Forget the headlines: what J.K. Rowling's new book is actually about

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This was published 3 years ago

Forget the headlines: what J.K. Rowling's new book is actually about

By Kerryn Goldsworthy

CRIME FICTION
Troubled Blood
Robert Galbraith
Sphere, $32.99

Whatever you may have heard to the contrary, thanks to one British newspaper, this fifth novel in the Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith, the crime-writing alias of J.K. Rowling, is not about a ''transvestite serial killer''.

Within the cast of hundreds, there is a relatively minor character called Creed whose modus operandi is sometimes, not always, to wear women’s clothes as a disguise in stalking victims. Creed appears in person once in the whole 927 pages, and is named and described only briefly and intermittently otherwise. Matters transgender are not mentioned at all.

Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger as Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott in the small-screen adaptation of Robert Galbraith's crime novels.

Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger as Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott in the small-screen adaptation of Robert Galbraith's crime novels.Credit:

This fact is relevant to a review of the book in only two ways. The first is that any comment, much less judgment, that you make about a book is worthless unless you have read that book yourself. The second is that if we are to condemn J.K. Rowling for using such a common and time-honoured storytelling trope as cross-dressing for the purpose of harming women, then we must also wipe from the canon such classics as The Silence of the Lambs, Psycho, and the story of Little Red Riding Hood.

This fifth novel begins a year after the end of the fourth. Robin Ellacott has been promoted to business partner and fellow-detective, and is almost free of her awful husband. Strike is now both solvent and famous, but is still batting away the persistent approaches of his former lover of 16 years, a beautiful but bonkers British aristocrat to whom Strike’s oldest friend refers, with reason and with feeling, as Milady Berserko.

Both of these exes return in Troubled Blood to cause more headaches for the detectives, who are trying to concentrate on their investigation. Following a chance meeting with strangers in a Cornish pub, they have taken on their first cold case. A 29-year-old female GP called Margot Bamborough disappeared without a trace one rainy London night 40 years ago, and Strike and Robin are hired by Margot’s daughter Anna to investigate.

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As must be the case for any financially solvent investigation agency, the business has several cases on the go at once, and the narrative is skilfully toggled from scene to scene as Strike and Robin, along with their three sub-contractors and the new office manager, juggle activities that include surveillance, workplace management and tensions, travel, interviews with witnesses and suspects, library and archive searches, and many hours of online slog.

All of this involves repeated sacrifices of private life, and at one point so many competing and dramatic demands are being made on the resilient and phlegmatic Strike – two of them literally matters of life and death, both involving people he has loved – that even he must surely crack under their weight.

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Here as in the Harry Potter books, Galbraith/Rowling’s storytelling is exuberantly cinematic, and it shows not only in the vivid physical descriptions but also in the way that dialogue is used to develop character while simultaneously keeping the plot jogging along.

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The kind of tension generated in previous Strike novels by the expectation of violent confrontation is absent here, but a different kind of tension is set up: Robin and Strike are working this cold case to a deadline. Anna and her wife Kim have done the financial arithmetic and have given the detectives a year to crack it.

It’s a deadline that they almost miss, and in the course of that year the story covers a startling number of topics, from fatherhood, cancer, birthdays, and perfume to astrology, sexual harassment, and the transactional element in personal relationships: the question of who gives and who receives gifts, of what those gifts are and why they’re given and what they mean. Are supermarket flowers almost worse than nothing? If you buy chocolate hedgehogs for your three nephews as Easter gifts, to which nephew do you give the hedgehog that accidentally got broken on the train down to Cornwall?

Asked by a friend whether I think the 927 pages are justified by the quality of the read, I replied – after the usual havering about personal taste – that in my view they absolutely are. But unless you are using an e-reader, do not try to read this book in bed. If you accidentally drop such a heavy and unwieldy object on your face, it will blacken both your eyes and break your nose.

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