Holy Smokes but this review has taken all of time to write.
Seriously, I cannot actually remember the last time I found it hard to put my feelings
about a book into words. I mean I know I flail sometimes and I have kind of
made the incoherent keysmash into an art form of my own (and I am eternally
sorry for any and all posts that are basically just READ THE DAMN BOOK) but I
hardly ever sit and just think ‘well then.’
Thing is, ‘well then’ is pretty much what I did think when I
got to the end of The Cursed Child and now I don’t
know quite what to do or say. WHAT SHALL I DO OR SAY?
I’m not going to talk about it lots. I could, and maybe I should.
But I’m not going to, partly because see above and partly because I know some
people haven’t read it yet and I don’t want to be SPOILER GIRL. I’m basically
going to say that I have feelings and they’re mixed and a lot of that might be
down to what Harry Potter means to me, and how despite myself my expectations
for The Cursed Child were unrealistically
high. So high though, you don’t even know. They were always going to be. Harry
Potter owns a part of my soul, my love for this franchise knows no bounds. For
all of time I have – for all of time I will – make grabby hands at anything new
that JK Rowling and her cohorts want to throw at me. I will grab it all and I
will want it all and I will devour it all, and I will expect it all to fill me
with the same wonder that the books did the first time around.
And when it doesn’t, I will feel sad about it.
I think that’s perhaps what I’m feeling now. Sad. Because
you see, I remember so well the last time a new Harry Potter book arrived on my
lap. I remember Deathly Hallows release day so well. I remember how it was so very very worth the wait.
I wanted to love The Cursed Child, believe me I
did. & I read part one and made myself stop for the night because I didn’t
want it to be over too fast – who knew when (if ever) I was going to get this
again, I didn’t want to rush it. & it felt good to be back at Hogwarts, it
did. So good. I giggled, and I rolled my eyes and I thought ‘yeah, of course he
said that’ and I snorted at Draco and Harry and I was mildly irritated by Ginny
and I felt strangely calm and settled and like as JKR promised me, Hogwarts was
still there to welcome me home. It just….wasn’t entirely the
Hogwarts I was expecting.
& still, I don’t want to say too much, I don’t want to
spoil and I don’t want to bias and to a point I don’t actually want to say
anything negative about a part of something that I love so hard (writing this
review is hard, dammit. I feel like a house elf.)
I’ll tell you a few things though and the main one is, is
that it’s glaringly obvious that a JK Rowling piece of work this is not. Jo
very kindly agreed to let somebody play in her sandbox and that’s fine because
it’s nice to share your things, but it’s not Harry Potter in the way I know
Harry Potter. It doesn’t feel to me to be Jo Rowling’s Harry Potter and I have
feelings about that, because it kind of should be, you know? Jo’s Hogwarts is
also my Hogwarts and this, this is something
else. I didn’t want something else.
It was weird to read too, in some ways, perhaps because it
was a script and not prose. We lost a lot there, a mon avis, because a lot of
Harry Potter is in the storytelling; the world JKR built; in the way she used
her words. So much of what made me fall in love with the whole damn thing in
the first place was lost, and I missed it and it was so obvious to me that it
wasn’t Rowling’s writing and that made me sad. You don’t get the same level of
description in a script, the same level of detail. The detail is what made
Harry Potter and without it, at the risk of sounding like a poor and broken
record, it just wasn’t the same.
Also, there were flaws in the plot: things that really
bugged me and things that felt too convenient and things that needed explaining
and things that made me facepalm so hard and there were some pretty major
issues with characterisation, such as (sometimes) Hermione (holy feminist
issues batman do not let me get on that soapbox because I was a little bit
ragey) and Ron (who albeit had some excellent lines) coming across like he was
a caricature of himself.
& then there was pretty much everything about Harry as a
parent. I felt like some key issues from the books had been conveniently cast
aside in order to try to make the story work. Anyone else remember Sirius, and
Remus and how thanks to them Harry sort of did have a father figure? Ok, good.
Because all of that stuff, the Harry as a father stuff… actually, no. Let’s
not. Don’t get me get on the Sirius Black train, it won’t be pretty.
Oh, and I missed people that I thought should have been
there – where was Hagrid please? Where exactly was Hagrid.
Perhaps Jen was right (and I don’t mind telling you that our live texting of
this was a world away from our live texting of DH) and they just didn’t know
how to stage him, ha, but still. WHERE WAS HAGRID???
It’s just….I was from the fanfic era you know? I read a lot of fanfiction back In The Day. A lot. And some of it was
out of this world excellent. I read fix-it fic, which essentially is what this
play was and whilst I was totally a Marauders fangirl, after Deathly Hallows I
also read a fair amount of Next Gen fic and that’s kind of what this felt like
to me. Next Gen Fix-It Fanfiction. I already knew this version of Albus and
Scorpius because I’d met them – they felt like they’d been lifted straight from the internet. (& if you want to tell me that
Scorpius has a thing for Rose then sure, go right ahead, but that’s not the
play I read.)
On the flip side, the Voldemort storyline made my skin crawl
in the way I imagine it was supposed to and there was also a scene with Harry
that ripped out my heart in a way that I was not prepared for, fuckety fuck and
also ouch.
There was some excellent and very moving Snape stuff (good
God is anything to do with Severus Snape ever not going to destroy me?) and,
there was Scorpius. Oh, Scorpius Malfoy, how I love you. If JKR wanted to write
an actual book about that kid, I would so totally be down for reading that
thanks.
& despite my misgivings I can totally see that it would
be pretty impressive on stage, and I really want to see it. I also loved the
little bits of JKR that shone through – I mean look at Albus’s initials and
tell me she hadn’t already sorted him when she wrote the epilogue. There are
zero coincidences in Harry Potter and I have always loved Jo for that. Those
little bits, the blink and you’’l miss it foreshadowing, the ‘fuck yes’ moments
of realisation, the seemingly insignificant details that turn out to be
epically important, the things. Those
are what I love. This play was lacking in things. I WANT
ALL THE THINGS.
TL;DR: If you want to read some really excellent fan fiction
then start here. For the love of God if you’re going to read The cursed Child
because you’re a Harry Potter fan, then read this because wowzer.
If you want to read something that’s been for actual real
published then read this and then read this because Rainbow Rowell is a genius.
& you know what, read The Cursed Child. Let’s be honest,
you’re a HP fan so you’re going to anyway. Just, just remember that it was
never meant to be read like this, it was supposed to be seen and remember that
JK Rowling didn’t write it, and don’t expect it to be like the books, and make
your own mind up afterwards.
(Sad Jo is still sad about this whole damn thing.)
