Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

3/5. I finally read it, though I’ve been spoiled for a long time. It’s not as bad as I was expecting? But it’s also . . . not good. Though I do understand that it is an entirely different animal when staged, and I can see from the script how the staging would have to be extraordinary to get this across. Scattered reactions:

• So Harry and Ginny have three kids and every single one of them is named after dead people. Specifically, dead people that Voldemort directly or indirectly killed. At least two of them have double-barrel dead people names. And it’s just. One name is a memorial. Every single name for every single child is a wow maybe you could have considered therapy instead.



• One of the annoying things about this play is that there are actually good bits. For example, Harry and Draco have this scene where they are coming to an understanding with each other while both afraid for their children, and they get to talking about the past and Harry asks what Draco wanted to be as a child. Draco says not a man of power, like his father wanted. Pause. Probably to play quidditch professionally, though he wasn’t good enough. Pause. And then he says that what he really wanted was to be happy. Ouch.



• Scorpius Malfoy is a delight, and he was the highlight of this for me. He is a super nerdy rule-followy Slytherin with a cheerful sweetness to him, and a backbone somewhere under there that he can find when he needs to. He’s also a pretty great friend.



• I also liked Draco in this, come to think of it. Or, well, I liked this idea of an isolated, socially awkward, lonely man. He is very far from fandom’s sexy playboy, which I find intensely dull. If more people wrote Draco like this, I might actually care about Harry/Draco. It’s always been kind of annoying that there are literally hundreds of millions of words written about them, sometimes in amazing fashion, and I couldn’t manage to care.



• I do not get what she was trying to do with Ron. Harry and Hermione spend the whole story making huge decisions together. Appropriately so – they are Minister of Magic and the head of Magical Law Enforcement; they are doing their jobs. But Ron just sort of . . . vaguely wanders in and out of scenes and cracks jokes? There is very little trio here, either in spirit or in fact. It’s frankly kind of sad.



• I totally object to the notion that Voldemort ( spoiler )



• Here’s the thing about it, though. This whole thing is obsessed with the first seven books. I mean, it’s a time travel story, so literally, people revisit key points of the books and in some cases change things. And every change is more disastrous and leaves more parts of the world – and more individual people – miserable. There’s this tangent about how in one timeline variation, Ron and Hermione aren’t married, gasp. And Ron is married to someone else, shock, and has a different child, and he is so specifically miserable that I was like, yes, JKR, okay, Jesus, I get it. The way the books went is holy and not a thing about them can be changed. In the end, everyone stands around while back in time and watches the original great tragedy of the books play out, without intervening, and like, okay, that’s hard. But you know what would have been way more interesting? If any one of those timelines was better than the original books. If more people survived, if they found other ways to make happiness. Wrestling with that – and what to do about it – would have been so much more interesting



• Fundamentally, it’s the obsession with the past that is so tiresome. I do appreciate the portrayal of how the past fucked people up, specifically Harry. But come on. It has been how long since the last book came out? How many millions of fanfics have been written? We have moved on. Apparently she didn’t.