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A sloppy behemoth from Robert Galbraith, crime writing nom-de-plume of JK Rowling. PI Cormoran Strike continues his romantic flirtation with fellow detective Robin Ellacott, this time against the backdrop of a case involving toxic fandom and social media. Cartoonist Edie Ledwell comes to Strike and Ellacott's agency seeking assistance to identify "Anomie", an internet troll stirring up a campaign of online abuse against Ledwell due to her supposed "selling out", among other things. The sleuths declare themselves unqualified to deal with such an enquiry until Ledwell is tasered and then stabbed to death in Highgate Cemetery, her boyfriend/colleague left paralysed.
Rowling's detective novels have, at least for me, the same issue as her later Harry Potter books: they stopped being edited once they became guaranteed money-spinners. Rowling recently appeared on Graham Norton's radio show to discuss The Ink Black Heart (don't ask me why there's no hyphen) and addressed the length partly by invoking the Golden Age of detective fiction, arguing essentially that more space equals greater characterisation. This feels like a fallacy which reveals Rowling's apparent belief in tell-don't-show. Do short books somehow have less characterisation?
"Long" Golden Age novels, like Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers (which comes in at a meagre 483 pages), don't come close to the 1,024 churned out by Rowling. Even modern examples, like the notably long novels of Elizabeth George, tend to weigh in between 5 and 800. Heck, going back to one of the prototype novels of detection, Charles Dickens' masterpiece Bleak House, you still get less than a thousand pages at 912. The only reason for any novel to be as long as The Ink Black Heart is if it's either a masterpiece of language or filled with enough interesting detail to justify it. The Ink Black Heart is neither.
There's also the issue that Rowling's writing is often dated and clumsy. You'd have thought that descriptions of "cupid's bow" mouths, for instance, went out with the 1970s. (Although to be fair, I do recall that phrase being used in a fairly recent Stephen King anthology.) This is a theme in her books, the last one (Troubled Blood) having added a "weak and sensual mouth" to a killer who fetishises women's clothes and uses them for disguise. The old-fashioned writing would be fine, with me at least, if it felt like a conscious stylistic choice, but it tends to just feel simplistic.
Added to this in The Ink Black Heart is the badly formatted use of web chats and other mocked-up social media content. Maybe this is better in the print version, but on a Kindle, I found the chapters' worth of web chats to be difficult and just plain obnoxious to read. In the end, I gave up trying to follow it precisely and just read it in columns, left to right. Whose idea was it to try to emulate the look of social media and weblogs as opposed to adapting that material into a more book-friendly format? (Say, by presenting the chats similar to a theatre script.)
Of course, none of this will matter to Rowling's fans, who'll see reviews like mine as just grumble-puss nitpickery by elitist (or "woke") critics. The length is just what they're looking for and anyone criticising it has a low attention span, they'll say; they happen to like the writing style, thank you very much, and you're just too PC to get it; the formatting wasn't a problem for THEM. And so on, and so forth. That's fair enough, but I do wonder whether the most rabid fans are buying the book strictly for what they perceive as its quality, or whether, maybe, they're more just inclined to support the author because they sympathise with her reported views and experiences.
As always, Rowling's strengths as a writer are in picturesque concepts and crisp readability. (Aforementioned social media dross aside.) I also like her use of quotations from classic texts that start each chapter; this can feel like an attempt to make books feel more literary than they are in other works, but they're used to decent effect here. Ultimately, Rowling has a fertile imagination when it comes to conceiving plots and ideas for characters. It's the execution that's the problem.
