Book Review: The Silkworm
Best-selling authoress J. K. Rowling may have wanted to avoid all the furore and fan-craziness that's she has gotten used to ever since the Harry Potter franchise went on to become a global phenomenon when she published The Cuckoo's Calling under a pseudonym. But ironically the most dramatic surprise turned out to be the very revelation that Robert Galbraith was Rowling herself. That was almost an year back. The Silkworm, the second novel in the Cormoran Strike series which hit the book stands last week, builds upon its predecessor's foundations to deliver a solid (old-fashioned) mystery that has its roots in the works of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. And for a huge Christie and Poirot fan like me, Strike is the present day Hercule Poirot!
If The Cuckoo's Calling was about the world of fashion and its unintended pitfalls, The Silkworm is set in the world of contemporary literary publishing, a milieu Rowling doubtless is familiar with, and she offers us a satirical and a not so flattering insider portrait of the highly competitive field. We get to see budding novelists who go the self-publishing route when rejected by publishers, greedy literary agents willing to do anything for the sake of publicity, editors left with no choice but to heap praise on writers and massage their egos before asking them to make a change in the manuscript, publishers who are increasingly wary of ebooks' runaway success, and back to the writers themselves who also have to constantly battle cut-throat rivalry and maintain their sense of self-worth.
Into this steps in our protagonist Cormoran Strike, the one-legged ex-Army investigator who lost his limb in the NATO led military offensive in Afghanistan post 9/11. Eight months later and still riding high on the success of his first high-profile case as a private eye, which would be around the time of Prince William and Kate Middleton's engagement, Strike's steady stream of new cases have sort of pulled him out of his teething financial troubles. However with "his palate (was) in danger of becoming jaded by the endless variations on cupidity and vengefulness that his wealthy clients kept bringing him", he decides to take up the case of a missing novelist, an Owen Quine, after his wife Leonara makes an impassioned plea to help her in tracking and bringing him back home.
But as Strike begins to investigate along with his protégé Robin Ellacott, he realises there's more to the novelist's disappearance than Leonara thinks it to be, for Owen, despite being written off by the rest of the publishing world as a "monumentally arrogant, deluded bastard" and "possessing a bigger glutton for praise than any author", has left behind a scurrilous novel of disturbingly monstrous sexual perversity titled Bombyx Mori (Latin for Silkworm, hence the title), a "Gothic fairy tale" overrun with libellous depictions of almost everyone he knows - his wife, his mistress and self-publishing author of erotic fantasy novels Kathryn Kent and her transsexual friend Phillip "Pippa" Midgley, his friend-turned-literary rival Michael Fancourt, his alcoholic editor Jerry, his sexually closeted publisher Daniel Chard and last of all his domineering agent Elizabeth Tassel. It's certainly sufficient motive to silence Owen and soon enough Strike finds him brutally murdered under grotesque circumstances.
At one point in the book Rowling writes, "Plot is what happens, Narrative is how much you show your readers and how you show it to them." Masterfully employing the genre's tried and tested tropes, the plot twists and turns when you are least expecting it, making the story an enthralling read. And as author Val McDermid puts in her review of the book in the Guardian, "the orderly interviewing of witnesses; the closed world of the suspects; the gathering together of the cast of characters so the detective can unmask the killer" are all very Agatha Christie-like and yet the conundrum is incomplete without its modern sexual explorations about gender identity and sadomasochism. She even takes a dig at the now defunct News of the World tabloid over the phone-hacking scandal. It is to be noted that Rowling herself was one among the many victims.
Strike and Robin, as the protagonists, are undeniably some of the most compelling characters I have come across in popular fiction (though the same cannot be said of the supporting cast). Theirs is a strictly professional relationship, although Strike might have been tempted to cross that boundary had it not been for her impending marriage to her long-term boyfriend Matthew Cunliffe, whose disapproval of her work with Strike brings alive the dynamic between the three. I am really curious to see how Rowling takes it forward. Vividly described, well-structured and devilishly clever, The Silkworm keeps you guessing till the last pages as to the identity of the killer. Rowling, needless to say, has another successful series on her hand. Eagerly looking forward to her next.
***On a side note, for a book about books and publishing, it's ironical then that The Silkworm has become a victim of Amazon-Hachette spat over ebook profit margins!
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| The Silkworm |
Into this steps in our protagonist Cormoran Strike, the one-legged ex-Army investigator who lost his limb in the NATO led military offensive in Afghanistan post 9/11. Eight months later and still riding high on the success of his first high-profile case as a private eye, which would be around the time of Prince William and Kate Middleton's engagement, Strike's steady stream of new cases have sort of pulled him out of his teething financial troubles. However with "his palate (was) in danger of becoming jaded by the endless variations on cupidity and vengefulness that his wealthy clients kept bringing him", he decides to take up the case of a missing novelist, an Owen Quine, after his wife Leonara makes an impassioned plea to help her in tracking and bringing him back home.
But as Strike begins to investigate along with his protégé Robin Ellacott, he realises there's more to the novelist's disappearance than Leonara thinks it to be, for Owen, despite being written off by the rest of the publishing world as a "monumentally arrogant, deluded bastard" and "possessing a bigger glutton for praise than any author", has left behind a scurrilous novel of disturbingly monstrous sexual perversity titled Bombyx Mori (Latin for Silkworm, hence the title), a "Gothic fairy tale" overrun with libellous depictions of almost everyone he knows - his wife, his mistress and self-publishing author of erotic fantasy novels Kathryn Kent and her transsexual friend Phillip "Pippa" Midgley, his friend-turned-literary rival Michael Fancourt, his alcoholic editor Jerry, his sexually closeted publisher Daniel Chard and last of all his domineering agent Elizabeth Tassel. It's certainly sufficient motive to silence Owen and soon enough Strike finds him brutally murdered under grotesque circumstances.
At one point in the book Rowling writes, "Plot is what happens, Narrative is how much you show your readers and how you show it to them." Masterfully employing the genre's tried and tested tropes, the plot twists and turns when you are least expecting it, making the story an enthralling read. And as author Val McDermid puts in her review of the book in the Guardian, "the orderly interviewing of witnesses; the closed world of the suspects; the gathering together of the cast of characters so the detective can unmask the killer" are all very Agatha Christie-like and yet the conundrum is incomplete without its modern sexual explorations about gender identity and sadomasochism. She even takes a dig at the now defunct News of the World tabloid over the phone-hacking scandal. It is to be noted that Rowling herself was one among the many victims.
Strike and Robin, as the protagonists, are undeniably some of the most compelling characters I have come across in popular fiction (though the same cannot be said of the supporting cast). Theirs is a strictly professional relationship, although Strike might have been tempted to cross that boundary had it not been for her impending marriage to her long-term boyfriend Matthew Cunliffe, whose disapproval of her work with Strike brings alive the dynamic between the three. I am really curious to see how Rowling takes it forward. Vividly described, well-structured and devilishly clever, The Silkworm keeps you guessing till the last pages as to the identity of the killer. Rowling, needless to say, has another successful series on her hand. Eagerly looking forward to her next.
***On a side note, for a book about books and publishing, it's ironical then that The Silkworm has become a victim of Amazon-Hachette spat over ebook profit margins!
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