STORY, J.K. ROWLING, JOHN TIFFANY & JACK THORNE. SCRIPT, JACK THORNE
LITTLE, BROWN, $45

Last time I sat down to read a Harry Potter adventure in a day it was the sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. After about 10 hours and 600-plus pages I was left the half-dead reader.

That couldn't happen with The Cursed Child. Enthusiasts of the boy wizard should be under no illusions - this eighth adventure is not a new novel. It is the script - the rehearsal script, no less – for the two-part play that officially opened at London's Palace Theatre last week.

But those same enthusiasts will nevertheless relish any chance of a new adventure with their favourite characters – Harry, of course, but there's Hermione, Ron, Profesor McGonagall, Severus Snape, Draco Malfoy, the Dursleys and many more. Even Moaning Myrtle emerges from the bathroom sink.

That gives you a hint of how canny J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne have been. There are only three significant new characters, so if it's not exactly a "Harry Potter's greatest hits", there is a familiar feel to the whole thing.

The Cursed Child begins at King's Cross station - on platform 9 3/4, of course - 19 years after the Battle of Hogwarts as Harry and Ginny's youngest child, Albus Severus Potter, is about to start at the wizarding school.

Albus is feeling the burden of his father's reputation as the man who defeated Lord Voldemort and there is an air of melancholy as Harry's relationship with Albus deteriorates. The play makes much of that hoary old theme of problems between fathers and their sons, but also delves into the nature of genuine friendship.

This is an older and perhaps wiser Harry Potter – Head of Magical Law at the ministry -  one who recognises he has made mistakes in the past, one who is reflective, one who begins to recognise the consequences of his actions and his ambivalence about his role both as a father figure and a living legend. It is also a Harry Potter whose scar, that fail-safe indicator of the approach of the Dark Lord, hasn't hurt for 22 years.

Albus is being picked on because of the name he bears and, lonely and put-upon, becomes close friends with another new boy who is being bullied, Scorpius Malfoy, around whom swirl dark rumours about the nature of his parentage.

Albus and Scorpius manage to get hold of an illicit Time-Turner and attempt to right what they see as an egregious wrong inflicted on Amos Diggory, the ailing father of the heroic Cedric who was killed by Peter Pettigrew in the Triwizard Tournament in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

They team up with the disarming Delphi, Amos' niece, but as you might expect things don't work out as simply as they expect. To start with, they have forgotten about Croaker's Law, which allows only a very limited spell in the past. And already events are spinning out of their control.

So the passage of time becomes crucial to The Cursed Child. Early in the piece, Thorne whisks the reader through a few years to age Albus and let us see the crumbling of his relationship with Harry. Later, its manipulation becomes central to the storyline. It's almost a case of Proust meets Harry Potter, as Albus and Scorpius go in search of lost time.

The real problem with The Cursed Child as a reading experience is that plays are by definition written to be seen by an audience and performed by actors, something that applies to Shakespeare as much as Jack Thorne. So while there's magic galore, plenty of action, moments of tension, fights, and, going by the stage directions, great spectacle in The Cursed Child, because it remains a script, the reader misses out on the texture and detail, indeed, the whole astonishing world that J.K. Rowling created so brilliantly in her novels.