New York Times Review Harry Potter Deathly Hallows
J. M. Rowling Just Can't Permit Harry Potter Go
LONDON — J. Thou. Rowling e'er said that the seventh Harry Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," would be the terminal in the series, and so far she has kept to her word. But though she'due south written many new things in the intervening nine years, including four adult novels, she's never been able to put Harry to rest, or to exit him alone.
What's an writer to practise when she once seemed to be done? Taking an approach that some fans dear and others practice not, Ms. Rowling has never fabricated a hush-hush of her continued immersion in Potter-world. Over the years, she has regularly interjected new elements into the old stories, sometimes through sudden Twitter pronouncements, sometimes by other means. (In 2007, for instance, she appear at an event at Carnegie Hall that Dumbledore, whose sexuality in the books was obscure, is in fact gay.)
She also regularly produces fresh coincident material — new stories, new elaborations — on her Pottermore website, most recently a series of fictional essays about the history of magic in North America.
And at present comes "Harry Potter and the Cursed Kid," a play in two full-length parts that begins previews in London on Tuesday, June seven, opens July 30 and is beingness advertised as the official "eighth story in the Harry Potter canon." Prepare 19 years after the events of "Deathly Hallows," the play imagines Harry as an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic and focuses on his middle kid, Albus Severus, and his struggle to come to terms with his family unit'due south legacy.
No one who remembers the frenzy surrounding the publication of each of the Potter books would be surprised to larn there is now a frenzy surrounding this play and all the details effectually it, similar the disclosure that a black actress, Noma Dumezweni, is portraying Hermione.
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The news has been released slowly — Ms. Rowling is a master of controlled publicity — and on Tuesday cast photos of a grown-up Harry (Jamie Parker) and Ginny Potter (Poppy Miller), along with Albus (Sam Clemmett), were unveiled on the Pottermore website.
Performances, at least for the first of the ii parts, are sold out through May 2017. Secondary-market tickets to the first preview are selling for as much as four,000 pounds (nearly $v,800). And the play'southward script — by Ms. Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, who is likewise the director — is No. i on the Amazon best-seller list, despite the fact that information technology won't be published until July 31, Harry Potter's altogether.
If that wasn't enough, adjacent autumn comes "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Notice Them," a moving picture that is both a spinoff and a kind of prequel. Written by Ms. Rowling (who did not write the screenplays for the eight Potter movies), information technology is very loosely based on her book of the aforementioned name. That book was a fictional wizarding-school textbook; the film takes its supposed author, Newt Scamander, sends him back many years to when he was a young man, and transports him to America. The pic, starring Eddie Redmayne, is expected to be the commencement of a trilogy.
Clearly Ms. Rowling has not wanted to put Harry Potter behind her. It's an interesting dilemma for an author, peculiarly ane who creates an elaborate world over many volumes: How practice you cease? (Do you want to stop?)
Both Philip Pullman, author of the "Dark Materials" series, and Stephenie Meyer, author of the "Twilight" series, accept spoken about further books to come, years after those stories were apparently put to residual. On the other extreme, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle grew and then weary of Sherlock Holmes that he killed him off, only to resurrect him years later on in response to widespread public unhappiness.
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In an interview, Maggie Stiefvater, writer of the wildly popular young-adult "Shiver" and "Raven" series, spoke of the temptation to revisit characters she thought she had finished with. The "Shiver" books were meant to be a trilogy, she explained, and she even put a note into the tertiary 1 promising never to come back to the story. But and so, while writing the "Raven" books, she changed her mind and published a fourth "Shiver" book.
"I had idea, No outs any, and then I looked similar a full idiot," she said.
Stephen King, who has written many series as well as stand-alone novels, said the aforementioned matter tends to happen to him. In 2012, eight years after completing his seven-volume "Nighttime Tower" serial, for example, he produced an eighth volume, "The Wind Through the Keyhole," whose action takes place between Books iv and 5.
Characters with unfinished concern inveigle themselves into his head, he said in a telephone interview. He's currently toying with going dorsum into his Bill Hodges trilogy, though "End of Watch," coming out side by side month, is meant to exist the last installment. "There'south a graphic symbol named Holly I keep thinking about," he said.
Ms. Rowling gives interviews very rarely and declined to comment for this article. But Mr. King said he sympathized with her relationship to her material. "There are two things," he said. "I think she likes the Harry Potter people, and it's a little bit hard for her to let go. And she's aware that there are millions and millions of people who loved those books. Writers feel responsibility to their readers, and some of that is a way of proverb to the fans, 'If you want a fiddling more than, I'll give you a niggling more.'"
Indeed, all this new cloth is proving very exciting to very many Potter fans. They can't get enough. The "Dumbledore is gay" revelation, in 2007, became a major world news event. And at present, even the smallest snippet of information virtually the play — the introduction of hand-carved sconces for each of the Hogwarts houses and of new wand designs, for instance — sends the cyberspace into ecstasy.
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On May two, Ms. Rowling issued a Tweet apologizing for killing off Remus Lupin, the reluctant werewolf, in the final book. So far, information technology has been retweeted more than 100,000 times and "liked" more than 140,000 times.
Though the occasion was the anniversary of the (fictional) Boxing of Hogwarts, the appointment for the last two years when Ms. Rowling has expressed sorrow over deceased characters, it too came at a fourth dimension when excitement is building over the play.
Details have been few and far between; Ms. Rowling likes to tease her fans past doling out information sparingly. Sometimes she'll respond to questions on Twitter, equally she did recently when a follower asked if "Cursed Child" would make him cry.
"If it doesn't, we'll be checking your vital signs," she replied, launching a thousand headlines nigh how she has revealed that the play will exist "sad."
All those tidbits are just fine with Melissa Anelli, who runs the Leaky Cauldron fan website and also organizes a Potter-themed fan convention known as LeakyCon.
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"I dearest everything about Harry Potter," she said. "So when I go one of those plot details or a new piece of writing, it's like a squeamish, full exhale."
But not everyone agrees, and this speaks to a debate deep within fandom civilisation, starting with what counts as the canon in a fictional globe like Harry Potter'southward. Should the plot snippets that Ms. Rowling lets slip — that Hagrid can't conjure the soul-like being known equally a Patronus, that Hogwarts has Jewish students just non Wiccans, for instance — exist considered part of the series, or something outside and apart? (In fan fiction, ex parte remarks past an author or, in the case of a television show, by a writer are known as the Word of God.)
"Some people say the canon is within the actual covers of the seven books and that anything she says afterward you lot should take every bit opinion," Ms. Anelli said. "Others say that anything she says is true, no matter if it'southward on Pottermore or on Twitter or wherever — no matter what she says, information technology's canonical."
Readers in the first camp consider the material in the vii books to exist inviolate, immutable. Hearing new details near things they hadn't realized were open to interpretation feels like cognitive dissonance, as if someone were tampering with the wording of the Constitution. "It'south dispiriting to be faced with daily reminders that one of your former heroes is withal tinkering with a earth they thought you left behind perfectly preserved in childhood," Heather Schwedel wrote recently in Slate.
For her part, Ms. Stiefvater said that she never acquiesces to fans' requests for extra information. "Some people come up to me and ask me to give them material outside the books — for instance, what is Gansey's favorite ice cream flavor?" she said, referring to 1 of her teenage protagonists. "I never respond to them. Personally, I remember it'south unfair — it rewards but some readers and not those who don't dig through all the archives to find the new little factoids."
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She counts herself a Rowling fan and considers Harry Potter's earth to have closed after "Deathly Hallows."
"I take such respect for what J. Grand. Rowling has washed," she said. "I know I engaged with her series at a moment in time, like a lot of people did. And if you render to it, it feels like information technology's stretching on — people aren't remembering the series as much every bit the cultural phenomenon." Of the new details that accept emerged over the years, she said, "they ripple throughout fandom, and for fandom information technology's highly rewarding, but as a reader information technology's not how I engage with books."
With a new set up of movies on the horizon, some fans worry that Ms. Rowling volition make the same fault that George Lucas did after the three original "Star Wars" films, producing inferior work that detracts from the brilliance of the original.
They mention, also, how Harper Lee's "Become Set a Watchman" dismayed readers who loved "To Kill a Mockingbird" and wanted its earth to remain intact. (An article in The Atlantic final September about Ms. Rowling's postal service-Potter, Potter-rich piece of work was titled "Harry Potter and the Never-Ending Story.")
But to Ms. Anelli, who was a teenager when the books were published and is now 36, in that location can't exist enough new material.
"It's not like she's a prophet who's being handed down something from someone else," she said. "She's creating it, and whatever she creates becomes role of the story. As long as she wants to make it, equally long at that place's more than story coming from her, I'yard super-happy."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/theater/jk-rowling-just-cant-let-harry-potter-go.html