I have been a fan of the mystery novel since elementary school, when no summer vacation was complete without a new stack of Nancy Drews or Hardy Boys to wallow in. In fifth grade I joined the Book-of-the-Month Club just to get their free offer of The Complete Works of Arthur Conan Doyle. And I was delighted to have a theological imprimatur accorded the genre by my systematics professor at Gordon-Conwell, Roger Nicole. He argued the mystery novel was the most moral of all fiction, since the guilty were found out and the innocent exonerated. As such, it appealed to our inborn thirst for justice and judgment.
So I was delighted to be asked to review The Cuckoo’s Calling. What I didn’t foresee was how difficult it would be to impartially analyze the plot and prose when I knew that “Robert Galbraith” was really J. K. Rowling. I’ve always been firmly in the camp of C. S. Lewis since reading The Personal Heresy, a collection of his debates with E. M. W. Tillyard over the place of understanding the personality of an author in judging the worth of a poem, story, or other work. The quality of a written work is either good or not, regardless of the author’s name. Rowling herself must have wanted to prove this point (to her own satisfaction, if no one else’s) or she wouldn’t have written the novel under a pseudonym. And of course Lewis himself later found the uses of a pseudonym when writing A Grief Observed as N. W. Clerk.
I was struck, however, with how differently I read The Cuckoo’s Calling knowing Rowling to be the author than if I’d received it naively, as the work of a newcomer to the field.
The Cuckoo’s Calling
J. K. Rowling as Robert Galbraith
As a “first novel by Robert Galbraith” I would have focused more on the strengths and weaknesses of the plot and characters. Not bad, either one, but not riveting, either. One wants to be drawn in to the lives of Strike and his sidekick secretary Robin, but repetition of their doubts, weaknesses, and even their better character qualities is not compelling. Likewise, the plot is serpentine, with a somewhat abrupt and unfulfilling ending.
I would have finished it with appreciation that the modern tendency to fill pages with gratuitous sex, brutality, and violence bordering on the sadistic, as well as endless cursing, had been omitted as unnecessary. But I wouldn’t have been waiting anxiously for the next installment.
Although it may sound like damning with faint praise, the title and section heads intrigued me most of all. The cuckoo is famed as a creature that plants its eggs in the nests of other birds, thus forcing others to rear offspring not their own to the neglect of the usually smaller, legitimate offspring. Halfway through The Cuckoo’s Calling, characters begin revealing that they called Lula Landry, the murder-or-was-it-suicide victim, “Cuckoo.” Near the end of the novel, the appropriateness of that nickname becomes all too apparent.
I found the Latin section heads the most memorable and quotable lines of the book. Well, that is damning with faint praise, but after all she stacked herself against Virgil, Boethius, Horace, and others.
Knowing Rowling was the author robbed me of my objectivity, and instead I read the book through the lens of what the public knows of her life and other writing. To wit: Her antipathy toward the press, her unpleasant experiences of being stalked by paparazzi, and the downside of fame almost constitute a major theme of the novel. On the Prologue title page, she quotes Lucius Accius: “Unhappy is he whose fame makes his misfortunes famous.”
There then follows on unflattering descriptions of the press and “paps,” as they luridly recount every detail and rumor of the dead woman’s life, relationships, and end. On pages 57-59 we are treated to excerpts from a fictional tabloid obituary worthy of Rita Skeeter. Nearly every character has something negative to say about the press—its intrusiveness, its voracious need to have something to say, even if only a rumor, and its overall indifference to the lives it uses for fodder. One of the characters is shown on YouTube saying, “That’s what they do to success: they hunt you down, they tear you down. That’s what envy does, my friend. [The press] chased her out that window.”
Strong statements, especially in light of the fact that nowhere in the plot is there any suggestion Lula herself minded being in the spotlight, or that the pressures of fame had anything to do with her death.
One must assume Rowling just needed to work out her own ambivalence towards the double-edged sword of fame. One can almost hear her voice in Strike’s musing, “He had never been able to understand the assumption of intimacy fans felt with those they had never met.” On page 151, we hear Rowling speaking again: “No one who hasn’t been through what I went through with the press can understand what it was like. . . . I can’t believe it’s legal, what the press are allowed to do in this country.”
Rather than recount every occasion where Rowling uses her characters in this fashion, I’ll mention only one more. When a young man becomes unexpectedly wealthy, Rowling observes he was “struggling to deal with the idea of his enormous new wealth; that he was buckling under the responsibility of it, the demands it made, the appeals it attracted, the decisions it entailed, that he was much more overawed than glad.”
The economium “write what you know” has certainly been followed, and if the author had been the anonymous Robert Galbraith, we would have found his observations insightful. Knowing it comes from the pen of Rowling, however, I found myself musing about what experiences led to these conclusions. And that speculation couldn’t help but derail the reading experience somewhat.
Further, though an avid reader of the Harry Potter series, I still couldn’t help but wish that in some of those books an editor had stood his ground and (along with Mssrs. Strunk and White) declaimed, “Omit needless words!” This novel could likewise have benefited from a heavier editorial hand. Lord of the Rings is the only work of fiction I’ve ever wished could have been longer, and there have been many, including this one, which would have benefited from an abbreviation of incident.
On the positive side, Rowling grants moral considerations a place not often accorded them in any genre of modern literature. Strike at first refuses the badly needed offer of a job because he’s convinced “it wouldn’t be right” to take the man’s money for such a frivolous case. He is cited as wrestling with his conscience in order to reach this conclusion. When he does accept the job, “his baser self” rejoices.
Last, the element of expectation cannot be ignored. If you’ve loved Rowling’s other works, you come to her newest one expecting to treasure it as well. The Casual Vacancy, her first non-Harry book, should have cured us of that expectation. But I held out hope that The Casual Vacancy was just a stutter step and that she’d found a fruitful new vein to pursue. Sadly, the magic just wasn’t there.
