People, places and what triggers you to make faces

Sunday, April 16, 2017

What just happened

You can't help but fangirl JK Rowling for her tenacity, her talent and fighting the crass and the crazed (see her Twitter), but this morning I mumbled Oh Joanne, Joanne and did the whole SMH thing. I had reached the last page of Career of Evil, you see, waiting for the sexual tension to be cut by a knife, with the same precision rendered to the limb that arrived on a secretary's desk and started the novel off. I waited. And I waited. And in the last line of the last page I realised that either Rowling has reached that stage of fame where editors are afraid to touch her, or she has lost her touch. It was all wrong.
The relationship between Detective Cormoran Strike and his partner, (we won't demean her by saying his Girl Friday), Robin Ellacott is one of the best things about Rowling's crime series, possibly better than her denouements and her sometimes too-populated pages, (I sometimes had to backread to keep track of who was who and what heinous crime each had committed), which nevertheless make for fun times. Characters like Shanker is a case in point, and no it isn't pronounced the Indian way, who reminds me of the wonderful Bubba in Dennis Lehane's Kensie and Gennaro books; how I would love to have one of them come charging over the hill to my rescue, no questions asked. Am I the only one with a Bodyguard on my wishlist?
But the genius subtleties between Cormoran and Robin, that's the thing. So to have it fended off time after time and then end on the worst possible note was aggravating and bewildering.
Do we finally look at the hitherto willow-in-a-typhoon Cormoran as broken in a battle between his head and his heart (i.e., the wuss of all wusses, make up your mind, for god's sake, Corm), and Robin as the kind of weak-willed character she herself despises, when they have been our heroes for 62 Chapters? Wtf.
Cormoran is sexy, imperfect and adorable; Robin is gorgeous, feisty and uncaring of gender when it comes to getting down and dirty in a fight, literally. But her last words show her to be indifferent to vows that are not to be taken lightly, in a setting where real love, which she has already found (and the way Rowling shows that without ever saying it is brilliant), should triumph. Well, I'm just lost.
Will I buy Book 4, Lethal White? Sigh. Of course.

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