Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: a Review

These days I have a rather ambivalent view of Harry Potter. 

I used to love the universe so much but now I am not sure anymore. The whole debate on whether or not it is bad for Christians to read is leaving me mostly bewildered, so I wouldn't hazard an opinion on that particular can of worms, but I am rather puzzled as to whether it is just good literature. It's certainly fun, and the story is engrossing, but the older I get, the more wooden the characters seem to be, and the dialogue appears dangerously close to naff.

I still sent Simon to pick up the new one for me yesterday, if anything because otherwise my 17 year old self would never have spoken to me ever again (yes, we dialogue frequently, don't you?). It is a play, and so also an extremely quick read, but that is just about all the good I have to say about it. I think the choices which were made for this latest instalment were systematically the wrong ones. 

For those who haven't heard, the story follows Harry Potter's son Albus, and his friend Scorpius (son of Draco Malfoy) going back in time for various reasons. I haven't liked it much. The whole going back in time thing seems mostly devised to pander to a nostalgic audience, by revisiting some iconic episodes from the previous books, the plot more of an after-thought cobbled together as an excuse for people to fork out more money, rather than just go back to read their favourite bits. It's as if the playwright (it is not very clear whether that is JK Rowling herself)was constantly making little in-jokes then pausing expectantly, as if to say "Get it? Get it?"

In the original stories, the truly mesmerising part was the wizarding world, its rules, wonders and complexities. Most of the characters, and especially the main ones, didn't ring particularly true and the plot was not going for originality (which is not a problem in itself, just a fact about the type of story it is). What kept people (or at least, me) coming back, was the detailed inventions of the world Rowling created.

Enter the play. Which subtracts the wizarding world altogether. 

Now, that may be different if you actually go to see the play, I don't know, but I doubt it. The action systematically fasts forwards through the daily life (out of necessity due to the lack of space in a three-hour play) to leave us purely with actions and quips (which are occasionally funny). Very little time is spent at Hogwarts, most of the action seems to be happening in various offices, where people have crises and make jokes.

Dialogue was not Rowling's strong point, it still isn't. The whole failed relationship between Harry and his son is complained about but never explained or indeed properly shown. It is more declared into existence by the characters, and the same goes for most of the action. It's only towards the end that we are finally given any kind of insight into the two new protagonists (Albus and Scorpius) and therefore start caring about them, which is exactly the wrong way round. The habit Rowling had of describing the school year, and then packing the action right at the end may have been a tad predictable, but it made sense. You cared for the characters before they were in danger.

And the characters are the main flaw. The dialogue simply fails to bring them to life. Harry is a rather unconvincing father (my sister would say he was already an unconvincing teenager) and Albus makes very little sense. Rather than letting us guess at the characters intentions, which is the beauty and ambivalence of theatre, here everything is over-explained and spelled out, and the explanations just don't convince. Everything is nicely tied together with a bow, people are neatly psycho-analysed, but it doesn't work. 

So I am going to pretend this new episode has not been written, because it is rather an argument for the "against" column when I ponder whether the whole series is something good and true I want to introduce to my children.

14.07.2016

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W. B Yeats, 1921

A few thoughts:

1. Beauty points to truth, whether the author intends it or not.

2. Yeats always strikes me as a man with a blindfold, groping about and creating a strange mythology from the shapes he feels, but incapable of the act of will necessary to remove the blindfold, or even aware of it as a possibility. A bit like how my entire English Lit class was unable to answer our professor what should have been blindingly obvious, namely that Dover Beach was about the absence of God (nope, didn't even cross our minds).

3. "Mere anarchy" strikes me today. A lesser poet would have said "sheer anarchy". But that's what anarchy is, petty and less than.

4. We're fine. The family's fine, they hadn't gone to see the fireworks. I don't know how many more times I'll stomach having to write these words this year, though. 

Just in case you were wondering how it feels

When I come back from France, when the train emerges from the tunnel, sad as I am to leave my family behind, do you know what the overwhelming feeling is?

Relief.

Because I am home.

As a foreigner, you always have to try a little bit harder, being that little bit more British than the Brits, because if YOU don't know about the War of the Roses, the colours of the various tube lines or the county Milton Keynes is in, it's because you are Other. Never mind that born and bred Englishmen/women do not know these things (I have spent a lot of time explaining the War of the Roses to English people, actually). When YOU don't know, YOU emphasise your outsider status.

Immigrants know that. Most of the time they accept that. We do have to work that little bit harder to build our homes, but we get to build one, and most of the time we are simply grateful for that. And we feel we have a right to be where we are, because that is where our home is, where our community is, where the familiar streets and well-known sights are. The smells, the sounds, the rain. All of this spells home, all of this we love because it is home.

This street outside my house is not just any street, it's the one down which Jude took his first hesitant steps behind his wheelie dog. This bus is not any bus, it's the one Gabriel rode four hours after he was born. All of it precious, all of it irreplaceable. 

But today we were reminded that working harder was not the only thing required of us in order to be able to build our homes. Today we were shown that nothing we can do is ever enough.

Now my neighbours denied my right to call my home my own. They chose to pull my house down, they knew it could damage theirs to do so, because theirs were leaning on mine, but they chose potentially dramatic instability for the privilege of evicting me.

Of course this is an imperfect simile, of course there were good reasons to want to leave, but not a single one of these good reasons was ever used during the campaign. Like it or not, this was a campaign of hate. People were not making an informed decision over complex policies, because that is not the arguments they used to debate. The arguments they used were all about getting rid of migrants, European or otherwise.

Getting rid of ME. Pulling MY house down.

More than half the population wanted to push me away so badly, they were willing to gamble economic stability.

But this was my home.