Review: THE SILKWORM by Robert Galbraith

One of the literary world’s best kept secrets exploded into the headlines last summer, when it was inadvertently revealed that ‘Robert Galbraith’, the debutant author of the private eye novel The Cuckoo’s Calling, was a pseudonym for JK Rowling, the creator of the Harry Potter phenomena.
  Eyebrows were raised, first in surprise, but later in admiration, as The Cuckoo’s Calling – which initially sold relatively few copies – went on to become an almost universally acclaimed bestseller. It also scooped the LA Times’ Book Prize in the ‘Mystery/Thriller’ category.
  Set in London during the bleak winter of 2010, The Silkworm (Sphere) is a sequel to The Cuckoo’s Calling, and again features the private detective Cormoran Strike. A war veteran who lost a leg to an IED device in Afghanistan, Strike is a gruff, hulking but surprisingly sensitive soul who was named after a mythical Cornwall giant. His brush with death has left Strike physically and mentally scarred, but he is a proud man determined to live life on his own terms. Despite being belatedly acknowledged by his millionaire rock star father Jonny Rokey, Strike lives, as his straitened circumstances dictate, in a tiny flat above his office in Denmark Street.
  Also returning from The Cuckoo’s Calling is Robin Ellacott, the young woman Strike employed on a temporary basis to handle the paperwork, but who proved herself vital to the success of his previous investigation, and who now harbours serious ambitions of becoming a private investigator herself, despite the friction this causes with her fiancée, Matthew.
  Proving, in The Cuckoo’s Calling, that the model and socialite Lula Landry was murdered has made something of a minor celebrity of Cormoran Strike, and established a clientele that is for the most part composed of wealthy businessmen attempting to prove their mistresses’ infidelity. Bored by their self-absorption, Strike is intrigued when he is approached by a rather dowdy woman, Leonora Quine, who wants him to find her missing husband, the author and former enfant terrible, Owen Quine. It’s not the first time the impetuous Quine has folded his tent, and Leonora is sure that Quine’s agent, or his editor, will be able to point Strike in the right direction.
  Soon, however, Strike discovers that Quine has gone to ground because he has written a slanderous novel, titled Bombyx Mori – which translates as The Silkworm – in which vicious pen-portraits of his wife, editor, publisher, agent and peers are easily identifiable to anyone in the publishing industry. When Quine is discovered murdered in a vile fashion, and in a manner terrifyingly similar to the climax of Bombyx Mori, the police immediately suspect Leonora Quine. Determined to prove her innocence, Strike plunges into the murky world of literary publishing in search of the real killer.
  It’s hard to avoid the feeling that JK Rowling hugely enjoyed loosing her bluff, no-nonsense private detective on the literary world. Bombyx Mori represents hilariously bad literary fiction, an overwrought Pilgrim’s Progress stuffed to the gunwales with classical references, necrophilia, cannibalism and sadomasochism. Strike, for all his size and bulk, moves carefully through this world, sidestepping the blades that regularly flash into the hands of the embittered cast of back-stabbing publishers, editors, agents and PR people. And then, of course, there are the literary authors themselves, all of whom seem to be involved in a complex Mexican stand-off fuelled by envy, insecurity, greed and mutual loathing.
  All of which is good fun, if excessively caricatured, but even as Rowling weaves a satisfying complicated plot around a lurid cast of characters, her instinct is to place Strike and Robin front and centre. The investigators make for a fascinating pair, both individually and in tandem – both are struggling with personal relationships, which gives the ‘will they / won’t they’ sub-plot an added frisson – and while there is very little that is new about this kind of relationship, that seems to be point: Strike and Robin make for a double act strongly reminiscent of Holmes and Watson, even if here it’s Strike, rather than his assistant, who has recently returned wounded from Afghanistan. Indeed, the homage to the golden age of the mystery novel is evident throughout, not least when the denouement, with all the suspects present, takes place in a London club ‘that had the feeling of a country house, cosy and a little scruffy.’
  The novel also functions as something of a love letter to the city, or perhaps more accurately a well-thumbed and dog-eared London A-Z, as Strike limps his way down its mean streets and alleyways, lurching into a variety of pubs, clubs and restaurants, noting as he goes the more unusual sculptures and the less-travelled routes. These digressions, and the occasional poetic flourishes that see Strike on his way, are in stark contrast to the main thrust of Rowling’s storytelling, in which the prose is as functional and direct in its devotion to advancing the story as Owen Quine’s Bombyx Mori is meandering and prolix.
  It is telling that Cormoran Strike sees fit, on a number of occasions, to remind us of his pragmatic philosophy in work as in life, which is ‘to do the job, and do it well.’ JK Rowling, as Robert Galbraith, has done the job and done it very well indeed. ~ Declan Burke

  This review first appeared in the Irish Times.

How Timely It Was, How Timely

Three cheers, two stools and a resounding huzzah for James Kelman (right), who last week managed the not inconsiderable feat of uniting fans of Harry Potter and crime fiction. As far as I can make out, he was lamenting the decline a particular kind of indigenous Scottish writing, and unloaded all over crime fic and teenage wizards to illustrate his point.
  Predictably, the issue quickly became one of whether or not crime fiction is crap, and the extent to which the literary novelist has or has not crawled up the dead end of his or her fundament.
  At the risk of sounding churlish, it strikes me that crime fiction readers and writers are a little too quick to take offence whenever a ‘literary’ writer disses crime writing. I mean, imagine it in reverse: what would the reaction be in the literary world if Dan Brown or James Patterson offered the opinion that literary fiction is rubbish? Chuckles of disbelief, I’d imagine.
  Is it a confidence issue? Because to me there’s something immature about a response that basically consists of pointing a trembling finger and shrieking, ‘No, you’re crap!’
  Also last week, although I’d imagine the two events were unrelated, Lev Grossman had a superb piece in the Wall Street Journal on the second coming of plot in the contemporary novel, despite a century-long Modernist conspiracy to kill off the kind of good old-fashioned story-telling you only get in genre novels these days (if you haven’t read it, it’s well worth reading in full). Quoth Lev:

“Look at Cormac McCarthy, who for years appeared to be the oldest living Modernist in captivity, but who has inaugurated his late period with a serial-killer novel followed by a work of apocalyptic science fiction. Look at Thomas Pynchon—in INHERENT VICE he has swapped his usual cumbersome verbal calisthenics for the more manoeuvrable chassis of a hard-boiled detective novel.
  “This is the future of fiction. The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing. The balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the public taste are being struck all over the place. Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century.”

  You can add the name of William Boyd to those of McCarthy and Pynchon. Boyd’s RESTLESS, a literary spy thriller, won the Costa prize last year, and ORDINARY THUNDERSTORMS, his new one, should appeal to fans of David Goodis and his ilk, with a protagonist whose respectable life is turned upside down when he finds himself on the run, wanted for murder and pursued by a killer. Boyd has also won the Whitbread Prize, and been shortlisted for Booker and IMPAC prizes, so his literary credentials are impeccable. And, if ORDINARY THUNDERSTORMS is anything to go by, the man can tell a page-turning story. Mind you, he’s also a screenwriter and director, so maybe he has a different take on narrative and pacing than most literary novelists.
  But there’s the rub. Why does a story always have to have a beginning, middle and end? Aren’t people entitled to read a book for the beauty of its language, or the existential angst of its fragmented, non-linear narrative? The desire, or need, for a story to have a recognisable arc is in a microcosm as the same as wanting to believe that there is a meaning to life, the universe and everything. A comforting faith, certainly, but one that is at odds with the scientific truth that, at the quantum level, life is no more than chaos and chance. The hero who comes through his trials to earn a happy ending can be found in all the earliest mythologies, and remains the dominant paradigm, but the modern story that follows that kind of arc – whether it’s a crime fic, romance, sci-fi YA or literary novel – is just another kind of fairytale. And, in defence of even the most self-indulgent post-Modernist, it’s nice sometimes to read a story that isn’t a fairytale.
  The issue of quality, when it comes to the use of language, is also a live one. Most literary snobs I know tend to believe that crime fiction is written by illiterates clutching crayons in their sweaty fists – although, for that matter, most literary snobs tend not to have read very much crime fiction. It’s a hoary old conker, but it’s worth repeating: there are good and bad crime writers, just as there are interesting and boring literary writers. Some crime writers can craft as fine a line as the best literary writers; others are every bit as bad as the literary writer who confuses bad poetry with good prose. The essential difference, I think, is that even with a crime writer who is hopelessly hackneyed on a line-by-line basis, there’s generally enough story to carry the reader along, whereas reading a bad literary stylist can be a Sisyphean slog.
  But there are many literary writers who, though they can’t plot to save their lives, are worth reading for their prose alone. I defer to no one in believing that Elmore Leonard is one of the pre-eminent stylists (and storytellers) of his generation, and his dictum – if it sounds like writing, take it out – obviously works for him. But that’s a reductionist view of storytelling, and writing. Where’s the harm, once in a while, to break off from a story to savour a line or a paragraph, and re-read it for its craft, or its profundity, or for whatever reason you’re having yourself? Certainly that kind of writing is frowned upon in commercial fiction, where the rule of thumb is to immerse your reader in the story as quickly as possible, and do nothing that might prick the bubble of illusion. But, again, that kind of reading seems a little childish to me – the novel has the edge over movies, for example, precisely because it’s a two-way process in which the reader has to actively engage with the story, conspiring with the writer to create the images and pictures that float up off the page. Even while watching the best of movies, I never feel to urge to stop the film and rewind, the better to savour a particularly good scene. But I do get that urge, and regularly, when I’m reading a good book.
  I suppose all I’m doing here is repeating Raymond Chandler’s old saw, that there’s no kinds of books, just good and bad books. I loved John Banville’s THE INFINITIES, for example, but I’ve also been looking forward all year to Elmore Leonard’s ROAD DOGS and James Ellroy’s BLOOD’S A ROVER. Radically different kinds of stories, and storytelling, but I’m pretty sure that when I look back at the end of the year, I’ll have enjoyed all three on their own terms.
  Anyway, the point of all of this, I think, is express the wish that, the next time some uninformed snob unloads on crime fiction, the reaction from the crime fic community might be a little less Pavlovian; that the response would be to chuckle, perhaps even condescendingly, at the poor unfortunate who simply doesn’t understand, probably because he or she doesn’t read crime fiction. The crime genre may well be a relatively young one in terms of the evolution of the novel, but even at that we should be long past the phase in which throwing toys of out the pram, or huffing our way into hysterics, is considered an adequate response to criticism.

Johnson And Boswell Ride Again

I’ll be writing a full-length review of John Connolly’s THE GATES closer to the publication date (October 1 in the UK), but for now suffice to say that it’s a terrific piece of work that put me in mind of THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY. That’s not a comparison I make lightly, as I’m one of those who thinks Douglas Adams was something of a genius in a minor key, but THE GATES has the same qualities: a beautifully wrought tone, a subversively funny take on the intricacies of science (in this case, sub-atomic physics), and a deceptively simple but utterly compelling story.
  In essence, young Samuel Johnson (with his loyal dachshund Boswell) takes on the might of Satan and Hell’s legions armed with little more than an irrepressible curiosity, a nascent sense of civic duty and a generous dollop of courage. At 40 years old I’m probably not the best judge in the world of this, but to me the secret of this particular success is that Connolly has tapped into the mind of a young boy of ‘perhaps eleven’ to give us the world as seen through Samuel’s eyes. It’s perhaps clichéd to say it, but in doing so the world is remade vividly in all its wonders, horrors and banalities.
  Samuel’s age and the way in which Connolly blends reality and mythology will very probably draw comparisons to THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS, but – at the risk of offending teen wizard fans – this has more in common with the Harry Potter books in its apocalyptic battle between good and evil, albeit – and this is one of its major strengths – without the good guys having recourse to magic. Unless, of course, you consider the esoteric mysteries of quantum physics a kind of magic, which I do.
  Anyway, the bottom line is that THE GATES is a novel that should achieve the elusive crossover by appealing to both adults and children, and the whispers I’m hearing about a further two books in the series bode well (and will hopefully see the return of Nurd, the Scourge of Five Deities). In the meantime, Chapter 1 can be found here …

Funky Friday’s Free-For-All: We’ll Trade You Monday And Tuesday For Another Friday, Big Guy

Fleming or Phlegming? The Bond books tend to raise the hackles of the literary set – yet another reason to love them – and yet Ian 'Dirty Harry' Fleming’s (right) popularity remains undimmed. On the back of the news that Sebastian Faulks is the latest Fleming avatar, Ben Macintyre had a nice piece in the Irish Indo last week in which he defended Bond against the snobs … If free books beep your jeep, off-road over to Crime and Investigation, where they’re running a competition to win signed copies of Nick Stone’s King of Swords, or to Ray Banks’ The Saturday Boy, where they’re giving away copies of Ray’s Donkey Punch (kudos on the Billy Bragg-inspired title for the interweb page, Ray) … Southern Accent at the Southern Voice links to the Declan Hughes interview at January Magazine, to wit: “The author of a brace of highly regarded novels of Irish suspense chats with January Magazine contributing editor Kevin Burton Smith about his influences – both literary and musical – his letter from Pete Townshend and how we’re all walking in Snoopy’s shadow.” Which is lovely … except for the fact that the post is headered ‘I Like The British Writers’. Erm, Mr Accent, sir? At the risk of sounding excessively pedantic, Dec Hughes’ part of Ireland hasn’t been British for almost 85 years now. Not that we’re counting or anything … Have we mentioned that it’s officially Parry Hotter day on Crime Always Pays today? The elves can barely contain themselves, bless their little cotton socks; they do love yon speccy git Hotter. Jump over to The Scotsman for Allan Guthrie’s hard-boiled take on how the series should end. Yep, that’s the same Allan Guthrie who last night won the 2007 Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award for Two-Way Split. Huzzah! … Finally, The World’s Best Ever High School PI, Like Ever, aka Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), goes head-to-head with the schoolyard bully, Brad the Jock, in the vid below. If you haven’t seen Brick yet, people, you’re doing yourself a serious disservice … And that’s it for another week. Have yourselves a very merry weekend, and don’t forget to come back here, y’all …