Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Potter Grows Up

JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books changed publishing history by creating a new generation of young readers, who then also became consumers of the movies, games, merchandise-- making the writer one of the wealthiest people in the world.

After seven bestselling books, each of which triggered fresh rounds of Pottermania, Rowling decided to stop. She also started writing non-Potter books, but her wizard hero refused to vanish.

So back he comes, older, sadder and helpless before his spoilt brat, Albus Potter, the only one of his three children (James and Lily remain in the background) who is chronically sullen and has a problem with his father’s fame.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is the dramatic script of the recently staged London production, which was written in two parts by playwright Jack Thorne, based on an original story by Rowling, the director John Tiffany and himself. The play picks up where the last novel,  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007) left off. It is set nineteen years after Harry Potter got out of Hogwarts and defeated the Dark Lord Voldemort. He is married to Ginny Weasley and works with the Ministry of Magic. His buddy Ron married Hermione and they have a daughter, Rose.

The kids are going to Hogwarts, when the play (book) opens and Albus manages to befriend just one other boy, with as big a chip on his shoulder as he does--Scorpius Malfoy, the son of Harry’s nemesis, Draco Malfoy. He is a sweet-natured child burdened with the rumour that he is Voldemort’s son, so nobody wants to be near him.

Anyone who has not read Potter books and is unfamiliar with the back story, the characters and the mythology would not be able to follow the story, but Potter fans can plunge right in as if the gap between Book 7 and this one never happened.

The story has a lot of twists, turns, action, emotional turmoil, magic and time-travelling, which from all accounts, made for a magical and riveting stage production, and will undoubtedly make for a successful film. The book leaves a lot for the reader to imagine, because the layers a novel would have brought in are missing.

There is suspense too-- even though Voldemort is dead, Rowling and Thorne find a fiendishly clever way to have him return.  Albus is not an appealing hero, a rude busybody, whose rebelliousness causes his hapless father and others a great deal of grief.

He drags an unwilling Scorpius into time-travelling misadventures, that re-introduce some characters and the past at Hogwarts, as what-if alternative realities are created. Because it is in the form of a play, the book is an easy read; so much to-ing and fro-ing would have made a novel unwieldy and perhaps boring. Here all the conflicts and emotions are there, without excessive verbiage. And the climax has all the fireworks one would expect from a classic confrontation between Good and Evil.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Parts One and Two)

By Jack Thorne, based on an original story by J. K. Rowling, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne

Publisher: Little, Brown & Company /Hachette

Pages: 327 pages

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