J.K. Rowling’s New Book

…is coming out “later this year”. And that, my friends, means that it’s time for theories!

Kindly look at this site before you do anything else. (That is, if you’ve been living under a rock and have never seen it before! I’ve seen about seventy thousand times myself. Each time, I hope it will tell me something new. It never does.)

As yet, it is the only resource on the Internet that tells us anything about The New Book. This is exceedingly frustrating.

So, one must salvage the clues that one can find.

For starters, here is the entire text on Rowling’s sadly empty website.

J.K. Rowling is to publish a new novel for adults.

Further details will be announced later in the year.

J.K. Rowling’s official website is currently being refreshed and
redesigned, and will be relaunched later this Spring.

 

(And then, in handwriting at the bottom of the screen):

“Although I’ve enjoyed writing it just as much, my next novel will be very different from the Harry Potter series.”

What does this mean?! What is “The New Book” about?!

As a Potterhead who is probably too Potterhead-y for my own good, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And I’ve come up with four distinct possibilities.

Idea Number One: a mystery/thriller.

Nearly all my money is on this idea. I think it has so many things going for it — and I’m not alone, if you glance around at the millions of commenting areas and forums and articles that people have written about this.

First of all, the Harry Potter series is primarily one enormous mystery. Sure, it’s very multi-faceted — it’s an epic, a romance, and a moral tale in parts — but every piece of the Harry Potter puzzle eventually goes toward solving the many mysteries that left fans reeling for years. Think about it — before all the books had come out, theory-making was the most entertaining part of being a Harry Potter fan. As people who loved Rowling’s books, we wanted to try to solve the mysteries she created before we had the answers. This alone proves she has an incredible talent for setting up this kind of plot.

In addition, she loves mystery novels herself. She has talked about her love for Dorothy L. Sayers a number of times, calling her “the queen of the genre”, and confessed Christie, Allingham and Marsh as guilty pleasures — “although, if I’m honest, I don’t feel guilty about them”, she said. She reads mysteries, she writes mysteries — I think chances are pretty good that The New Book is a mystery. And in addition, David Shelley, an editor known to have worked with thriller-writers in the past, has signed on to edit the novel.

Idea Number Two: a political fairy tale.

This idea is taken purely from the James Runcie documentary that was released in 2007. Towards the end, Rowling is shown scribbling in a cafe, the words on the page blurred by the camera. Shortly afterwards, she said it was “a political fairy tale” — and left it at that. However, she has also said that this story was meant for “slightly younger children”, while we know that The New Book was written for adults. Unless Rowling’s fairy tale has evolved over the past few years, it’s pretty likely that The New Book is something different.

Idea Number Three: a story about a stand-up comedian.

This is a complete shot in the dark, based on a very old interview that clings to the back of my head without shedding any light on who it was with (so I can’t look it up and quote it). In the interview, the reporter mentioned something to do with a comedian, and Rowling leapt on the idea, saying something along the lines of “I’ve always wanted to write that! But I can’t, because of Harry Potter.” (Which she was still writing at the time.) However, Harry has been over and done with for nearly five years now — perhaps she has fulfilled this dream during that time?

Idea Number Four: a story quietly denouncing conservative politics. (No offense intended to those with such political beliefs! Am simply theorizing.)

I count this idea as different from the “political fairy tale” because Rowling hasn’t explained that phrase deeply enough for fans to understand it. But Rowling is no stranger to politics. The careful reader will have noticed many political undertones in the Harry Potter series, particularly those mirroring both England and Germany before and during World War Two. The oppressed, the power-hungry, self-interest, politicians, wealth, appeasement and thousands of other issues all have roles to play. And Rowling’s stance on those things is primarily liberal.

This is especially clear if one has read her interviews. She counts Jessica Mitford among one of her heroines, who was born a British aristocrat in the early twentieth century, but ran away from home to fight in the Spanish Civil War. (She later joined the Communist Party and became a muckraker. If you ever have a chance, read her first autobiography, Hons and Rebels. It’s one of my favorite books in existence.) She has campaigned against David Cameron, fighting to reelect Gordon Brown during the last British election. She has worked for Amnesty International, a primarily liberal organization. She supports same-sex rights, universal healthcare, support for single parents, and welfare over charity. She has a very firm political stance.

And seeing as it has seeped into her first series of books, I could easily imagine politics being a significant undertone in her next publication. Rowling spends a lot of time on causes that are important to her — she has recently made the news after losing her billionaire-ship to charity donations — and it’s hard to imagine her writing about something that she doesn’t care about deeply. Could The New Book be a story riddled with hidden political thought?

And what do you guys think? Do you have an Idea Number Five? An Idea Number Six?

With luck, Rowling will make an announcement soon and put us out of our misery!