During a cocktail party in Robert Galbraith's (aka J K Rowling's) endlessly entertaining detective novel The Silkworm, the publisher Daniel Chard gives a toast in which he observes that "publishing is currently undergoing a period of rapid changes and fresh challenges, but one thing remains as true today as it was a century ago: Content is king."
Coming from an obscure, midlist, mystery author named Robert Galbraith such a statement might go unnoticed. But when the same passage is written by J K Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series and one of the most successful authors of all time, the words cannot help having a far greater impact.
Therein lies the problem and the great joy of this book. You want to judge The Silkworm on its own merit, author be damned. It is, in fact, this critic's job to do so. But writing that type of blind review in this case, while a noble goal, is inauthentic if not downright disingenuous. If an author's biography always casts some shadow on the work, here, the author is comparatively a total solar eclipse coupled with a supermassive black hole.
This is especially true because Rowling (let's stop pretending) makes matters worse (or better) by taking on the world of publishing. Leonora Quine, the dowdy wife of the novelist Owen Quine, hires our hero, the British private detective Cormoran Strike (first seen last year in Rowling's The Cuckoo's Calling), to investigate the disappearance of her husband. Owen Quine has just written a nasty novel that reveals dark, life-ruining secrets of everyone he knows. Owen, his wife tells Strike, is probably at a writer's retreat. Finding him should be a routine matter.
But, of course, nothing here is what it seems. When Owen Quine ends up gruesomely slaughtered - in a murder scene ripped from his new novel - Strike and his comely sidekick, Robin Ellacott, enter the surprisingly seedy world of book publishing. They investigate those who were thinly disguised in Quine's final manuscript, all of whom offer insights into the world of the writer. The suspect pool includes his editor, Jerry Waldegrave, his agent, Elizabeth Tassel, his publisher, Daniel Chard, and the pompous literary novelist Michael Fancourt.
As written by Rowling, The Silkworm takes "write what you know" and raises it to the 10th power. Is this crime fiction, a celebrity tell-all, juicy satire or all of the above? The blessing/curse here is that you turn the pages for the whodunit, but you never lose sight that these observations on the publishing world come from the very top. This makes complete escape, something mandatory for a crime novel, almost impossible - but then again, who cares? If you want a more complete escape, pick up another book. Reading Rowling on writing is delicious fun.
Even the title of the novel is The Silkworm because a silkworm's life is "a metaphor for the writer, who has to go through agonies to get at the good stuff." On envy: "If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels." On Internet trolls: "With the invention of the Internet, any subliterate cretin can be Michiko Kakutani." On a literary male writer's inability to create realistic female characters: "His women are all temper . . . and tampons." There is even a debate on the merits of self-publishing when Quine's mistress whines that she's going the "indie" route because "traditional publishers wouldn't know good books if they were hit over the head with them."
Are these opinions shared by Rowling? Don't know, don't care. In the end, despite the window dressing, Rowling's goal is to entertain and entertain she does. If we can't forget that she is a celebrity, we're also constantly reminded that she is a master storyteller. Push aside J K Rowling and judge the book on the merits of Robert Galbraith, and The Silkworm is still a suspenseful, well-written and assured British detective novel.
If J K Rowling never leaves our minds while reading The Silkworm, the world of Harry Potter, to Rowling/Galbraith's credit, never enters it. We are squarely in the gritty and glitzy real world of the Muggles, except maybe when she describes a noisy piece of furniture in Strike's office as the "farting leather sofa." For a moment, the reader can almost see the sofa coming to life in the halls of Slytherin House.
The Silkworm most often feels like a traditional British crime novel albeit set in the present day, complete with eccentric suspects, a girl Friday and a close friend in the police department whose life Strike saved in the war. But Rowling gives some of the old saws a new spin. Robin, for example, isn't a longtime friend or ex-lover - she starts out as a young temp Strike first meets in The Cuckoo's Calling.
Strike himself may at first appear to be something we have seen too often - a brooding, damaged detective, with a life-altering war injury, financially on the brink, who's recently lost his longtime girlfriend - but there is an optimism to him that is refreshing and endearing.
There are musings on fame (Strike is the illegitimate son of the rock star Jonny Rokeby), the media (the book opens with a passing shot at the British phone hacking scandal that engulfed many celebrities, including Rowling), book marketing (Quine's wife on her husband's sluggish sales: "It's up to the publishers to give 'em a push. They wouldn't never get him on TV or anything like he needed"), not to mention e-books and the digital age of publishing.
But Rowling saves her most poignant observations for the disappointments of marriage and relationships. The likable Robin is engaged to a pill named Matthew and cannot see, as Strike and the reader can, that "the condition of being with Matthew was not to be herself." When he thinks about his own sister's marriage and those like it, Strike wonders about the "endless parade of suburban conformity." His private-eye job of catching straying spouses makes him lament "the tedious variations on betrayal and disillusionment that brought a never-ending stream of clients to his door."
The book isn't perfect. It's a tad too long, and the suspect interrogations grow repetitive. Some will also argue that while Harry Potter altered the landscape in a way no children's novel ever has, here Rowling does the opposite: She plays to form. The Silkworm is a very well-written, wonderfully entertaining take on the traditional British crime novel, but it breaks no new ground, and Rowling seems to know that. Robert Galbraith may proudly join the ranks of English, Scottish and Irish crime writers such as Tana French, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, John Connolly, Kate Atkinson and Peter Robinson, but she wouldn't overshadow them. Still, to put any author on that list is very high praise.
The upside of being as well known as Rowling is obvious - sales, money, attention. That's not what she's after here. The downside - and her reason for using the pseudonym - is that telling a story needs a little bit of anonymity. Rowling deserves that chance, even if she can't entirely have it. We can't unring that bell, but in a larger sense, we readers get more. We get the wry observations when we can't ignore the author's identity and we get the escapist mystery when we can. In the end, the fictional publisher Daniel Chard got it right: "Content is king," and on that score, both J K Rowling and Robert Galbraith triumph.
THE SILKWORM
Author: Robert Galbraith
Publisher: Hachette
Pages: 455
Price: Rs 699
Coming from an obscure, midlist, mystery author named Robert Galbraith such a statement might go unnoticed. But when the same passage is written by J K Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series and one of the most successful authors of all time, the words cannot help having a far greater impact.
Therein lies the problem and the great joy of this book. You want to judge The Silkworm on its own merit, author be damned. It is, in fact, this critic's job to do so. But writing that type of blind review in this case, while a noble goal, is inauthentic if not downright disingenuous. If an author's biography always casts some shadow on the work, here, the author is comparatively a total solar eclipse coupled with a supermassive black hole.
This is especially true because Rowling (let's stop pretending) makes matters worse (or better) by taking on the world of publishing. Leonora Quine, the dowdy wife of the novelist Owen Quine, hires our hero, the British private detective Cormoran Strike (first seen last year in Rowling's The Cuckoo's Calling), to investigate the disappearance of her husband. Owen Quine has just written a nasty novel that reveals dark, life-ruining secrets of everyone he knows. Owen, his wife tells Strike, is probably at a writer's retreat. Finding him should be a routine matter.
But, of course, nothing here is what it seems. When Owen Quine ends up gruesomely slaughtered - in a murder scene ripped from his new novel - Strike and his comely sidekick, Robin Ellacott, enter the surprisingly seedy world of book publishing. They investigate those who were thinly disguised in Quine's final manuscript, all of whom offer insights into the world of the writer. The suspect pool includes his editor, Jerry Waldegrave, his agent, Elizabeth Tassel, his publisher, Daniel Chard, and the pompous literary novelist Michael Fancourt.
As written by Rowling, The Silkworm takes "write what you know" and raises it to the 10th power. Is this crime fiction, a celebrity tell-all, juicy satire or all of the above? The blessing/curse here is that you turn the pages for the whodunit, but you never lose sight that these observations on the publishing world come from the very top. This makes complete escape, something mandatory for a crime novel, almost impossible - but then again, who cares? If you want a more complete escape, pick up another book. Reading Rowling on writing is delicious fun.
Even the title of the novel is The Silkworm because a silkworm's life is "a metaphor for the writer, who has to go through agonies to get at the good stuff." On envy: "If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels." On Internet trolls: "With the invention of the Internet, any subliterate cretin can be Michiko Kakutani." On a literary male writer's inability to create realistic female characters: "His women are all temper . . . and tampons." There is even a debate on the merits of self-publishing when Quine's mistress whines that she's going the "indie" route because "traditional publishers wouldn't know good books if they were hit over the head with them."
Are these opinions shared by Rowling? Don't know, don't care. In the end, despite the window dressing, Rowling's goal is to entertain and entertain she does. If we can't forget that she is a celebrity, we're also constantly reminded that she is a master storyteller. Push aside J K Rowling and judge the book on the merits of Robert Galbraith, and The Silkworm is still a suspenseful, well-written and assured British detective novel.
If J K Rowling never leaves our minds while reading The Silkworm, the world of Harry Potter, to Rowling/Galbraith's credit, never enters it. We are squarely in the gritty and glitzy real world of the Muggles, except maybe when she describes a noisy piece of furniture in Strike's office as the "farting leather sofa." For a moment, the reader can almost see the sofa coming to life in the halls of Slytherin House.
The Silkworm most often feels like a traditional British crime novel albeit set in the present day, complete with eccentric suspects, a girl Friday and a close friend in the police department whose life Strike saved in the war. But Rowling gives some of the old saws a new spin. Robin, for example, isn't a longtime friend or ex-lover - she starts out as a young temp Strike first meets in The Cuckoo's Calling.
Strike himself may at first appear to be something we have seen too often - a brooding, damaged detective, with a life-altering war injury, financially on the brink, who's recently lost his longtime girlfriend - but there is an optimism to him that is refreshing and endearing.
There are musings on fame (Strike is the illegitimate son of the rock star Jonny Rokeby), the media (the book opens with a passing shot at the British phone hacking scandal that engulfed many celebrities, including Rowling), book marketing (Quine's wife on her husband's sluggish sales: "It's up to the publishers to give 'em a push. They wouldn't never get him on TV or anything like he needed"), not to mention e-books and the digital age of publishing.
But Rowling saves her most poignant observations for the disappointments of marriage and relationships. The likable Robin is engaged to a pill named Matthew and cannot see, as Strike and the reader can, that "the condition of being with Matthew was not to be herself." When he thinks about his own sister's marriage and those like it, Strike wonders about the "endless parade of suburban conformity." His private-eye job of catching straying spouses makes him lament "the tedious variations on betrayal and disillusionment that brought a never-ending stream of clients to his door."
The book isn't perfect. It's a tad too long, and the suspect interrogations grow repetitive. Some will also argue that while Harry Potter altered the landscape in a way no children's novel ever has, here Rowling does the opposite: She plays to form. The Silkworm is a very well-written, wonderfully entertaining take on the traditional British crime novel, but it breaks no new ground, and Rowling seems to know that. Robert Galbraith may proudly join the ranks of English, Scottish and Irish crime writers such as Tana French, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, John Connolly, Kate Atkinson and Peter Robinson, but she wouldn't overshadow them. Still, to put any author on that list is very high praise.
The upside of being as well known as Rowling is obvious - sales, money, attention. That's not what she's after here. The downside - and her reason for using the pseudonym - is that telling a story needs a little bit of anonymity. Rowling deserves that chance, even if she can't entirely have it. We can't unring that bell, but in a larger sense, we readers get more. We get the wry observations when we can't ignore the author's identity and we get the escapist mystery when we can. In the end, the fictional publisher Daniel Chard got it right: "Content is king," and on that score, both J K Rowling and Robert Galbraith triumph.
THE SILKWORM
Author: Robert Galbraith
Publisher: Hachette
Pages: 455
Price: Rs 699
©2014 The New York Times
Harlan Coben is the author, most recently, of Missing You. His new young adult novel, Found, will be published this fall