Let's suppose you're a multi-millionaire author, much feted for the brilliance of your imagination. You've produced a series of novels that took you years to conceive of and write. But they were restrictive and limiting, and you look forward to moving on - to writing dark, gritty fiction, say, or murder mysteries. You're famous and celebrated enough that anything you write will become a best-seller. Let's assume all this is true: Then why on earth would you return to the universe in which you set your first series?
That's the question that, in the end, everyone is asking as Harry Potter and the Cursed Child dominates the best-seller lists. After all, the Harry Potter series, beloved and complex, was very clearly a complete, self-contained work. It had a narrative arc that spanned its seven books - one that an unemployed but inspired J K Rowling famously plotted out decades ago in a Scottish coffee shop - and, by the end, the hundred narrative threads were carefully gathered together and tied into a beautiful knot.
In works like Harry Potter, you have to combine three elements: There is world-building, there is character-creation, and there is intricate plotting. You can never describe a world fully in a book - even in a series of books, even an imagined world. So, sure, there's the temptation to say: This world remains undescribed, there are stories to tell about it, let me return to it. But some works of true genius, such as the Harry Potter series, also have a meticulously designed narrative arc that incorporate their characters' growth almost perfectly. The three elements - world, character, and plot - were in balance in the series. Revisit the world, extend the characters' history, and suddenly things are thrown off-balance. That perfection is somehow marred.
This is not to say that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will not be a great read. I think everyone who has ever read Ms Rowling trusts her enough to know that it is. But unless Ms Rowling had the plot in mind as she wrote the earlier books, it will always stand oddly and uncomfortably apart, ruining the perfect symmetry of her earlier creation.
I am not cynical enough to believe that Ms Rowling returned to the Harry Potter universe purely to make a little more money, perhaps preparing the way for one more blockbuster film. No, I suspect that after so many years of living in that universe, she just can't let go of it fully. After all, this happens to many readers; why shouldn't it happen to the one person who is closer to the universe than even the biggest Harry Potter fan?
The world-building, the depth of character, in Harry Potter has always been especially seductive. There was an unexpectedly long wait for the fifth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Some fans simply couldn't take it. The internet was still relatively young, and it seemed to collapse under the weight of Harry Potter fan-fiction - short stories, novellas, even entire series set in J K Rowling's universe, written with varying levels of competence and varying degrees of faithfulness to the "canon" of "real", published novels.
Ms Rowling wasn't fond of fan-fiction. Again, some cynically believed she took a harsh line solely to protect her intellectual property. Certainly, some of her lawyers' more outrageous attacks - on a Kolkata puja pandal that was meant to look like Harry Potter's school, for example - didn't exactly detract from that impression. But others - me included - always thought that there was also some degree of parental affection for her creations in there. Perhaps she couldn't abide them being left alone and defenceless, at the mercy of other, less-skilled writers.
I have no doubt that when you finish something that has taken you as long to do as Ms Rowling took to write the Harry Potter series, you are initially relieved. You have pushed to the back of your mind every other idea and ambition in order to finish; now, at last you are free to do what you want. And so Ms Rowling wrote the dark novel A Casual Vacancy, and began - initially under an assumed name - a mystery series set in contemporary London.
But prolonged absence from the universe in which she had spent so much time, into which she had given so much of herself, must have been difficult. Once she had satisfied herself, and everyone else, that she was a good writer even when not writing about boy-wizards, did she begin to think she had abandoned her imaginary charges? Left them on the cusp of adulthood, at the mercy of the world she created? Did she want to reassert a little control over their lives - and maybe revisit, ever so briefly, the interior landscape where she spent much of her youth? Perhaps. If so, then Ms Rowling was just like any of her fans, and couldn't resist the lure of fan-fiction.
m.s.sharma@gmail.com
Twitter: @mihirssharma
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