'The Cuckoo's Calling' Review by Book Club member Nick

The Cuckoo’s Calling

 

I’m not interested in crime. However, it is by far one of the most popular genres on shelves if not the most popular. Still, I dived into the novel halfway knowing I wouldn’t like it. Then, something happened. I don’t know what exactly triggered my brain to think this way but I found myself nodding at this crime novel with approval. I liked it a lot.

 

First things first, we all know that if you peel back the mask of Robert Galbraith, you’ll find J.K Rowling. The author of ‘Harry Potter’ and a billion spells I can’t pronounce. As it turns out, replacing wands with notepads and prosthetic legs did her a world of good. This is coming from somebody who still hasn’t read the last ‘Harry Potter’ book and it seems to me that this was what she was born to write. Who’d have thought the same person who brought you Dobby, a loveable elf, could bring a host of characters who come from the gutted London streets.

 

‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’ is about a private investigator, Cormoran Strike who is hired by the brother of a dead supermodel, Lula Landry who falls off a balcony. The case was closed as a suicide but Strike’s job is find out if she was pushed off and by who. Now, this book is all about the dark streets of London. Most of the shadows seen dancing on the wall are either drug addicted actors, rappers shot skyward to the stars, rich wives and vile fashion designers. Most of the cast is designed to be hated but even those venomous characters play their part and you want to find out what happens to them. Who knows if they are exaggerated versions of the people Robert Galbraith is trying to cast but they are intriguing, they are interesting and they all have something to say, usually in the form of swear words after every third word but still, you get the idea. 

Strike makes for an interesting protagonist, he’s certainly somebody you can root for and why not? He’s a war hero, he has a prosthetic leg (ergo, his weakness), he’s crumbling in debt, he’s practically homeless and Galbraith (I’ll stick with the pseudonym) describes him as somebody who most people wouldn’t find attractive. Despite all of that, at first I found him a bit boring. I didn’t care much for his war story, I’ve heard that before in stories and I also lost interest in his family history which I thought made for tedious backstory but then again, its clever that the private investigator, a man paid to root around in somebody else’s dirty laundry gets his own wardrobe vandalized too. Also, his surname, ‘Strike’, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. Did I like it? Not to begin with. At first I found it unconvincing as a surname and more appealing as a nickname but as the story went on, I changed my mind and enjoyed his name. What’s great about it is that it demands the reader to summon an image of him and Strike doesn’t sound like the name of a scrawny lawyer. This man is grizzled, a bit like an angry bear sometimes. Furthermore, Strike isn’t what you would call well-kept or tidy. He makes any space his own as quickly as a wine stain ruins a carpet and he shows no care at all to his own tidiness. His own un-kept world clashes against his own job which calls for meticulous detail and planning and a lot of the time, Strike jumps feet first into hell without a backup plan.

 

I can’t remember much of the language of ‘Harry Potter’. I read most of them at school and they were children’s and YA books. ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’ is undeniably for adults. F-bombs are scattered all over the pages, sometimes a few too many I thought and even the hated ‘C’ is spat a few times. You can tell instantly that this is England. London is used as a metaphor for Strike’s lonely existence more than once and even though I don’t know London at all, I could picture the capital and as I read I was there and if a book can pluck you out of your comfy chair and drop you without a map into a new world, that book is worth keeping around. The main star though is the cast, I know I’ve mentioned them a few times but they really are quite something. There aren’t many friendly people there but what I loved most of all was Strike’s relationship with his temporary secretory, Robin. As the story unfolds, she falls under the spell of detective work, she uses initiative to help root out the anomalies and with her speedy typing and eye for discovery, she becomes the Watson to Strike’s pursuits as a less than able walking man on a hunt for a phantom killer.

 

‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’ is a triumph. So much so I would love to read more of Robert Galbraith’s work. Happily, he (or she) is eager to continue the series and even though I’m not into crime, I’m OK with making exceptions for these books. If you want a nasty image of London inhabited by some of the nastiest characters in black and white, I’d go with this.