J.K. Rowling’s latest book, “Harry Potter and the Chasm of De- spair”, which acts as both her fourth “final” installment to the Harry Potter series and her 8,719-page suicide note atop her opium-laden corpse, is, sad to say, her weakest.
It has always been a testy point among critics as to whether Rowl- ing’s prose is an attempt to satirise the dense paragraphs of Kafka and Tolstoy by providing their antithesis; she is undoubtedly at her worst here.
Gone are Rowling’s subtle yet provocative contributions to queer theory, such as Harry’s omnisexual experimentation with Cornelius Fudge and Polyjuice Potion in “Harry Potter and the Anguish of Desire.” These scenes are instead replaced by more base erotica such as George Weasley’s use of the Inferi curse on his brother’s half-de- cayed corpse.
The one highlight of the work is Hermoine’s tirade while in the throes of the Witch Menopause. In this scene, Rowling poses the question of to what extent the author, when overtly speaking through a fictional character, is able to retain her reality.
As Hermoine rants about how the public were fools for never ac- cepting her treatise on the role of fiction in a world still recovering from Australia inexplicably sinking into the ocean and screams “You wanted me to only write Harry Potter? Here’s your fucking ending! I hope you have a stroke when you finish this sentence!” one must wonder if these words are merely frustrated ramblings or one of the best contributions to the connection and divide between the author, the textual material, and the reader since Calvino. It is in this part, and only this part, where we get a glimpse of the brilliant Rowling of old, the author whose seminal first seven novels rose to replace the seven volumes of “À La Recherche du Temps Perdu” in the canon.