Harry Potter And The End Of An Era

Published in Ceylon Today

'Finite Incantatem' is what people in the world created by J.K. Rowling say when a spell has run its course, or has ended its usefulness and is now causing damage. 

I want to say these words, as a requiem for Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, because it has been 19 years since he was created, and the latest work about him, the play 'Harry Potter and The Cursed Child' that was co-written by Rowling, and published last week, marks the end of an era. Not because the readership is not interested in what happens next, but because what we are told in this play happens next is a bewildering let-down of our legitimate expectations. 

As a great fan of the series, I find myself in the equivalent of a Body Bind Curse when it comes to putting into words what I want to say about the latest instalment. Please bear with me, because I wanted so much to find that the magic never ends, that the cupboard door in the spare room which led to the magical world was still partly open, that there was still a possibility that that wonderful childhood pleasure of discovering interesting characters in a world parallel to my own, was not outgrown. 

I have heard many people with children praise the series for their story-telling, the exciting adventures, for getting kids interested in reading again, for their wit and their humour. Social commentators have praised the inclusion of characters whose situations raise even young readers' awareness of socio-political issues in our contemporary world: of injustice and inequity, of bigotry and of race, class and gender prejudice, in accessible ways. 

The 7 books portrayed a battle between Good and Evil that was only thinly rendered in metaphor, and in which the hero and his friends grow and evolve in moral awareness, and in insight into the complexities of human nature, including their own. This in itself in my view was a great literary achievement, although the story-telling itself is uneven at times in its quality, and the best sequences show up in stark contrast the labouredness of the weaker sections. 

It was a stroke of brilliance on the part of Rowling to fix the personal development of her protagonist onto the natural and familiar organisational structure of every child's Senior School curriculum and syllabus, so that his emergence into adulthood at the age of 17 was also the point at which he would meet his (un) Maker, his arch-enemy, and battle him for the last time, avenging his parents' murder and saving his generation and the wizarding world from impending doom. 

The world which was created in that parallel universe portrayed diverse ethnicities, girls known for their intellectual ability, and ways people could literally learn to successfully deal with their demons. This fantasy world was an original one, product of an interesting perspective, which, despite its stifling Anglo-centrism, its tokenism and its formulaic tendencies, brought many blessings to child readers in the form of ideas which formed the basis for their beliefs about friends, enemies, and what side to choose when life presented them with dilemmas which tested their evolving character and aspirations. 

So this play which is presented as portraying the world in which Harry and his friends are in their early middle age, and have married each other and had children, should have been interesting, even fascinating - as it is interesting and fascinating to meet a person you last saw in their teens now 'all grown up' and in the midst of their destined life. 

It is acutely disappointing to see potential in real people, in real life, unrealised. And when writers create characters who impact our imagination, we have hopes and fears for them as we do for real people. So I must say that Rowling's creation of Hermione Granger, easily the most interesting character of the original central trio, is a travesty in this play: the idealistic, sceptical, insightful girl, whose combination of despised 'Mudblood' status and brilliant intuitive talent challenges all the prejudices of her world, has become the mother of a daughter whose snobbery and sense of entitlement are qualities the young Hermione would have seen through and mocked into proportion 'at once'. 

Even alternative outcomes clumsily and confusingly accessed by Time-Turners do not outline any better alternatives. Of all the infinite possibilities available, generated by the better parts of her own imagination, Rowling in the end ultimately endorsed THIS? This shop-worn and self-limiting, parochial vision? 

It does not make sense. And the tortured central story of the second generation resolving their parents' differences ought to be interesting and morally instructive, but is not. And middle-aged, navel-gazing Harry with doubts about his ability to parent, the contrived passion and faux chemistry of the two ill-assorted married couples, the weirdly self-defining children, the lifeless dialogue, make the experience of reading the script increasingly worse. What ought to have been a longed-for pleasure has become an ordeal.

We are presented with easy answers to difficult questions. Rowling over the years created an audience who became accustomed to a far higher standard of creative characterisation and thematic presentation. Whereas great writers generally create the audience by which they are appreciated, in this case the inverse seems to have occurred. The story's worth is only in its value as a commodity by booksellers at point of sale, and tickets for performances of the play sold out two years in advance. The franchise and its dictates have engulfed the central narrative, and a light has been put out which had made the world in the late 1990s and the 2000s a much better place. 

The wishing well is dry, and the coins at the bottom of it have lost their value and their currency. 

A terrible end to the telling of a wonderful story. 

Vale, Harry Potter

Review of Harry Potter And The Cursed Child

This review originally appeared in the Sunday Times under the title 'Gone Is The Spell, It's Truly A Curse'.

‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ was a favourite children’s story of mine, a story told to remedy a much sadder story with a tragic ending which had preceded it. At its heart was a fraud, perpetrated on a foolish ruler, who believed two confidence tricksters who posed as tailors and took all his money to make him a fantastic new set of clothes made with invisible cloth and thread. 

The courtiers and advisors of this King all felt it was not their place to tell the King he was being tricked, so they played along with the fraud. So when the King came out in regal procession, thinking he was in his glorious new outfit, he was actually exposed in his nakedness to the crowd. The illusion still held – the crowd maintained silence – until one child held out his hand and pointed and stated the obvious: ‘The Emperor is not wearing any clothes!’

I cannot recall what happened after that. Was the Emperor quickly clothed by his PR team and event organisers? Were the confidence tricksters arraigned? Was the little boy rewarded?

If anyone has any information about any of this, please write in and tell me and my Editors.

Fairy tales often mirror in fantastic form the real issues of our real lives. And their influence on our minds and belief systems when we become acquainted with them as children is powerful, and long-lasting. In the last two decades, the most powerful story to capture the imaginations of the world’s children and their parents has undoubtedly been the story of an orphaned young man whose parents had been murdered by a Dark Lord who thought of himself as an Emperor: He Who Must Not Be Named. Our Hero’s struggle to face and defeat this menacing and macabre character took 7 books to unfold, in the form of prose fiction narratives with interesting themes but (at times) inconsistent stylistic presentation.

Last week, a new fairy tale for our times was released, in the form of a script for a stage play: ‘Harry Potter and The Cursed Child’. Possibly the best aspect of it is its cover, which portrays a small boy huddled in a fraying birds’ nest  which is designed to look like a Golden Snitch – the prized winged golden trophy in the fictitious game of Quidditch, invented by J.K. Rowling in the books she wrote about Harry Potter and his progress through Secondary School at Hogwarts. It is meant to be a portrayal of the central dilemma facing the two sons of the arch-enemies Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy: young Albus Severus Potter and his best friend Scorpius. How do these two young princes come to terms with their complex inheritances? How do they find their own way and forge their unique identities amidst the complex criss-crossing bonds that tie and segregate them? How do they deal with the fame and power and status of their respective fathers, and the tense historical relationship between their families?

Are they orphans of the storm? Poor little rich kids, born fully-actualised from the bubble heads of their self-important parents?

It is extremely strange to see children as young as this defining themselves by class and character type and their role in the plot before they are even introduced to us, or their characters are allowed to emerge. They categorise themselves and each other in unsettlingly pre-fabricated analytical ways, like robotic preternaturally self-aware miniature sociologists. They try to sort out problems that occurred long before they were born. They play with history, alter events, seek to remedy certain wrongs.

But the best parts of the books – Rowling’s storytelling, and in particular some of her descriptions of setting and character – are absent. And the younger generation as portrayed in the dialogue by the writers do not match the open-mindedness and the capacity to evolve that was demonstrated by their parents.

Rose, Hermione and Ron’s daughter, is one of the most offensive young people ever to strut onto a stage. Where her mother was a know-it-all, this girl is a snob, full of excitement not at the prospect of what she could learn at Hogwarts but at the social supremacy she can enjoy exercising there. We are briefly warned about her by her own parents:

‘Rose is worried whether she’ll break the Quidditch scoring record in her first or second year. And how early she can take her O.W.L.s’, says her mother.

‘I have no idea where she gets her ambition from’, says her father.

But what we hear when this Young Achiever speaks is unadulterated self-congratulation and entitlement which sits very oddly in contrast to the enlightened views of her mother, the activist Hermione Granger, who spoke out so boldly against the ill-treatment of Mudbloods and house-elves, on the grounds of race and class:

‘We need to concentrate…On who we choose to be friends with. My mum and dad met your dad on their first Hogwarts Express you know…’

‘So we need to choose now who to be friends with for life? That’s quite scary.’

‘On the contrary, it’s exciting. I’m a Granger-Weasley, you’re a Potter – everyone will want to be friends with us, we’ve got the pick of anyone we want.’

‘So how do we decide – which compartment to go in…’

‘We rate them all and then we make a decision.’

    (‘Harry Potter And The Cursed Child’)

Are there young children even in our contemporary world who actually think and  speak like this? Without being told how offensive they are? Are they the 8, 9 and 10 year olds who ‘only fly in Business Class’? And what sort of adults will these kids grow into?

When Draco Malfoy at their first meeting attempted to impress Harry with his family’s social standing, a young Harry was rightly unimpressed. Malfoy’s jealousy of Harry (‘Famous Harry Potter!’ ) was an underlying and developing theme. But his ability to see through his own father’s social and political pretensions and choose, at crucial moments, to go against the dictates and affiliations of his father and his aunt made him an interesting character. And in the 7 books that preceded this play, one of the most pervasive, reassuring and progressive features was the strong resistant challenge made to ‘privileged’ status based on so-called purity of blood, on the comparative grandeur of one’s dwelling, and on elitism of all kinds.

I am unhappy that the high expectations I had about this sequel were disappointed – and so early in the story. It is disconcerting to find the apparent social, racial and gender equality and inclusiveness portrayed in the earlier stories so easily erased, and to find that they may have indicated a faux equality and tokenistic inclusiveness at best.

Am I taking it too seriously? It is only a children’s story, after all! Yet it is one which has impacted millions of young people for nearly twenty years. The author has never claimed to be an intellectual or a philosopher, and she has donated millions of sterling British pounds to philanthropic causes. This latest instalment can already be deemed a ‘success’ merely on the financial scale. Tickets for the play are already sold out two years in advance. So for the next two years, the actress/es playing Rose Granger-Weasley will say her/their piece on pages 13 and 14 of the Special Rehearsal Edition Script and be unchallenged, by anyone in the play, for expressing views which are classist and inappropriate. If Hermione as we have known her in the previous books had heard her daughter say those words, would she have seen them as evidence of ‘ambition’, or of something far less attractive? And more unsettling?

On a scale of literary merit, and on a scale of moral enlightenment, the play itself is a ‘cursed child’: a lesser offspring.

Perhaps the unchallenged conduct of Rose Granger-Weasley in this play reflects the lower standards of behaviour, the smug self-satisfaction and the socio-economic polarisation that have been occurring in the real world, as well as the wizarding one created by Rowling, in the past 19 years.

There are plenty of inconsistencies and tortured fabrications in this play, but the prospect that Hermione, of all people, could produce a child like that is, to me, the core fracture that produces a misaligned outcome which no sentiment can gloss over.

Remember Rowling’s brilliant satiric portrait of the corrupt and vain Horace Slughorn? Who  ‘collected’ students with talent or who were from families he considered to be of powerful lineage, and who was fond of crystallised pineapple? Hermione’s daughter as portrayed in this play has more in common with him than with her sceptical, intelligent mother, the Muggleborn daughter of two dentists, who, despite her despised ‘non-pure blood’ status, was the most capable spellcaster in her class.

We are also expected to believe that Bellatrix Lestrange had conceived a child with Lord Voldemort. With the understanding and support of her actual husband! Because that type of conduct was considered to be ok in the ‘old, well-established families’! Yet adultery itself is – of course – in this morally self-righteous world of the 40 year old Hogwarts students who all married each other  – only something an evil bad witch ‘of prodigious skill and no conscience’ would do. He Who Could Not Be Named was not named in any paternity suit.

A totalitarian fantasist like Voldemort would in the real world have had harems of stunned women lining up for the honour of conceiving the inconceivable. Bloodlines, reproductive organs and all other requirements intact. What legacy could he have otherwise left, beyond interfering ad nauseum with the minds of generations of students undergoing teaching at Hogwarts? And would the splitting of his soul into multiple Horcruxes not have affected his ability to produce a child?

For the first time, I find myself uninterested in the backstory and any further development in the characters created by J.K. Rowling.

This world which used to be compelling has now ceased to cast its spell. It’s as if we have all been played – a feeling all too familiar in the real world today, with its sordid politics and its disheartening power plays. One would have thought the world of original fiction could reflect a more energised and intellectually interesting reality. One where the call to battle of the protagonists was not so often the lame, Americanised ‘Let’s do this’, and the description of their state of mind in the stage directions was not so often the shop-worn ‘discombobulated’.

Casting a black actor as Hermione in the stage performance does not change the script. And in this script we have children mouthing the ponderous truisms of adults:

‘I discovered another Scorpius, you know? Entitled, angry, mean – people were frightened of me. It feels like we were all tested and we all – failed.’

What young boy with any credibility calls himself ‘entitled’? And this same boy finds the appalling Rose so attractive that he vows to work on being worthy of her, despite her ongoing ill-treatment of him:

‘You know logic would dictate that you’re a freak? Rose hates you.’

‘Correction, she used to hate me, but did you see the look in her eyes when I asked? That wasn’t hate, that was pity… a foundation on which to build a palace – a palace of love.’

Would a boy who finds his own entitlement disturbing find Rose’s self-justifying, unearned and privileged sense of superiority admirable? Would he, the young ‘Scorpion King’, described by his own father as a follower not a leader, desperate to prove himself, really accept a debased position as a persistent suitor to a girl who ought to be unworthy of his attention? Because he sees her resistance as a challenge? Because Rose, the self-styled ‘uptown girl’, morally deficit as she is, is ‘going to take years to persuade’. And is this slice of psychobabble I have quoted above supposed to be a recogniseable portrayal of the words of a young man in love?

This badly thought-out junk is currently occupying the best-seller lists. And it is a misuse of a power to persuade, entertain and influence that Rowling had legitimately earned.

Professor McGonagall lets the young meddlers Albus and Scorpius, friends contra mundum and para siempre, off, in this play, relatively lightly:

‘You’re all so young. You have no idea how dark the wizarding wars got. You were – reckless – with the world some people – some very dear friends of mine and yours – sacrificed a huge amount to create and sustain.’

But the writers of this play are old enough to know better, and to do better. Rowling in co-creating and endorsing this sequel has been reckless with the development of the characters in the world she created. And the recklessness is irredeemable: the bereftness of the plot shows through the ineptly woven strands of this threadbare story.

Even the brave decision taken by Hermione in an alternate world to face death by the Dementors’ kiss left me unmoved. It was not a world actually worth saving, if her daughter Rose was going to preside in it.

I am glad this latest work will make us want to re-read the earlier books. I admire Rowling for creating so many jobs in the creative arts sector for so many people, by creating the wizarding world. But I think we would not have made such a big deal of it if our literary and moral standards had been higher. Those were dark and difficult days, as Dumbledore said, and our reading choices revealed our own characters. The story was a fitting fable for our fractured times. And the earlier books were actually better. This is evolution in reverse!

If this literary product is supposed to represent the ‘Best Of British’ in 2016, it is third-rate indeed.

I wanted to say to the assembled writers, in their own words: ‘Your solidarity is admirable, but it doesn’t make your negligence negligible’. But Minerva McGonagall in her wisdom has said it for me.

Expelliarmus.