I read the Cuckoo's Calling last week. I didn't like it. Now I need to find a way of saying it without sounding stupid, without comparing it to Harry Potter. I need to judge it by its own merits. But here's the problem - I haven't read much crime-fiction. The only detective I'm familiar with is Sherlock Holmes. So, do I get to go on and crib? What the heck, I'm angry and I NEED to rant.
I did not pick up The Casual Vacancy because I was afraid those scathing reviews it got might have some truth to them. Most of the ones I read were overwhelmingly negative and I did not want to take a chance. So when it was revealed that JKR had written another novel, I grew excited. It suddenly shot to widespread critical acclaim, I thought I might finally have my book. The JKR I was familiar with wrote fantasy. This was crime-fiction, so I did not know what to expect. I picked up this book with an open mind.
Buddha said that there cannot be disappointment without expectation. But Buddha was wrong. Buddha didn't come across Paulo Coelho or Dan Brown or Madhuri Dixit's movie scripts. For if he had, Buddha would've known that if a piece of fiction is truly horrible, nothing can stop you from crying your lungs out and hurting yourself, not even if you put on the most condescending and patronizing expression you can muster and force yourself to laugh derisively at the end of every chapter. No, this book isn't that bad. But it's pretty bad.
Let me begin.
"The buzz in the streets was like the humming of flies".
That is how it starts. The first line. The buzz in the streets was like the humming of flies. I don't know what she was thinking. I really really can't help thinking of how sorcerer's stone starts:
"Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."
I know I'm not supposed to do this but how can one possibly go from the latter to the former? She wrote with assurance, the JKR I remembered. There was a sleepy humour to her sentences, a cocky nonchalance most unique, the combined charm impossible to resist. And then came this book.
"Photographers stood massed behind barriers patrolled by police, their long-snouted cameras poised, their breath rising like steam."
Long snouted? Srsly Rowling? We want JK Rowling. (Get it? Srsly and JK? Never mind. #sorry)
Lula Landry, a supermodel, is found dead in front of her apartment building. One page down, we're introduced to a detective inspector Carver, whose face is the colour of corned-beef and a "boyishly good-looking" Detective Seargent Eric Wardle, both of whom seem to think this is suicide. Then we meet Robin, "pretty, tall and curvaceous with strawberry-blonde hair which rippled as she strode briskly along". Robin works as a temporary at Temporary Solutions Ltd, and her next weekly assignment is with private detetive Cormoran Strike, our main man. (Cormoran Strike. Of course his surname had to be strike. All detectives have cool surnames. Sherlock HOLMES, Richard CASTLE... Cormoran STRIKE. It'll grow on me, you say to yourself and you move on.) Lula's brother doesn't buy the police theory. He believes it is murder and approaches Strike to seek help. Will Strike be able to deliver Justice and help Bristow avenge his sister's death? In a situation where virtually everyone is a suspect, where does one start? Well, this guy starts with google searches. No, really. This is the new age, man.
Cormoran Strike is not particularly good looking.
"Strike had the high, bulging forehead, broad nose and thick brows of a young Beethoven who had taken to boxing."
Maybe JKR really liked those lines for we see another one -
"He was massive and looked like a boxing Beethoven, and had curry sauce all down his T-shirt."
Boxing Beethoven, I see.
Strike has just broken up with his girlfriend, who is indubitably real; beautiful, dangerous as a cornered vixen, clever, sometimes funny and fucked to the core. He moves out of her place to his office, because he's broke. In comes Robin. Sexual tension Dha Dha Dah... Robin is pretty, smart, subtle and super-resourceful. She's basically an adult version of Hermoine Granger. But But Robin's engaged. And her fiance disapprovres of her working for a guy who lives in his office, annoying Robin, for whom this is a childhood dream. Fiance acting like a jerk gives Robin doubts about her future marital life, which is reflected in a frozen pea getting stuck in in the setting of her ring as she's washing dishes at the end of the chapter. You think that's silly? The book's just beginning.
Rowling's cast of original characters stops at Robin. If you try really hard, maybe you can come to like Strike. But that's it. Everybody else is a caricature. The abusive husband, the gay fashion designer, the dumb model, the druggie boyfriend, the pervert producer and the crazy ex-girlfriend.
About the crazy ex-girlfriend, now.
"...Charlotte screamed at him, the ashtray catching him on the brow bone as he looked back..."
"Then the final filthy scene after Charlotte had tracked him down in the early hours to plunge in those last few banderillas she had failed to implant before he had left her flat ... clawing his face, (after which) she had run out of the door."
"Charlotte would not rest until she had hurt him bad in retaliation"
Absolutely nothing is hinted at as to what really happened between Strike and Charlotte, who he spends so much time thinking about. You just have to assume she's crazy, like chicks are. You could completely remove her character (which would easily take two dozen pages) and the plot would remain the same. No diference, whatsoever. But it'd still be a bad plot.
But it's not just her characters, it's her writing in general which feels unsure, amateur and awkward.
"The floodlit area was almost as long as the street itself, full of millions of pounds' worth of Ferrari, audi, Jaguar and BMW."
"It was overlooked by Canary Wharf, whose sleek, futuristic buildings resembled a series of glaming metal blocks on the horizon; their size, like that of the national debt, impossible to gauge from such a distance."
The mystery isn't exactly new. The killer turns out to be psycopath with childhood issues. What a surprise. At the end of the day, this is not a bad book, individually. It's an okay book But it certainly doesn't deserve the acclaim it seems to be getting. I wouldn't have had a problem if this had cut out its pretensions and become just a whodunnit. But JKR clearly did not want that. You can see that she's trying to create something new, something fresh. There's a scene where Strike's searching Landry's emails on her laptop for clues -
"Her emails gave him the realization what the multitude of photographs had not; a realization in the gut, rather than the brain, that a real thing, living, laughing and crying human being had been smashed to death on that snowy London street".
If it hadn't been for strike spelling it out loud, I wouldn't have thought of it that way. That is what Rowling is trying to do. She is trying to create real people, not just a detecive and a bunch of suspects. And she's failing. I'm not one-thousandth of a writer she is. I'm just a sad 17-year old who misses the author who gave him the characters he grew up with. You're a pro, JKR. Act like one.
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