script of a play by that name written by Jack Thorne based on an original story by JK Rowling, John Tiffany (the play’s director) and Thorne. The play is booked till next year, though Rowling says it may go global. Meanwhile, she is debuting as screenwriter in the first of a trilogy Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them starring Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne, out this November. As part of its promotion, she has been adding more stories to her Pottermore website (one of which was deemed offensive to Native Americans), expanding on the Potterverse. All this has raised the question of when an author should unhand her fictional universe and allow the readers’ imagination to take over.
I confess I, too, was in two minds about The Cursed Child. I did not pre-book it nor was I especially excited about the release. Still, on Sunday I ended up at the bookstore, in line, with my hardbound copy that I proceeded to devour that night.
The Cursed Child takes off from where the epilogue of the final of the series Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows left off. Harry and Ginny Weasley are seeing off their second son Albus Severus Potter to Hogwarts as he worries he might be placed in Slytherin. As that sentence may indicate, The Cursed Child is not for newcomers to the series though if familiar with the overall plot and characters it can come off as a self-contained work about love, loss and living with trauma. Loneliness of children and the bonds of friendship between unlikely people. And most, movingly, of the bond between parents and their children.
I doubt it would be much of a spoiler to say that the story dwells most on the friendship between Albus and a peer alluded to in the Epilogue, Scorpius Malfoy, whose father Draco was the bane of Harry’s school life and grandfather Lucius was an outright, though sometimes sympathetic, villain-associate of Lord Voldemort. The performance of the actor who plays Scorpius has come in for much critical acclaim but even on text he is a lovable soul, kind, supportive and self-aware, perhaps as much a geek as Hermione but attached with less of a know-it-all tag (how much of that is because he is a boy and she a girl, is for readers to introspect).
Albus, the young nervous child we see at the end of Deathly Hallows, is the focus of the story. Burdened by the legacy of his names - like Scorpius, one could say - his loneliness and angst will strike a chord with every person who has ever felt misunderstood, unseen, even unloved by those deemed closest to us. His is a more relatable story - orphan Harry raised by Dumbledore for the slaughter was an unusual being could pose more of a challenge for young readers to see themselves in, so extraordinary his circumstances.
Albus, however, has the pressures of every child: do our parents want and love us *as we are*? Have we lived up to their expectations? Do they see as people in our own right? Most of us, even those in the most secure of upbringings, go through these phases. For some of us, words of our parents - words we know they cannot really mean - may sting our eyes even decades later. Parents given a something so fragile as a child, with no one manual to rearing them, may spend years second-guessing their actions and regretting words, said or unsaid. Harry and Albus are this pair: bound by blood, and much more but drifting apart in anger and frustration. While less attention is given to the Draco-Scorpius relationship, there is little doubt that there is love and understanding, Draco a more demonstrative and giving father than his ever was. Scorpius, who wears the burdens of early loss, stigma, and isolation lightly with grace, is a more secure child, presumably because of the love of Draco and Albus. It is to script’s advantage that the reader fills in these details with so limited information.
The moving exploration of these themes - love, loneliness, and friendship - are what make the loopiness of the plot forgivable. A lot of action takes place and much of it would have once belonged to the realm of fan fiction - who paired up with whom, who could have paired up with whom, what is vs what could have been. Harry Potter fan fiction was once a source of great joy to Potterphiles, readers using the characters of the text across a variety of genres and with varying levels of competence. The pinnacle, no doubt, may have been the fan-fic version of the final Harry Potter books that became available at roadside shops shortly before the actual book’s release, correctly narrowing in on Horcruxes as a key plot detail (though the rest of the book went haywire including some island fantasy scenes and more sexual action than a Rowling-authored book).
I evoke fan fiction because some of the plots thought out on those corners of the Internet become part of Potter Canon in The Cursed Child. In fact the key twist in the tale - that can be spotted a mile away - was reportedly discussed by a reddit user some months ago. Rowling has claimed that reading the play would indicate why this particular story needed to be told in this form, as a play. However, the rushed way in which the plot unfolds, it is hard not to imagine how Rowling would have told it as a novel - no doubt over some 1000 pages that could have been savoured and revisited. She would have convinced us of the implausible and facile, in ways that the script fails to.
Having said that, as a mediation on its core themes, it succeeds in conveying that sometimes the loneliness of an outsider (at home and at school), of the ‘loser’, of being the unloved, unseen, uncherished can be common to both hero and villain, that at our very core we aren’t that different from those who loathe us and who we loathe in return.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child lures us in with the promise of telling us what happened next, after Voldemort died, after Harry grew up, after the train left for Hogwarts bearing our beloved heroes’ spawn. It wins us with what won us over all those years ago when an oddly dressed man deluminated a suburban street and, as an unstirring cat watched, laid a newly-orphaned child on a doorstep as another world erupted in celebration: it wins us with heart.