Kitsch's Calling

The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I gave The Cuckoo's Calling to my boyfriend as a birthday gift. I kept quiet about who was really behind the pseudonym Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling) as I knew he wouldn't be aware of this fact: I was curious to see what he'd think of the novel.

Halfway through the book he turned to me and said: "it's strange but it feels like this novel was written by a woman." Why? I asked. "The way the main character, Cormoran Strike, describes his secretary doesn't sound like the way a man would think."

Because I knew J.K. Rowling had written it, I couldn't think of anything else but "Why did she write this?" as I read on. Why did she bother? Why did she choose such a simple style, such a middle-of-the-road approach? The novel brings absolutely nothing new to the crime genre. It reminded of something ITV would come up with, like Midsomer Murders - and in fact some plot points don't get resolved and are clearly meant to be developed over various books.

The characters felt very paper-thin and stereotypical (with perhaps the exception of Cormoran Strike himself) and the uncovering of celebrity life in London after the suspicious death of a supermodel was more superficial than a Heat magazine article. Most disappointing of all, the first remotely exciting plot development only happened on page 360!

This novel is more chick-lit than crime fic but only because J.K. Rowling chose for it to be so. But why? I ask myself again. Was she afraid of delving deeper into the crime genre? Afraid she'd be found out so she stuck with something easy to swallow, that would sit prettily by a cashier's desk at the supermarket and wouldn't reflect badly on her?

The end was somewhat satisfying and neatly concluded the main mystery - almost as if Agatha Christie had been channeled for the task (I was reminded of how Christie started her novels by writing the end first and I get the suspicion that's what Rowling did here.) I hope though that she takes some risks in the next books in the series.

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Time Travel Machine

From sushidog:

You have a time machine, in which you can make three (and only three) trips. You may use one trip to change something in your own past, one trip to witness a past event, and one trip to change the world. No cheating, any attempts to game the system will dump you in a primaeval swamp with no way back to the future. What do you do with your three trips?

My first trip would be to São Paulo, 1982, September - the month my youngest brother Nicholas was born.  I'd try to stop my parents from giving him the vaccine for whooping cough - the vaccine that gave him a brain lesion and made him a fully disabled person for the rest of his life.  I've always wondered how Nicholas would have turned out if he'd been "normal".  What kind of person would he have become? What kind of profession would he have followed?  And how would that have affected us as a family?

The second trip would be the hardest for me to choose.  Would I travel to The Smiths' first gig? Margaret Atwood's first public reading in a Toronto poetry evening? The arrival of Europeans in the Americas? (Wouldn't it freak them out if they saw me there, standing on the beach beside the natives?) Or perhaps I'd visit one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. I'd probably just let the time machine decide for me.

For my third trip, I'd try to stop Archduke Franz Ferdinand from getting killed.  In theory, that would stop World War I happening as we know it (though maybe war was inevitable?), and consequently Hitler wouldn't have gained the ground to take power, World War II wouldn't have happened, etc.  But, knowing we humans, something as equally as terrible would have taken place and we'd still be in a mess today...