Dom on Writing

I don’t think I’d be giving anything away if I mention that Robert Galbraith is just J.K. Rowling with a bloke’s name. The good thing about this is that you know you’re in for a stonking good read, and that’s exactly what you get with Silkworm.

This is the second book in the Cormoran Strike series (I say ‘series’, but I don’t know how many more she plans to write). Her hero, the surly one-legged war veteran turned private detective, finds himself immersed in the apparently vain, self-centred and generally grotesque arena of the publishing industry, while trying to find the murderer of a vain, self-centred and generally grotesque fiction writer.

First off, she must’ve had great fun writing this book: there is not one redeeming feature in anyone working in the industry, so much so that at several points during the novel I found that I probably didn’t care who did it. Publishers, agents, novelists (industry-published and self-published) are gloriously savaged without restraint. What saves the day is the relationship between the main characters (the detective and his secretary), and the secretary’s ongoing clashes with  her fiance. Unlike the first book, in which the murder was the plot’s main driver, I got the feeling that solving the crime took something of a back seat this time round, which was unfortunate because I think I was a little less interested in who did it by the time I reached the big reveal.

Still, Cormoran and Robin are such great characters, so there was more than enough to sustain my interest to the very end. Looking forward to the next one.

Seven out of ten.

 

This one was an impulse buy; I hadn’t read a book in a while (smacked wrists), so I picked up The Night Following when it showed up in one of those marketing email shots. Definitely a case of expecting one thing and getting something else entirely.
I’m tempted to say that it’s one story told from three viewpoints, but it’s much more than that. It’s three separate stories that are loosely intertwined, so much so that the writing style changes as you move from character to character.

I don’t want to give too much away, but it starts with a road accident, a hit-and-run, and spirals outward from there, weaving the story in the past and the present.
It’s beautifully written, as close to literary fiction as you can get with a novel like this, though I did think that the characterisations perhaps lacked a bit of dimension. I wasn’t too sure about the ending, but endings are very subjective things.

Still, even if this isn’t your usual sort of thing, the book is an excellent study in writing style, especially if you’re looking to blend them in the same novel. I actually enjoyed, and I’ll pick up another Morag Joss in the future.

Marks? Mmmm . . . Eight out of ten.