JK Scowlin’
Why did I start reading the Cormoran Strike books? It wasn’t exactly interest, and it wasn’t morbid curiosity, either. It was just that my family rented a beachside house for a week in the late summer of 2020, and the first book in the Strike series was on the shelf.
The strange thing is that it took me so long to ready any of JK Rowling’s adult books, given that I spent my childhood finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and then picking up Philosopher’s Stone to start all over again. Literally — no stretching of truth here. Harry Potter was far and away the defining media experience of my childhood; nothing else comes close. I lived in those books — I fell into them in the way that you can as a child. Every character vivid on the page, brought to life with so much care. I still remember sentences, word for word. Mr and Mrs Dursley, of Number Four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. And when the books grew up, when James Potter was revealed to be a bit of a douche, when Dumbledore was revealed to be an egomaniac, then fucking died, I was furious at JK Rowling. It took years until I grew up enough to know that she was trying to prepare me for the adult world. An adult world in which I would be furious with JK a lot more than expected.
So much has been said about what might respectfully be called “the change” in JK Rowling, and what might disrespectfully be called vile seething fury directed at some of the most vulnerable people in society. I’ve dug so heavily into this stuff that I’ve effectively erased any of my own opinions and replaced them with the pithiest comments I’ve absorbed from elsewhere. The leftist Youtuber Contrapoints pointing out that for someone anti-transitioning to have two pen-names and to identify as a man for both of them is … interesting. The fact that JK has talked on record many times about how her parents wished she was a boy, and told her so, from an early age. The leftist Youtuber Shaun pointing out that even Harry Potter always defended the status quo, and that the final sentence of Deathly Hallows sees Harry wishing his unpaid servant (the house elf Kreacher) would bring him a sandwich. How every woman in Harry Potter is defined on a moral scale from good mother to bad. How deviation from the norm, from Dudley’s weight to Professor Quirrell’s turban to Harry’s scar, is a byword for threat. Her reactionary credentials were there from the start.
But when I picked up The Cuckoo’s Calling that first night of holiday, all that was forgotten in an instant. Straight away, I just fell into the story, blissfully, wonderfully easy to read, not needing to be deciphered or struggled with, just hardcore competent storytelling with clearly drawn, likeable characters.
Then our holiday finished before I could get further than 100 pages into the book (they are all very long), and I didn’t come back to it until last year, when I picked it up in one of Bristol’s many bizarre miniature libraries. They open for about three and a half hours a week at random times of the day, staffed by a collection of lovely people who always seem to be doing something slightly random, like painting or woodwork. They could easily be a JK Rowling creation.
But my second attempt at The Cuckoo’s Calling was completely different. Before I was halfway through the book, I noticed a change: I really didn’t like this. But it was still effortless reading, and the plot and pacing were still obviously the work of a talented storyteller (I am currently trying to write a much simpler book, and the idea that anyone could write the kind of complex mystery novel that JK has produced 15 of is baffling to me). What’s more, I had still liked the first 100 pages on second read. What went wrong after that?
First, the writing itself. What starts strong descends very quickly into some very clunky, overwritten assault-course sentences: “Wardle uttered a polysyllable” rather than, you know, speaking. And then there are the fucking accents — OK, you get away with it when it comes to loveable old Hagrid, but when you have Northern characters saying “She’ll be at work noo. Bak’ry awwer in Vickerstown”, you should stop. When you have Thai characters saying “He no want massage … he want know where Noel went” you should for the love of God, stop. It’s not even that it’s inaccurate and wrong — I just hate it. Then again, maybe it is wrong — after all, a character like Hagrid could never have come from the Home Counties in JK’s mind.
But it’s not that she’s a bad writer—she’s choosing to be a bad writer, and fair enough, she’s not going to top Harry Potter. What’s most unforgiveable about the Strike books is the characters.
Our central duo, gruff, intelligent Cormoran Strike and bubbly efficiency machine Robin Ellacott, are instantly likeable, their relationship engaging and funny. But specifically, they are likeable because they are liked by the author. JK Rowling likes them, so they are fully fleshed characters with their own range of abilities, quirks and flaws. As for every other character in The Cuckoo’s Calling … it’s hard to call them anything but caricature. And it’s not that JK dislikes them. She fucking hates them.
The whole plot is a pretty formulaic trudge from one interview to the next, as Strike picks up clues and witness statements. But the people he interviews seem to be thinly veiled excuses to JK Rowling to vent her disgust at various portions of society. A woman living in a council flat has rolls of fat spewing out from her bright pink tracksuit — it’s the stuff of caricature, the stuff of Little Britain, it’s fucking bigoted. Other descriptions of dodgy boyfriends and silly rich girls might feel a bit less bigoted, but they’re still told with a disgust which strays a little close to revelry.
Of course, this is the bread and butter of crime novels — the jaded detective sinks into the dregs of society — but how did the person who wrote something like Harry Potter, infused with love, end up writing something like this?
The Silkworm is a more interesting story, but the vengeful portrayals are even worse. Set in the book world, we meet an ugly literary agent coughing through every line, a useless publisher, an alcoholic editor, a fan fiction writer with hopeless delusions of grandeur, and an author so fixated with hatred at them all that it gets him killed. The third book, Career of Evil, ups the ante again, jumping between the four suspects’ equally miserable and violent life stories. Only rarely, as in the case of a “man-like” alcoholic sister of one of the victims, is there an exploration of the reason why any one person is living such a miserable existence. I know it’s reductive, but on a very basic level, I feel that right-wing ideology points out the shitty parts of life and says “This is bad”, while left-wing ideology says “But this is why.” Overall, these are very reactionary books.
Which leads me to the trans thing. I know that Troubled Blood, the fifth book in the series, features a male killer who dresses up as a woman and caused a fresh wave of “Oh, shut up, Joanne,” but I only got through the first three books of the series, and I’m not going to get any further. Yet even in these early books, written well before JK Rowling fell from National Treasure status, there is a distinct obsession with gender fluidity. The first book has a fairly minor trans character who is portrayed as a bit needy and pathetic, but not any more needy and pathetic than anyone else, and they’re not misgendered. In The Silkworm, another: Pippa Midgeley, another foolish, desperate wannabe writer, but no major addition to the plot. And then, in Career of Evil, we meet members of “the transabled community”.
Transabled people identify as disabled — normally, an amputee — when they’re actually not. These people exist outside of JK’s imagination, so their presence in Career of Evil can’t entirely be blamed on transphobia, but there is definitely a shoot of bigotry bursting above ground here. Transabled people are exceptionally rare; transgender people can be traced in all cultures throughout history. It doesn’t take a spectacular leap to transfer the authorial presentation of one group to the other.
And how does JK present the transabled characters? Horrendously.
There are two of them, teenage boy and girl: “He resembled a scruffy heron … he looked like he had been finished in a hurry,” while she is “Pale, dumpy and doughy, her small, deep-set eyes like raisins in a bun.” In classic JK style, her vitriol focuses mostly on the woman, who is presented as irredeemably awful, only stopping from talking rubbish “with her mouth full of chips.” The chapter ends with Strike — the hero of our narrative — mocking and raging at the characters. All this highlights an interesting dimension of JK’s attitude to trans people — if these are a bunch of deluded autists, why is your tone always mocking, always hostile? If they are in desperate need of help, why don’t you — the richest woman in England — help them?
I don’t have any grand conclusions here. I don’t think JK Rowling is a terrible person — I think she might even be a good person, just overflowing with hate. Underneath it all, it’s the same old mixture of fear and resentment. For a woman who was told as a child that she should have been a boy, it sure is interesting that she has so consistently chosen to demonise people who change genders. Especially in her book series where, for the second time, she has chosen to make the main character a man. Especially when, for the second time, she has chosen to write under a male pen-name. I think there might be something going on here. If only there was some sort of detective around who might figure it out.
