The Cuckoo's Calling - Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)

Objectivity is a crucial skill for a book reviewer but for some authors even professional reviews seem incapable of separating the name from the book.  For no one is this more the case than for JK Rowling.  Since completing the Harry Potter books she has moved on from Young Adult fiction, first publishing The Casual Vacancy a book that I have already reviewed and personally think is much underrated.  Not just an very well-written book, it is a biting social commentary on issues of class and generational attitudes, and I feel it was hamstrung not by any particular authorial failing, but by the fact that reviewers of the book could not get over the fact that Rowling was no longer writing for teenagers.

This must have been a significant reason behind her decision to write her next book The Cuckoo’s Calling under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith.  Rowling could publish her shopping list, slap her name on the top, and it would sell millions, and while that must be very comforting to her accountant, it is easy to see why the artist within her would be uncomfortable with this.  The book would not be judged on its own merit, it would be judged by the historic successes of its author (or failings depending on your view).

Of course, after excellent reviews (and rather poor sales) her mask of Robert Galbraith was ripped away and the book shot from being the 4,709th best-selling book on Amazon to number 1 – a move unheard of since that of ‘Christmas is all around you’ in Love Actually.  Subsequent reviews of the novel have often focussed on the novel’s genesis, and those that have dealt with the book in detail have been almost universally positive.  While I would not go so far as to say I disagree, I would suggest that this book is still being reviewed on the basis of the author, and not the content

The Cuckoo’s Calling is in many ways a decidedly classic ‘professional sleuth’ novel.  Indeed, I think if Agatha Christie were still alive today she would probably think that she had found a kindred spirit in Rowling (shortly after asking her what on earth ‘email’ was).  The subject of the book is an ex-military-police turned P.I. named Comoran Strike, who begins the book lamenting the shocking state of his personal and professional life.  I would describe him as a sort of mix between Miss Marple, Sherlock Holmes and Dirk Gently with a bit of Jack Reacher thrown in for good measure.  Like Holmes he has a sidekick of sorts in his new temp secretary called Robin (sometimes Rowling can be wonderfully unsubtle) who, starts the book newly engaged but still looking for work after moving to London with her fiancée.

The crime that Strike is investigating is the apparent suicide of a famous model named Lula Landry (think Kate Moss but adopted by a rich family).  The police had concluded that the depressive, drug-addicted Landry had killed herself over, among other things, the fact that that her Pete Docherty-style boyfriend is a jerk, but her adoptive brother is determined that this was not the case and employs Strike to prove him right.  That is all the synopsis that I will give you because I really feel that in crime/detective novels it is important to keep most of the plot back.  

There is something altogether old-fashioned about this book.  Although Cormoran Strike is a fully teched-up detective, the idea of the P.I. charged to investigate a case that has supposedly been bungled by the police is, like I said before, something that goes back to the stories of Conan Doyle and Christie.  

Having chosen this format of book, it was always going to be hard for The Cuckoo’s Calling to stand out from the crowd and while it is a very enjoyable and well-written book, I am not convinced that it does.   One thing that does set Rowling’s book apart is the biting social commentary that she slips in.  One trope that makes its way into all her books is the rich, snobbish and prejudiced family who lord their status and wealth over the rest of the characters.  In Harry Potter it was the Malfoys, in The Casual Vacancy it was the Mollisons, and in The Cuckoo’s Calling it is the Bristows.  She also, more than any of her other books, rigidly sets the book in the present day/very near past, by making numerous passing references to the death-throes of the last Labour government and the suffering of the Financial Crisis.  Issues of equality and breaking down of social barriers are very important to Rowling and this shines through in this book.

The main character, Cormoran Strike, is an excellent creation, who will be able to sustain a multi-book series.  He has just the right mix of intelligence, social antipathy and emotional damage that means that he is very interesting, but not so much that it takes away from the mystery at hand.  While I did compare him to many fictional characters earlier, he is very much his own man.  

The basic problem that this book has is that frankly it isn’t all that special.  That is not to say it is not good, it just didn’t at any point get my pulse racing.  While The Casual Vacancy is not perfect, it managed to mix a cutting examination of the social fabric of the UK with a complex narrative that wove in many different complex developed characters.  This just did not quite achieve that to the same extent, but then again it is the first outing of a series and maybe this is just a platform for greater things.  

7/10

Favourite Quotes

“The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them.”

“It's that wounded-poet crap, that soul-pain shit, that too-much-of-a-tortured-genius-to-wash bollocks. Brush your teeth, you little bastard. You're not fucking Byron.” 

“Who was more conscious than the soldier of capricious fortune, of the random roll of the dice?” 

“How easy it was to capitalize on a person’s own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life.” 

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The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman

Some books are a real pain in the bum to classify.  Those of you who read my review of The Book Thief may remember the mini-rant that I went on at those people that classify simply as a Young Adult book, but I do admit that applying such labels is not an easy task.  Bibliophiles are notorious for loving a good classification – my own book shelf is a triumph of division and sub-division – but sometimes it’s best to not think about these things too much. 

Some books can be placed, others defy labels.  Can a book written from the point of view of an adult ever be called a children’s book?  Can one written through the eyes of a young child be put in a general fiction shelf?  Neil Gaiman in his latest book The Ocean at the End of the Road certainly proves that the answer latter of those two questions is most definitely ‘Yes’

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the first book for adults that Gaiman has written for nearly a decade, and it follows a young, timid and lonely boy who, through death of his cat and the suicide of a man who was lodging at his house, find his world transfigured as a dangerous yet familiar looking demon attempts to take over his life.  While his parents and sister fall under its spell, he finds succour from a local family: three generations of women living together on a farm.  The Hempstocks are seemingly his salvation, but to really combat his demons the narrator must face them himself.

 

Continuing with the theme of labels, I would argue that though most people would call this a fantasy book, it really is a work of Magical Realism.   Indeed the only thing stopping it from being categorised as such really is that it is written in English and not the Spanish of the great Magical Realists such as Carpentier and García Márquez.  For me, the difference between ‘Fantasy’ and ‘Magical Realism’ is that in a magical realist book, the author weaves the magical into our world, one where most of the characters are blissfully unaware.  It must be rooted in reality, but have elements of the fantastic.  This precludes books like the Harry Potter stories, the Chronicles of Narnia or A Song of Ice and Fire as these are works of pure fantasy.

As the tale is written from the POV of a child, we are encouraged to read it through the eyes of ourselves as children.  It contains emotions and fears that when we were that young were very real to us: abandonment, loneliness, fear of the dark and unknown, yet also has many of the joys that we felt at that age: the inquisitiveness that so many of us lose as we grow old, the lust for adventure and the thrill of new friendships.  I have never read a book that so successfully expresses what it means to be seven years old before.  We were all that age once, but capturing it as adults is a very difficult task.  Gaiman has succeeded brilliantly, and this is the greatest joy of reading this book.

Like most books of this nature, though the story is about the fantastic, it is grounded in some very real and primal concepts.  The boy’s abandonment and even abuse by his manipulated parents brings a real element of terror into the story.  His family comes under the influence of a demon in the form of an attractive au pair named Ursula Monkton.  She terrifies and threatens the child, but the world of course is ruled by the adults so he is powerless to resist her.  The only way to fight back is to use the powers of the supernatural, and to unlock that he needs Lettie Hempstock: the girl at the end of the lane.

The book itself is quite short and was originally designed as a short story.  For me this is its only real weakness.  The book is really all one single episode and you really feel that it is all still just an elongated short story.  Perhaps a little sub-plot or two may have helped to flesh it out a little and could have made it even richer.

The entitled ‘Ocean’ of the book appears to the boy and to the rest of the world to just be a pond, but to the Hempstocks it is an ocean, a limitless expanse where one can transcend worlds – and that is a little about how I feel about this story.  It is like a time-portal, transporting us to a condition that we once inhabited and reminding us that while we all eventually grow-up, we must never forget what it was like to be young and alive.

8.5/10

Favourite Quotes

“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.” 

“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.” 

“I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.” 

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