So, hands up first: I was one of those brainless snobs who
only picked up this book after the true authorship was revealed. I certainly have felt too old and too busy to
be bothered with any new fictions since finishing the last one quiet a few
years ago, which happened to be “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”.
“The Cuckoo’s Calling” is a well woven story, though I would
agree with the editor who turned down the book when it was submitted as a debut
by “Robert Galbraith”, that it was “well written but quiet”. There are a few points that strike me as
“different” from a typical “detective story” yet so Rowling-esque at the same
time, though they didn’t give the game away.
Her lawyers did.
Anyway, to start with, the author is clearly too literarily cultivated
to just provide a gripping plot. How
often do we see detective stories quoting Vigil and Horace, in Latin? Rowling, at some interview, did claim that
she was one of the few who managed to put her training in classics to proper
use. This is another indication that she
can’t completely stay away from her “roots”.
A lesser point, the author wouldn’t be happy with just naming
her characters merely common “Kevin” and “James”. If the unusual first names have been more
becoming in a world of wizards and witches, they are surely meant to achieve
some special effect too in a story about the “muggles” set in modern day London
(almost modern day, Gordon Brown was still the PM)? But, to my untrained eyes, this
isn’t obvious, except on two insignificant occasions when the protagonist’s
name first became a constant target of ridicule when he was young, we were told
retrospectively, then it was wrongly called in an almost comic way in the
hospital at the end of the book.
Yet, there are also something too predictable. It becomes so obvious so early on that Robin
would stay as Strike’s sidekick at the end.
Actually it’s made clearer every time we’re reminded that she will leave
soon. And the author even goes out of
the way to allude the Batman connotation at their very first meeting, as if she
were afraid the readers didn’t get the point. And it becomes almost Hollywoodian when Robin’s
heroics came to the last minute rescue at the culmination of the story.
Despite the predictabilities and occasionally over-elaborate
descriptions of trivialities, however, I was still glued to the book, and
managed to finish it within two days on top of all the daily chores a working
father had to attend to. In addition to
the plot which I found gripping enough, and the prose which I enjoyed, the
context of the setting repeated stirred an almost nostalgic, personal
reverberation in me: ULU (frequented the bar), SOAS (never went in but passed
by on so many days), Charing Cross Road (interesting that, with the sketch of
the guitar shop and so on, Rowling didn’t mention anything of the second hand
bookshops), Wong Kei (went with a group of friends to enjoy the humiliating
service the restaurant is known, and loved, for), The Tottenham (downed more
than a few pints), etc., etc.. Rowling is apparently a fan of this area,
sending Harry, Ron and Hermione to fend the dementors when they were having a
cup of cappuccino in a coffee shop in Tottenham Court Road.
Just like “Harry Potter” would never escape from being
compared with “Lord of the Rings”, Cormoran and Robin will be judged vis-à-vis
Sherlock and John, if more stories will come to develop a series, which Rowling
promises they will. With a talent that
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wouldn’t be too humiliated to be compared with, and with
a marketing capacity and capability second to none, you never know, J K Rowling
might be able to turn Denmark Street into another shrine just like Baker Street
in the last 120 years. She only needs to
give Strike’s office a fictional street number.
221B, however sincere a homage it might be, would be too archaic and,
yes, “predictable”. How does 9 ¾ sound?
