Saturday, June 6, 2015

Cormoran Strike

Here's how I came to Harry Potter:

Once upon a time, I finished library school, and wanted to go into youth services. Young Adults, if I could.  I was fabulously lucky, and right out of school, got a job as a YA librarian.  It was June of 2000.  One month later, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out.

Now, I'd heard of Harry, of course.  I seem to recall my children's librarianship professor saying something along the line of, "If you haven't met Harry Potter, go meet him now.  For this field especially, but in general, this is a great series."

I grew up on Tolkien and Lewis, and I turned my nose up at this upstart.  Why was I going to waste my time on what was obviously some faddish imitation?  Why couldn't kids be reading real fantasy?  It was probably to fantasy what RL Stine was to horror. (And that comparison, I made with knowledge.  I read several of those wretched things for a paper.)

But with GoF constantly off the shelves, I kept having kids come up wanting something that was like Harry Potter.   Anything.  Only it seemed to be something very specific they were looking for, and I couldn't tell without reading the books.  So I waited until a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone came in without a hold on it, picked it up... and swallowed it whole that day.  I went to a bookstore to pick up the next three, and then proceeded to wait over three year summer on tenterhooks like everybody else.

Because they were that good.  Because I  loved the characters and the setting that much, and couldn't wait to find out how the story was going to come out.  Because Jo Rowling is a worthy heir of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.  (And if you're worried about the whole, "Icky-goo, grown-up people reading fairy stories" thing, let me direct you to Tolkien's On Fairy Stories and Lewis's On Three Ways of Writing for Children, thanks.)

Was there hype, and was it annoying?  Yes.  But the subject of the hype was well worth the fervor.

So what did I do with JKR's other writing? Well, I steered well clear of The Casual Vacancy, for the most part, and that one didn't seem to have legs, anyway.  And then there was her detective series, Cormoran Strike (The Cuckoo's Calling, The Silkworm... so far), written openly under her pen name, Robert Galbraith.  So what did I do?

I turned my nose up and said, "Oh, she's just trying to get out of Harry's shadow.  Totally transparent, and probably self-consciously tough sounding and..."

I'm an idiot.

I was playing around with our e-audiobooks ([advertisement]pro-tip, if you're not a regular library user: Lots of e-materials available from most public libraries, and Summer Reading is a great time to try something new[/advertisement]) and The Cuckoo's Calling came up at the top of the list of currently available titles.  I downloaded it on a whim. The very opening didn't interest me much, then I met Cormoran Strike himself: An old-fashioned detective, in a seedy London office, just broken up with his infuriating fiancée, broke beyond belief, and dealing with bad pain on the stump of his amputated leg because he was forced to walk across London from her flat, his prosthetic limb chafing all the way.

Now, I like mysteries in theory. I like the puzzle aspect, I like the concept of solving crimes.  I often enjoy them on television.  But I've had a lukewarm relationship with them in print since I let go of Nancy Drew.  (That series is kid-specific.  Good kid-specific, but not one that has layers underneath what a kid sees.) In the well-written ones, it's often more the horror aspects I like than the mystery aspects, and in the badly written ones... well, the less said, the better.  I'm in awe of the ability of cozy publishers to come up with cutesy, punny names, and anyone who shelves books likes Sue Grafton  in theory, since her series is ALWAYS in order, but mostly, I haven't been able to attach myself to the style or the characters, and have rarely felt the need to pick up another book in a mystery series.

Before I was halfway done listening to Cuckoo, I'd placed a hold on The Silkworm. The Silkworm turned out to be even better. I'm now waiting eagerly for Career of Evil.

The mysteries themselves are good yarns -- proving that a popular supermodel didn't, in fact, throw herself from her balcony, finding the perpetrator a particularly grisly murder of an author who'd offended half of London's publishing industry -- and, with the exception of the common mystery tic of not having the POV character state something he knows, I like them a lot.  BBC America better pick up the miniseries, man. :p

But plenty of mysteries are interesting. It's always the rest that makes me give up on a mystery novel.

Rowling's gift is for creating characters not necessarily that you identify with, but who seem like people who exist, who you might know, and love or hate on their own terms.  Robin Endacott, Strike's  young assistant, opens the novel terribly excited to discover that her new temp job is with a private detective, because she's always wanted to be a detective, but never let it slip, because she thought people would laugh at her for wanting such a silly career. (Her fiancé, with whom  she unfortunately doesn't break up, is one of the people who sees the entire idea as inherently ridiculous, basically like she's playing at being Nancy Drew, and her boss is most likely some kind of faker.)  Anyone who's ever said something like, "I want to be an actress" or "I want to be a singer" knows the kind of looks she's feared.  It's a very real character trait, expressing both her insecurity and, to some extent, her naivete, especially when contrasted with Strike, who as an experience war veteran and investigator, takes his job quite seriously, but never had a romantic view of it.

And then there's Strike, who's just beautifully realized.  Is he a saint?  Oh, no.  NO.  His treatment of a few women in the novels is enough to make you want to smack  him.  (I'm hoping, like Robin's insecurity, that this is part of a character arc, and something he realizes toward the end of The Silkworm suggests that it might be.)  But there's something about him that wakes up on the page.  Part of it is the specificity of characterization -- his amputation is  a good example.  Rowling doesn't often dwell on it or treat it like it confers sanctity in and of itself.  He lost his leg saving a man who he now works with, and his feelings about that event are mixed -- half the time, he doesn't even like the man, and is totally nonplussed by the child who was subsequently named after him.  The leg is sometimes at the top of his thoughts, and sometimes not. (In fact, when he gets drunk and weeps to Robin, the leg is barely mentioned... but the child he claims he didn't want, and the ex-fiancée who either aborted it or lied about its existence in the first place -- and about whether or not it was his -- are stunningly present.  It's not often that we see a man mourning for children he never had, and Strike's relationship with children is complex, but... it's a really neat angle, and I'm looking forward to where it goes.)  Sometimes, it's very painful.  Other times, it's just an annoyance that he puts up with.  It's a very naturalistic picture.

There's also the issue of his extended family -- he's the son of a rock star he's only met twice and a "supergroupie" who died under mysterious circumstances while he was at Oxford.  He has half-siblings on both sides, and an extremely complicated relationship with the world of the well-to-do flit-abouts that he often works in.

This is the kind of thing that Rowling does exceptionally well.  She's also a very good observer of the physical world, and knows how to make her descriptions of it tell as much (or more) about the POV character than the setting he's describing.  Beyond the two main points of view, there's also Rowling, who seems to have an eyebrow raised a bit archly as she peers out at the world around her... a trait that carries over from HP.  I'm not surprised that it didn't take long for the pen name to be unmasked.

And she seems to be having fun, which is more important than people give it credit for.  When a writer is enjoying her story, no matter what its gruesome twists and turns, the books always crackle with that energy.

Cormoran Strike is definitely worth the read.

Remind me of that if I get on my high horse again.

1 comment:

  1. I didn't like what I read of Casual Vacancy. As I mentioned somewhere, Robert Barnard (whom I recommend about half the time -- stay away from the "series" books (Percy Trevalyan and Charlie Peace) -- did it much better in "Political Suicide".

    I will at least have to give her a try on these books (I keep reading that as "CormoranT"). Not fair to at least try, although true hard-boiled mysteries are my least favorite kind. I'm more into historicals, and I recommend Alan Gordon's Fools Guild books if you can find them, especially "An Antic Disposition".

    So, onto "Cuckoo". Would be glad if I liked them -- I read a lot of stuff over and over again because I don't much care for what's new.

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