It wasn’t snobbery that kept me from reading Harry Potter, just a calculation that at some point I’d have to read them all to one of the kids, and didn’t want to have read them already. But my wife read the first 4 to the eldest and then the first three to the middle one, and by the time my youngest wanted them J.K. Rowling had already published a book for grown ups and I realized that I could be one of the first people alive to read her adult novels without reading having read her children’s books. (In fact, I was about 3/4ths through the first Harry Potter when I finished The Casual Vacancy – and still am, because the boy got scared at that point, and I couldn’t be bothered to find out how it ended). I was drawn to The Casual Vacancy
But not as much as The Cuckoo’s Calling
I’ve been suffering withdrawal since Reginald Hill died, and about 5 months ago I realized that the possible posthumous Dalziel/Pascoe that amazon uk mentioned at the time of his death is unlikely to see the light of day. So having a brilliant mystery writer appear, fully fledged (which is rare – the only other I can think of is Benjamin Black), and clearly intending a long series, is a specially delightful surprise. Thoroughly recommended.
(Oh, and, if you haven’t been following the story, apparently all her royalties for the first three years, starting July 15th when she was unmasked, are going to the Soldier’s Charity).
Discussion of the books is very welcome below but if you haven’t read them, BE WARNED there MAY be SPOILERS
{ 30 comments }
Matt 08.27.13 at 1:13 pm
Clearly the book was going to become a major success even under the pseudonym
I haven’t read the book, so have no comments on its quality. (I’m not a fan of the writing in the Potter books, but many people obviously are.) But, having had some friends involved in various parts of the publishing world, I’ll say that I expect this is true, but not strictly because of the book’s quality. Rowling herself is proof that a book that’s not well supported at first can become a hit, but most books that sell well do so because they are supported, and most books that don’t sell well are not supported. But, the relationship between being supported by the publisher and quality is, at best, modest. I’d be fall-on-the-floor shocked if this book wasn’t very well supported. It would have been more interesting to see her send the book cold to agents, and have the agent, not knowing who she was, sell it, and then see what happened. With quite a lot of well done books the answer is an early death w/ a few thousand, or even hundred, readers.
Phil 08.27.13 at 1:26 pm
rambling, misanthropic and full of children’s cruelty
Exactly my own experience of The Casual Vacancy, although for me the first two got to be too much and I gave it up within the first 100 pages. I just didn’t want to invest much more time in reading about unpleasant people being unpleasant to one another, especially since there didn’t seem to be anything much in the way of plot. I loved the kids, though – totally believable. Anyone coming to the Potterverse after TCV would be disappointed and bewildered.
As for the success of the “Galbraith” book, there’s no ‘clearly’ about it – it had been out for several months, after getting a launch most first-time novelists could only dream of (multiple broadsheet reviews), and it was bumbling along selling a hundred here and a hundred there. Not a failure, but not that much of a success, even with solid publisher support.
there MAY be SPOILERS
Keep an eye on Quirrell, that’s all I’m saying.
Sean 08.27.13 at 2:33 pm
I quite enjoyed it. Bit pastichey here and there, but one of Rowling’s graces is her impeccable taste in influences. Josephine Tey, for example – I suspect her Shilling for Candles is the main model here.
Russell Arben Fox 08.27.13 at 2:44 pm
The Harry Potter books are for grown ups.
MPAVictoria 08.27.13 at 4:10 pm
I am currently enjoying the audiobook version of the Harry Potter books. The ones read by Stephen Fry are just fantastic. Yes the plotting can be a bit predictable but the world building is superb. Plus, Rowling has an excellent sense of humour that comes through in her writing.
/Now does anyone else agree with me that Hagrid is a dangerous maniac?
jazzbumpa 08.27.13 at 4:28 pm
Hagrid is an overgrown 9-year-old boy. He’s only dangerous because of his size and poor judgment. Trust me on this – I have 4 grandsons.
I’m surprised to see that anything by Rowling is tautly written. The HP books most certainty are not. Those 700 page behemoths late in the series could each easily be 100 pages shorter is she just wrote better sentences.
Great story-telling, though, and great characters, too – except for the Dursley’s, who are cartoon cut-outs.
Sorry for being dense, but hoe does Robert Galbraith give it away?
Cheers!
JZB
ajay 08.27.13 at 5:14 pm
Sorry for being dense, but hoe does Robert Galbraith give it away?
J.K. Galbraith/Rowling, I think. But Galbraith isn’t so uncommon a name that it obviously looks suspicious.
nick s 08.27.13 at 6:08 pm
Clearly the book was going to become a major success even under the pseudonym
Bookscan reported 459 hardback sales in the 9-10 weeks before the author’s identity got out, including about 40 sales in the week before; throw in library orders, ebooks and indie bookshops and it got to around 1500. The US print run was set to be 10,000.
Genre fiction is a pretty brutal field: while you can usually get some library orders, your royalties are going to be calculated from aggressively discounted online sales and “two for a fiver” on the shelf at Tesco.
The Galbraith book stood out for a first crime/thriller novel in genre because it was hardback and not trade paperback, and as Phil said, it had some pretty heavy PR weight behind it for a new author.
Dogen 08.27.13 at 7:03 pm
I very much enjoyed The Cuckoo’s Calling right up to the end, when it became pure Agatha Christie. That ending pissed me off quite a bit, but didn’t spoil the enjoyment of reading it to that point. (I enjoyed Agatha Christie plots when younger, but don’t want to read more of them.) So I hope JKR trusts herself to come up with her own plot for future detective stories.
And I loved reading the Harry Potter books, mostly for the humor and wordplay. The movies all seemed to run together though, and I’m not sure if I’ve seen all of them but can’t be bothered to figure it out. ;-)
GiT 08.27.13 at 8:11 pm
@7
I read somewhere though that Rowling explicitly denies picking Galbraith because of “J.K. Galbraith”. It was some other Galbraith that was the source of the idea for the last name.
Chris Armstrong 08.27.13 at 8:22 pm
I wonder how much of a secret Galbraith’s identity was, among the literati. It was widely reported some time ago that Rowling had signed up to write a novel with the publisher David Shelley, and it was pointedly noted back then that he was known for working with crime authors. A suitable while later, he launches a book by a new crime writer, who also happens to have the same agent as Rowling. I know that editors like Shelley may launch several new crime authors in a year, but still…not THAT many, and certainly not many who happen to share agents with her. Her book, anonymous though it was, was given its two headline endorsements by two other Shelley authors (McDermid and Billingham), who say they weren’t in on the anonymity ruse, and maybe they’re being candid about that, but, well, small world.
casino implosion 08.27.13 at 8:30 pm
Ursula LeGuin.
harry b 08.27.13 at 9:01 pm
She says that the JK Galbraith only occurred to her once the book was already published. I only saw the book after the reveal, but JK was the first thing that occurred to me. But I had a schoolfriend who idolized JK Galbraith (yep), so perhaps its not so obvious.
Bloix 08.27.13 at 10:38 pm
IMHO, the Cuckoo’s Calling is a conventional crime novel with an unconvincing protagonist, pedestrian writing, a trunkful of red herrings, and a hackneyed “surprise” twist that is telegraphed at least a hundred pages from the end – not to mention pages upon pages of explanation of the kind that went out with (as Dogen says) Agatha Christie.
But then, I’ve never understood JK Rowling. I get the appeal for children – you take two genres of proven appeal and mix them. Magic and boarding school – hit! It’s like baby-sitters and clubs – The Babysitters’ Club!
But why adults read this stuff is completely beyond me. I read the first three to my kids. And thank god by number 4 they could read on their own, because I don’t think I could have managed the bloated monstrosities she turned out once she was too powerful to be constrained by any editor.
nick s 08.27.13 at 11:13 pm
It was widely reported some time ago that Rowling had signed up to write a novel with the publisher David Shelley
And the assumption was that The Casual Vacancy was that novel.
From what I can tell, Rowling’s usual PR/media team stood well back from this one, as they’re very much associated with her. Whatever was done to get those broadsheet reviews — beyond publishing in hardback, which is its own kind of signalling — was done by the publisher.
RA Spurge 08.28.13 at 12:44 am
I’m always hunting for good mysteries. The best I’ve read so far this year is The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty, the first in a trilogy set in Northern Ireland in the early 80s.
Main Street Muse 08.28.13 at 12:50 am
I will eternally be grateful to JK Rowling for the Harry Potter books – my son in 2nd grade struggled to read – he had a horrible teacher who attributed his problems to “just not trying.” He wanted to read HP books but could not, so I read them out loud to him. And we loved it, the both of us. And the next year, he read these books himself. And then we saw the movies.
Will read Casual Vacancy when time allows. Looking forward to it.
xaaronx 08.28.13 at 4:51 am
“Now does anyone else agree with me that Hagrid is a dangerous maniac?”
“Hagrid is an overgrown 9-year-old boy.”
To-may-to, to-mah-to.
ajay 08.28.13 at 8:36 am
I get the appeal for children – you take two genres of proven appeal and mix them. Magic and boarding school – hit!
And she wasn’t the first person to think of this by a long chalk. Authentic national treasure Diana Wynne “Jones Disagrees!” Jones, for example, who is not read by nearly enough people.
Phil 08.28.13 at 11:38 am
Difference being that Diana Wynne Jones was a genius. I’ve read all the Harry Potter books, some of them twice; there are some genuinely good and memorable bits, particularly towards the end of the series, but it’s bulked-up light reading through and through. (Which The Casual Vacancy isn’t, although it could have used an editor.) Rowling certainly doesn’t deserve to be spoken of in the same breath as (say) Alan Garner or Ursula Le Guin When She Was Good. Diana Wynne Jones is right up there.
Thread-drifting shamelessly, I’m currently reading Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, which has surprised me slightly by being very, very good. (There is a connection of sorts – the cover quotes Diana W J as saying it’s the best thing he’s ever written, which I think was and almost certainly still is true.)
harry b 08.28.13 at 11:50 am
Sometimes, if one of my students reports being ill for a prolonged period, I give them a copy of the first two Adrian Mole books (which they have no awareness of — it wasn’t such a hit here as in the UK, obviously) — and they always say it reminds them of Harry Potter in a lot of ways. I never quite have the nerve to give them Jennings books (because they really are for children), but my daughters report that Harry Potter reminds them A LOT of Jennings. So I assume the Harry Potter books are pretty derivative.
Alan Garner. Yes, isn’t he great? He finally completed the Weirdstone trilogy last year. It must be the longest trilogy in history. You can watch The Owl Service on youtube now.
ajay 08.28.13 at 12:19 pm
Adrian Mole reminds your students of Harry Potter?
You have some very odd students. Or is it just “the protagonist is a weedy black-haired English schoolboy”?
(Never really liked Adrian Mole. It wasn’t obvious that what the world needed in the early 1980s was yet more prosperous middle-class women mocking the insecurities of working-class kids…)
Sancho 08.28.13 at 2:19 pm
J.K. Rowling for grown ups happened decades ago, and is called Terry Pratchett.
Barry 08.28.13 at 2:52 pm
jazzbumpa 08.27.13 at 4:28 pm
” I’m surprised to see that anything by Rowling is tautly written. The HP books most certainty are not. Those 700 page behemoths late in the series could each easily be 100 pages shorter is she just wrote better sentences.”
I think that it’d editing (both can the author tell the editor to shove off, and how bloated a book the publisher believes will sell). With the HP series, the jump in physical size and story bloat from book 3 to 4 was serious, and it got worse from there on.
harry b 08.28.13 at 2:53 pm
Just reporting the data. Surprised me the first two times (but, then, I’ve only recently read HP, and only 3/4 of the first book).
I don’t really think that is what Adrian Mole is about. And Sue Townsend was a working class (by any reasonable standard) communist — she became a prosperous middle class woman only after publishing Adrian Mole.
ajay 08.28.13 at 3:32 pm
OK, wrong about the class issue. It still comes across as fairly unpleasant stuff.
Tom Slee 08.28.13 at 3:40 pm
“Those 700 page behemoths late in the series could each easily be 100 pages shorter if she just wrote better sentences”
While I’m sure Rowling got to the point where editors couldn’t touch her, I am always puzzled by “could be shorter” arguments, because the length is part of the fun. You want immersion, and for immersion you need superfluous length, extraneous subplots. Dickens and Dostoyevsky may have written better sentences, but neither were exactly “taut” writers.
MPAVictoria 08.28.13 at 5:02 pm
“You want immersion, and for immersion you need superfluous length, extraneous subplots. Dickens and Dostoyevsky may have written better sentences, but neither were exactly “taut†writers.”
Exactly! These books are not a race to the conclusion! Anyone with any experience in genre fantasy knows how they are going to end. We want to enjoy the journey.
Old MacDonald 08.29.13 at 7:58 am
J.K. Rowling for grown ups happened decades ago, and is called Terry Pratchett.
Much as I love Pratchett’s work, I’d say that “Harry Potter for grown-ups” is A Song of Ice and Fire, (a.k.a A Game of Thrones for the TV-watchers).
Sprawl? Stereotypes? Immersive world building? Disagreements with publishers? Massive popularity? We haz it! We also haz moral ambiguity and betrayal of the reader’s trust in genre conventions.
hylen 08.30.13 at 6:42 pm
Reginald Hill, yes. A superior writer.
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