I completely understand why J.K. Rowling decided to publish The Cuckoo's Calling under a pseudonym. I can't think of another situation where the amount of pressure and expectation on an author has ever come close to what Rowling had hovering over her during the process of writing and releasing the final Harry Potter books and 2012's The Casual Vacancy*. With expectation comes scrutiny, and that novel was torn apart by critics -- often unfairly, in my opinion. Rowling is a much better writer than mainstream critics give her credit for, and the sad but obvious truth of the matter is that, when critics thought an unknown man named Robert Galbraith wrote a book called The Cuckoo's Calling, it was an almost universally praised exciting debut. When critics discovered that awoman named J.K. Rowling wrote it, suddenly reviews became a lot more biased and negative.
One of the problems with The Casual Vacancy is that it, at times, seemed to be almost stubbornly rebelling against the success of the Harry Potter series. While both works were at heart morality tales, Harry Potter dealt with this using the broad strokes and clear cut divisions of a young adult series, even when it went into its darkest places. The Casual Vacancy was deliberately and self consciously miserable, morally ambiguous, and offered us a view of a world peopled almost entirely with Dursleys with no clear heroes to redeem or justify the misery that runs rampant -- and fans reacted just as miserably.
The Cuckoo's Calling is a different species of animal entirely, and is in some ways a stronger work because of it. Rowling herself has stated that writing and publishing under a pseudonym was a liberating experience for her and that it was great to write without the burden of hype or expectation, and it shows. There's a lightness to this book that wasn't present in The Casual Vacancy OR the later Potter novels. It reads very much like an author trying something new for her own pleasure and rediscovering her love of the written word, and, most importantly, having fun again.
On closer examination, however, is it something completely new? While being heralded as Rowling's debut in the crime genre, it's obvious to any fan of Harry Potter that each of those books had the mystery elements of classic crime novels, so this feels like a logical progression for her work. Is it any good?
Yes, it is. As much as I'd love to see Rowling write about the supernatural again, I have to admit that she is very much at home here. Cormoran Strike is immensely likeable and I enjoyed spending almost 500 pages with him. Gruff, crude, irritable, intimacy issues -- Strike carries a lot of the classic personality tropes of a grizzled private detective, but Rowling makes him human and well rounded enough to endear him to us. (I have to confess, after so many pages of hearing him described as so physically large and hairy, that I often found myself wondering what he'd look like in a leather jock on the rooftop of The Eagle, but I feel like I might be too old to write slash fiction. Luckily for all of you.)
Some of the best moments of characterization in this novel come from watching him navigate personal boundaries with his new secretary, Robin Ellacott. Critics have complained that Robin isn't developed enough and comes across as weak and anti-feminist, and I can see those points. If this was a one-off novel I would be more harsh about this, but I think that Rowling, a master of long-term plotting, has some interesting and exciting things ahead for Robin in the coming books. Some have complained that her motivations for wanting to stay on as Strike's secretary are forced and unclear, but I think Rowling does a good enough job of both establishing Robin's desires and infusing Strike's character with enough unselfconscious charm that it does work. Robin is as drawn to the idea of taking part in a good old fashioned detective story as we are.
And that's what the heart of this story is. There is little that is new or groundbreaking here. There's a murder, there's clues, suspects, red herrings, and surprise twists. It almost seems as if there was a checklist of things to get through to pay tribute to the genre at large. Rowling doesn't write with the same atmospheric touch as Doyle or Christie. She is a bit closer to Dashiell Hammett (and Cormoran to Sam Spade), but her main flaw as a writer becomes clear in this comparison. Rowling doesn't give us a lot of the gothic descriptions of shadowy alleyways and midnight walks through London's wet and foggy streets -- with as much as she owes to those who came before her, this novel is very rooted in contemporary London. The scenes at night take place in flashy nightclubs, and much of it takes place during the day, with computers and texting and all the convenient but unromantic accoutrements of the modern world. The result is a novel that sacrifices some atmosphere for believability, but not necessarily to its detriment. Rowling is too polished and slightly too self conscious to get into the grit and dirt of some of her predecessors, so many of her characters remain at some degree of distance from us, slightly more sanitized than I think she intended. She tends to over-describe here, too, and I sometimes wish she had been a little less meticulous and a little more careless.
Where she succeeds, though, as always, is in her plotting and attention to detail. If one sometimes gets the image of writers like Harlan Ellison furiously scribbling away in a mad frenzy, slaves to their stories and their creations, one gets the opposite image with Rowling -- she is calm, patient, and casts a far seeing and detached eye on her characters. She is the queen of plotting, and definitely the omniscient god of her pages. Here, she takes what could be an average utilitarian murder plot and infuses it with enough twists and quirks and details to make it come alive and remain memorable, more memorable than it should be.
Critics have also made much noise about problems with the motivation and actions of the murderer, which I won't spoil here. And, again, I see their point, but I think these are critics that have jumped onto the novel after the author's identity was revealed and have never actually read another crime novel -- it may seem nonsensical, but I will say that it was a technique employed at least once that I can think of by Doyle in Sherlock Holmes. Most crime fiction requires a specific kind of suspension of disbelief, in some ways more so than in a story about witches and wizards because it is so grounded in reality.
Having freed herself from the burden of Harry Potter and now having the time and the financial means to do literally anything in the world that she wants to do, it's refreshing and exciting to see Rowling having fun again and writing for the sheer joy of writing. She seems to be fired up -- she's announced that the second novel in this series has already been completed and is due next year -- and, after such a solid beginning, I eagerly anticipate seeing where these characters go next. I do wish that the news wasn't leaked and she had been able to hide her identity for a bit longer (though I recognize the irony in the fact that I probably wouldn't be writing this review if this was the case) but I'm hoping that this experience has liberated Rowling enough so that she can continue to write with her newfound freedom regardless of the circumstances around her. Although not a perfect novel, The Cuckoo's Calling is a brilliant series beginner, and with the success of BBC's Sherlock and crime stories on the rise, all the elements are in place for Rowling to continue dominating both page and screen with her lovable characters and thrilling plots. Rating: B+
@robrussin
*George R.R. Martin may be experiencing something similar with The Winds of Winter right now which is why he seems to prefer being at red carpet events and hanging around the HBO offices
