Review: Lethal White by Robert Galbraith

WARNING: chock full of spoilers.

This book effortlessly kept my attention and curiosity and had no problem spending hours with it – something I can say all too rarely these days, sadly. That’s about the only good think I can say about it and the sole reason for the second star. Everything else about it is mediocre at best and some things are downright awful – from the needlessly convoluted mystery through the tedious exposition, the pointless bloat, the ridiculous rants against everyone and everything JKR finds objectionable in society to the heavy-handed character development. A ringing disappointment.

I cheered JKR politics in The Casual Vacancy. They were an annoyance here. I suppose it’s simply because I agreed with the former and tend to disagree with the latter – she’s grown noticeably conservative and that in itself is a disappointment. It’s not great, as a lefty reader, to read disdainful quips about „hard left“ circles (whatever that’s supposed to mean – but I suspect it’s a way to denounce leftist politics and by extension policies without coming out as a conservative) in the book and incredulously follow the story arc of a shady leftist portrayed as an irredeemable villain. Roughly 1/3 of the bloated text was a protracted and at times plainly satirical political rant against people who’ve criticised or annoyed JKR on Twitter – and it’s completely pointless, too, because it never amounts to anything. The sleazy leftists turn out to be mere plot devices with no bearing on the plot or the characters and I was left with the distinct impression they were there primarily as a foil for Rowling to get back at people she doesn’t like by parodying them in a book. Nasty, petty and unnecessary.

Let’s leave that aside though, because it’s more of a personal issue than a legitimate criticism of the book. Lethal White is too long (yes I said it of a JKR book, I can scarcely believe it either), verbose and expositional, and the vocabulary is frankly ridiculous for a crime thriller. This could of course be overlooked for a great mystery plot or fascinating characterisation (what I come to Jo for, tbh), but the main attraction on the character-development side, Robin’s relationships with Matthew and Strike, was underwhelming, too, to say the least.

The romantic tension between her and Strike, which was rather contrived in the previous novels as well, relies entirely on cliches and is hardly believable as a result. It’s superficial, almost sleazy, and disturbingly misogynist – his main attraction to her seems to stem from her excellent figure and her markedly feminine lures: she’s repeatedly praised for brewing perfect tea, in contrast to everyone else, being tactful, not wanting to change him – the only woman who doesn’t, too, – being diligent like a straight-A middle school student, and doing exactly as she’s told. She, in turn, derives pride, pleasure and, seemingly, her entire sense of worth, from his approval. She repeats it in her head, glowing, it literally restores her self-respect in one instance and she seems to live to get pats on the back from Strike, like a loyal dog. My high school diary has more mature descriptions of love and attraction.

Things are better with Matthew – honestly, the only believable, fully-rounded character at this point, whose chapters I looked forward to more than any others – but he featured scantly, edged out by the absurd will-they-won’t-they dynamic of Robin and Cormoran who inexplicably repeat the same patterns of misunderstanding-baseless suspicion-coldness-crisis-renewed friendship of the previous books, like they’ve learned nothing from their relationship so far and for some reason refuse to trust each other despite past experiences. It’s a frustrating lack of development that plainly serves to postpone their inevitable hooking up some more. I know JKR is capable of writing with deeper psychological depth and I can’t account for her laziness here.

As for the mystery, it kept me hooked and hungry to see what really happened. But it fails to deliver. I managed to work out Raphael was having an affair with the wife – they mentioned one too many times how much they hated each other. In the end, it was all too convoluted, unaccountably complicated (tracking down a kid from your childhood, hooking up with his girlfriend so you could feed her information that she would relay to him that would possibly make him blackmail your target so you can later use it as one of the reasons to claim it was suicide? really? JKR really needs to work on finding simpler accounts for her red herrings), and left a few plot holes, like for example why couldn’t Kinvara leave the key to the house under the mat or something? He had to go the trouble of buying clothes to pretend to be a homeless person just so she could give him the key? And the door not being closed properly was made too much of – sometimes people forget to slam the door even when they know it won’t close otherwise. I doubt the police would really have found that suspicious. Not to mention that the second mystery, the one the book starts with, kindles the characters interest and is selling the whole book on the back cover blurb, doesn’t pay off at all. It wasn’t really murder and the kid was alright. Hooray.

Since the book is so long and there are so many details, plotlines and characters, the explanation of what happened and why about 80% of it was red herrings took 20 pages of dialogue, which really dampens the Aha! moment we all ultimately read mystery books for. When most of the clues, leads and weird details were revealed to be ultimately inconsequential, I felt underwhelmed and kinda cheated. All of the clues that actually contributed to the mystery plot I picked up on, and it would have been nice if there had been something I’d overlooked, like the Aberforth Dumbledore in the picture of the Order of the Phoenix, so I could go back and say wow, it was there all along! Well there was one moment of that kind – while they (and I) were trying to find out what Chiswell was being blackmailed about by the tantalising hints – what was legal then but is outlawed now, but it would still be believable for a minister to not have a guilty conscience over? – the answer is given directly in a completely separate plotline (Charlotte’s renewed interest in Strike), so that the reader wouldn’t make the connection. And I didn’t. That was really neat, and what I read mystery novels for. Pity it wasn’t used for the main mystery.

This book, like the other three, has glaring issues with misogynistic writing.

The women are all cliches – the super talkative annoying woman, the sexpot, the devious homewrecker, the spoiled rich girl, the idiot smitten with a handsome crook, and of course Robin, who is Not Like Other Girls. The continuous stream of super attractive young women throwing themselves at the unattractive, emotionally unavailable Strike is also a mystery that the author did not feel needed any explanation, and it is especially grating in juxtaposition with the infuriating morality tale of the dangers of handsome men and autonomous sexual desire in women. Matthew and Raphael’s only positive qualities are that they’re handsome, and attraction to both men proves devastating and in the second case near-fatal for Robin. It’s the same shit JKR pulled with Ginny and Tom Riddle in Chamber of Secrets – demonising women’s sexuality by unvaryingly portraying its effects as dangerous and ultimately catastrophic. Don’t go for the handsome one, girls, be prudent, save yourself for a worthy candidate. The joke here is that there is no reason to suppose a handsome man would be any more of a misogynist dick to women than a regular guy – the only difference is that you actually want the hot one. I really resent that narrative and JKR’s pushing it in both her kids and adult books.

This is compounded by the supremely vexing virgin trope – well, since female characters in 2018 can’t believably be actual virgins without some kind of extraordinary circumstance in place, the trope has mutated to female protagonists who have only had one or two sexual partners (and all in serious relationships) before they hook up with the male protagonists. I hate that Strike gets to have sex with a different knockout beauty in every single book but Robin can’t even feel sexual attraction to another man – and if she does, he turns out to be a literal murderer. It was the same in The X-Files with Mulder and Scully and it bugs me every time I rewatch it. It’s the same with Ted and Tracy on How I Met Your Mother. It only serves to reaffirm the noxious idea that worthy women aren’t promiscuous, don’t have sexual needs and only have sex with men they have judiciously chosen as long-term partners. It basically perpetuates slut-shaming and I hate it.

But that’s not the only issue with Robin’s character. She is a total Mary Sue in this novel – her all-conquering attractiveness, which was merely noted in the previous novels as one characteristic, is constantly commented on here, there is not a man alive who doesn’t lust after her, and she’s not just pretty, but also diligent, a do-gooder, a moral compass for Strike, and basically never fails in anything – or if she does, she relentlessly beats herself up over it in unrealistic internal monologues. All the other women in the novel are foils for her character – they’re variously shrill, incompetent, vacuous, wicked, vain, victims to their lust, or just not good enough compared to her. All the insulting, misogynistic stereotypes about women are paraded in various characters so that Robin can stand out as special, an exception among women. That’s a continuation of the line taken in the previous novels, most notably the end of Silkworm, where she literally says „I’m not most women“. I really, really resent that approach and it just makes it hard for me to identify or sympathise with Robin.

There isn’t much to be said about the writing, either. The lack of editing is painfully visible – the style is onerous, with long and clumsy sentences, multiple inverted clauses and a peppering of pompous vocabulary, descriptions of feelings and sensations are repetitive and often awkward; not to mention the multiple typos and unedited sentences with repeated phrases, leftover words from previous versions and butchered grammar. It reads like a manuscript, not only because of the unnecessary plot points, wordy descriptions and unpolished writing, but it’s literally unedited, too. I couldn’t believe it was allowed to go to print in this state.

It’s all a pity because it’s so rare for me to find a series I get really invested in.

Review: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Warning: spoilers in the last paragraph.

A delightful read. Effortlessly creepy, with a couple of genuinely surprising and well-constructed plot twists (I was lucky enough to be spoiler-free), and wonderfully atmospheric – precisely what you’d want from a „haunted mansion“ kind of book. It has echoes of classic Gothic stories like Jane Eyre. The writing style is flowing and elegant, shining especially in the descriptions of dynamic changes in nature, which are a sort of a barometer for the story’s upcoming twists and turns, creating a sense of premonition which keeps you on your toes. My heart actually raced at a few places. No wonder Hitchcock loved du Maurier’s work.

I identified with the narrating main character almost the entire time. I, too, was the bumbling, inelegant, eager to please awkward girl at 21. I share her fascination with the passage of time, which she dwells on beautifully. I was also easily dazzled by splendour and froze whenever someone expressed the tiniest negative feeling around me. I found her vantage point immensely relatable and that helped me experience the thrill, fear, and apprehension of the new bride in the gorgeous but ominous mansion, imbued with the tastes, touch and spirit of its old mistress who seems to have ruled over every room and every soul in it.

I found Rebecca to be infinitely more fascinating before it was revealed Maxim isn’t pining for her but feeling the weight of his crime. I thought it rather frustrating that Maxim has murdered a woman, and one who he thought was pregnant, to boot, and not even a line is dedicated to how that may be wrong – there’s no remorse, fear for his soul, no reckoning with this pretty horrible deed at all. His bride doesn’t seem to have any ambiguous, at least, feelings about it either – like there’s an understanding that it’s not really a bad thing to do. That kind of flattens the character of Rebecca out; she is much better developed before she is revealed, ironically.

I was a bit bummed the narrator’s name is never revealed. At the beginning it’s mentioned as unusual and beautiful and I really wanted to know what it is.

Review: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Warning: spoilers for both this book and Jane Eyre

Wide Sagrasso Sea is about the hopeless abyss between coloniser and colonised, although the colonised here is represented by a white Creole (i.e. an earlier coloniser). It’s about how Antoinette became Bertha – the mad woman in the attic from Jane Eyre – through a process of relentless othering by her husband who refuses to recognise her as his social equal and, resenting the fact that he’s been thrust into this marriage for the humiliating reason of monetary need, he drives her to madness with his hardness, and with his willingness to listen to vicious rumours from this „alien“, as he repeatedly calls it, environment. I don’t think it was really the rumours themselves – he had two competing accounts and he chose to trust the one coming from strangers, because he needed an excuse to bury this unequal, from his point of view, marriage he could only associate with humiliation – even though it’s clear, I thought, that he did love Antoinette. He hates that he was forced to marry her for money, he is anxious that she might not be fully white, he is furious that he feels lost on this island, a continuously rejected stranger. All of this works to facilitate his willingness to erase his wife – both her identity, by calling her Bertha (and she confronts him directly about it – „I know, that’s obeah too“), and later, as we see in Jane Eyre, her existence in his life.

It’s a story about the stubbornness and impermeability of a imperialist culture that will not make room for any alternative narratives or points of view as much as it is an account of how Bertha Mason came to be locked in the attic. Rochester could have been happy with Antoinette but that would have meant adjusting his idea of what is truth and what is reality, and as a Victorian materialist, as a representative of a colonising empire that needs all its excuses to occupy, loot and enslave, he cannot do that. The fact that Antoinette ends up a mad woman in the eyes of proper British society not only underscores its rigidity but replays the age-old view that non-conforming women are crazy, not right, unhealthy, and need to be removed from the world. The violence of misogyny here echoes the violence of colonialism, two kindred philosophies practised by wealthy white men.

The introduction, explanatory texts about obeah, slavery and the Caribbean islands, and the notes to the text are a real asset to this edition – they put me in context and helped me understand the setting, atmosphere and a lot of references that would have flown over my head. To me, they made the reading more enjoyable.

Review: The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey

A purely fantastic summer read that has mystery, romance, drama, friendship and strife. Set in 1920s Bombay (and briefly in Calcutta), it follows the life story and current work of Perveen Mistry, Bombay’s first woman lawyer. While she’s investigating a suspicious case wherein three Muslim widows have declared they want to give up all of their inheritance in favour of the family charity fund, Perveen gets more than she’s bargained for, including a murder committed minutes after she’s left the widows’ zenana after their first private consultation with her.

Parallel to her investigation of the case, we get the story of her past and how she ended up a single woman working a man’s job at her father’s law firm. I found this part way more engrossing – it describes the fate of her first love and offers some fascinating insights into Parsi culture and practices that were still around in the 1920s. It’s akin to a family saga, with detailed yet easy descriptions of home life and a sensitive exploration of the fragile and delicate relationships between a new bride and her in-laws.

The mystery isn’t that exciting and the writing is very accessible, but you can tell instantly the author is very talented. She builds the fictional world on a foundation of rich local detail, including a barrage of Indian (mostly Hindi and Gujarati) words, architectural specifics, food, holidays, traditions, modes of communication, etc. 1920s Bombay comes alive in the narrative and it’s a pleasure to explore.

I may be biased though because Mumbai is my all-time favourite city in the whole wide world.

Ревю: The Fortune Teller by Gwendolyn Womack

It’s fast-paced enough to hold your interest but ultimately it’s pointless. The multiple stories spanning some 200 years make it hard to follow the main plot and eat up the space of the supposedly major characters, so you never get to properly know them, and when one of them died, I couldn’t care less. It was just a name to me. And that’s bad because clearly that death was supposed to elicit a strong emotional reaction.

The historical parts are half-baked. Famous historical figures like Cleopatra, Caesar, Ghiberti, Rasputin pop up pointlessly along to way, just so they can be there. They’re not a part of the fabric of the story, they’re celebrity cameos.

There’s a lot of telling and scarce showing. The cards are constantly mentioned as being powerful, then Semele or her ancestors touch them, they feel their power, etc., but they never actually do anything. At any point. All the Seeing is done through concentration or in dreams. The cards are basically useless.

The writing felt amateurish to me, like an ambitious high schooler trying to get into the big writing game. The plot twists lacked power because, as I mentioned, there’s not enough time to get to know and therefore care about the characters.

Review: Mysteries by Knut Hamsun

I feel somewhat uncomfortable expressing tepid feelings about a book that’s universally praised as a phenomenon in world literature but I was less than impressed with Mysteries. Perhaps it was that it was oversold on the back cover (the author was pronounced to have „complete omniscience about human nature“, where I only found incomplete, albeit self-absorbed, knowledge about a certain type of male person), or that I read it in 2016 with my firmly 2016 point of view, or that I can’t read much anymore without running it through the very specific lens of a host of modern values and expectations. But my ultimate impression is of a pretty worn-out cliche – though I guess it wasn’t that glaringly cliched in 1892 – of the misunderstood, tortured genius who’s enormously magnanimous but can’t ever be happy because he sees the ugliness of the world and it causes him pain, and spends all his time in self-absorbed internal and external monologues that are supposed to be mysterious and brilliant but are in fact predictable and hollow. Yawn.

He goes around treating women and the less fortunate like children, manipulating them „for their own good“. He carries around a firm belief that he’s better than other people, expressed not only in his treatment of them, which is rarely concerned with their expressed wishes or convictions, but in his penchant for „shocking“ polite society with his disdain for popular icons of the age such as Gladstone, Tolstoy and Ibsen. Nagel experiences zero character development – one gets the idea that he’s above it, that he’s no mere mortal and therefore can’t have a story arc where he errs and learns as a result – or doesn’t. He enters the stage heavy with the wisdom of the world and exits it the same way. He has transformative power in some wretched souls’ lives, never gets any gratitude for it, or the love he clearly deserves more than any other man, and then leaves.

Apart from the general boredom of reading about the kind of (male) character/author I was taught to admire throughout my formal education and with whom I became disillusioned once I started thinking for myself, there was an extra treat in the form of Nagel’s „courtship“ of his great – tortured, obviously – love, Miss Kielland. His pursuit consists of never shutting up about himself, forcing his company on her at every opportunity, disrespecting her feelings and her engagement, stalking her (at one point he says „So I come every night to stare at your window even though you forbade me! It’s not a crime!“, no joke), forcing his embraces and kisses on her despite her resistance, threatening suicide and killing her dog. He motherfucking kills her dog. And the reader is supposed to sympathise with him and his great anguish – which he talks about while forcing the woman he’s supposed to love to endure him and listen to him after she’s told him at least a dozen times she wants to be left alone. I suppose he doesn’t see her as a person like himself, but as a personal goal. I had to stop and laugh in exasperation at some of his lines. „I’ll kill myself right here to rid you of my presence!“ he says to her pleas to leave her alone – well, you can rid her of your presence by doing what she asked and walking away. But that wouldn’t have the power to manipulate, would it? He doesn’t really care about her wanting nothing to do with him, he cares only about his not getting what he wants, to it’s either her affection or death. Accepting the fact that his feelings are unrequited doesn’t come in anywhere. His „You’ve got to give me a chance!“ – shouted at an engaged woman who’s told him expressly, several times, that he cannot expect anything of her, that she loves her fiancé and that she wants him to go away – is so depressingly familiar and modern, I got genuinely angry reading it. What do men think „Give me a chance“ means? „Let me have what I want“? Because it was made perfectly clear to him he could not have a chance. But his desires are more important to him than her feelings or wishes. Some things never do change.

Maybe I’m not sophisticated enough or sufficiently versed in philosophy to appreciate Nagel’s long monologues about greatness and the mediocrity of universally hailed great men, but they dragged so badly, I kept counting the remaining pages.

The two rather interesting aspects about the novel, for me, were the impactful descriptions, in a presciently Modernist manner, of Nagel’s episodes of altered consciousness – when he’s under the influence of opium, when he’s feverish and when he’s clearly having hallucinations. It’s a curious look at the instability of the mental state that sounds strikingly modern to me. The other thing that was somewhat intriguing was the mystery – who killed Karlsen? Was he really killed? What’s the Midget’s secret vice? And what became of him? It would usually be anticlimactic to leave such questions unanswered, but in this novel, I think it works to its advantage and fits in with the general atmosphere of uncertainty, the style of smoothly switching back and forth between traditional narration, stream of consciousness and downright surreal descriptions of apparitions, premonitions and fairy-tale visions.

Yes, I know the book is about investigating the depths and the implications of human consciousness. About how the more evolved suffer more because they understand more, about exploring the edges of the human experience of the world. I’m just not impressed with it. As usual, this theme is seen through a narrow and narcissistic perspective that confuses a limited and demographically specific personal experience for the universality of the human condition. I can’t respect that.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Harry Potter and the Inexplicably Incompetent and Short-sighted or Else Unbelievably Manipulative Headmaster Who’s Supposed to be Looking Out for Him would be a more accurate title. Poor Harry, he really does not have a single responsible adult in his life (well, except Molly and he never heeds her advice anyway).

Some random thoughts that occurred to me in the course of this reread below.

Reading about St. Mungo’s, I have a number of questions I don’t remember occurring to me before – for example, what do wizards do when they get a non-magical illness, like smallpox or pneumonia, seeing as Healers seem to only treat magical maladies? Judging by Ron’s reaction to doctors („those Muggle nutter that cut people up?“) and the general poor understanding of the Muggle world among pure-blood families, they don’t have a habit of turning to Muggle medicine, which would mean they have magical means for dealing with those, which poses an ethical issue – if they can treat Muggle diseases, aren’t they obligated to share this knowledge with Muggles, their fellow human beings? There’s even a specific example in the text – Arthur takes a Blood Replenishing Potion to treat his non-stop bleeding after the bite. I feel like this should definitely be something ethics would require them to share with everyone, especially considering the need for blood in the Muggle world; it would make the need for blood donations obsolete.

This should be called Harry Potter: The Ungrateful Little Shit. I’d forgotten what an obnoxious brat he is throughout this book, and what a low opinion he has of his friends. If it wasn’t for his supreme affection and loyalty to Neville exhibited in the heartbreaking St. Mungo’s scene (which made me cry, again), I’d have hated his guts by the last quarter of the book. It also illuminated for me just how much Harry underappreciates Hermione without whom he’d have been dead at 11, not to mention failed all his exams and sent back to the Muggle world. She deserves much much more recognition than he gives her, which is barely any. And the same goes for Ron.

Speaking of Hermione, another thing I notice clearly now that for some reason hadn’t struck me that much before is just how ruthless she is! (It’s one of the things I love most about her tbh.) She keeps a women unemployed with blackmail and then forces her to do her job for free. I’ll be honest, this is skirting the line even for me, the most diehard fan of Hermione – it’s not only illegal (though Hermione has proven before she only cares for those rules that jive with her inner moral compass), it’s pretty cruel. It makes you think just how much JKR loathes tabloid journalists! But it doesn’t stop there – this is also the book where 16-year-old Hermione disobeys a teacher (a first for her), starts an illegal organisation in direct defiance of said teacher and the law, manipulates marginalised creatures over whom she has enormous privilege to further her political agenda (good thing she grows out of that eventually), and inflicts a permanent – yes, as in lifelong – facial disfigurement to traitors. She’d make one fearsome dictator, if she were into power – it’s a good thing she’s not.

Found another inconsistency – if you can listen in on other people’s conversations in Pensieve memories even when the person whose memory it is didn’t hear it at the time means any secret can be revealed if you found someone who was at the vicinity of its sharing at the time and ask them to extract the memory. Anyone could have known Remus was a werewolf for example, if they were on the grounds that day (and the entire school was) if they just entered their memory and went close enough to the Marauders.

I have to say the oft-repeated criticism that the DE couldn’t handle a bunch of teenagers is not true – they could, and did. They had them all defeated, and Harry with the unscathed prophecy cornered, when the Order and the Aurors arrived, and it was only after Dumbledore turned up that they were finally subdued – they had managed to murder Sirius and incapacitate Tonks and were well on their way to escape before that.

Ревю: The Bat by Jo Nesbo (Ю Несбьо)

Warning: contains major spoilers!

I found this weak as a mystery and overly bloated. It had some glaring problems with racism (two magical negroes, the murderer is a Black man who kills and rapes blonde women in retribution for white people’s treatment of Aboriginal people) and female representation (the two female characters are the victim and the love interest and they both end up murdered by a man). The translation was patchy, too.

Its saving graces are an engaging narration and the wide array of topics the author seems to be genuinely interested in – I appreciate it when there’s some meat to the generic skeleton of a murder mystery, especially if I can learn something new from it.

The mystery was weak IMO because the original murder never amounted to anything in the process of investigation – we never learn who Inger Holter, the victim, was, there’s barely any investigation into her background, friends, living situation to understand why she was chosen, and in the end, she was chosen solely based on her hair colour and chance. That felt disappointing, because the line of investigation picked up at the start of the book was just basically abandoned by the middle. The motive (racial revenge) was overly dramatic  and the process of investigation and then the pursuit was ridden with annoying holes that disrupt any enjoyment one might have from following it – for example, when they were fretting about how they could mask their cutting off electricity and thus tipping Toowoomba off that they were after him because it deleted his computer answering machine message, instead of asking the phone company to cut everyone off for a full day, they could have asked the electricity company for a 5-minute outage which would explain why his self-made alarm system wasn’t working.

I’ve been told this isn’t the best Harry Hole though so I’m thinking I’ll try The Snowman, for example, and see if it’s better suited to my thriller tastes.