What The Failure Of JK Rowling's Crime Novel Says About The State of Crime Fiction

As you are no doubt aware it came out earlier this week that JK Rowling released a crime novel in the Spring under the name Robert Galbraith. The Cuckoo's Calling failed pretty spectacularly: it garnered few reviews and although those reviews were generally praiseworthy they were not ecstatic and the book vanished quickly from the shelves, selling about 500 copies*. Now that JK Rowling has "accidentally" been revealed as the book's author I imagine that the novel will sell in the millions. I haven't read The Cuckoo's Calling and I don't think I will. I've tried 3 of Ms Rowling's books - 2 aimed at children and 1 aimed at adults - and they're just not my cup of tea. No harm to her but she just ain't my thing (I don't think my lack of interest is likely to trouble her sleep). I do have one friend who has read The Cuckoo's Calling and pronounced the book as "meh...not bad." But the quality of the actual novel isn't what interests me, what interests me is the fact that without a marketing campaign behind her** JK Rowling couldn't even sell 500 units* of a contemporary crime novel. No one can. As I've said on this blog many times marketing is the single most important factor in the success of a novel. The quality of the book is utterly irrelevant. If you are marketable (being young and pretty and/or connected) then you've got a chance, but if you are unmarketable you are doomed and your book will fail. There are 2 exceptions to this rule. 1) You might just get lucky. Occasionally a book will capture the Zeitgeist or get read by a powerful newspaper editor or a celebrity who will promote it. 2) You are from Scandinavia: if you are from Scandinavia you can write any old rubbish and the punters will buy it. If Ms Rowling had chosen as her pseudonym Robert Svensson and set the book in Stockholm she would have sold tens of thousands of copies instead of hundreds. Budding authors take note. 
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*Joan Smith in the Guardian says it sold 1500 copies which actually isn't bad for a 'debut' novel. I've also read elsewhere that the book sold 700 and 650 copies. You can't really get an audit on book sales until the years end because of returns and remainders but unfortunately now that the jig is up I don't think we're ever going to get an accurate accounting of the pre Rowling reveal numbers. Suffice to say that Cuckoo wasn't, ahem, flying off the shelves...
**Rowling's editor did learn who the book's real author was and thus the book did have suspiciously more marketing than was customary for a 'first' novel but without Rowling's actual name the book still died, although, as we shall no doubt see, the cuckoo will become a mighty phoenix...

This Is Not A Review Of The Casual Vacancy

Don't read The Casual Vacancy, read Barbara Pym or better yet
try to catch Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem for a daring and grown up
approach to these issues...

This is not a review of The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling because I didn't finish the book and I don't review books that I don't finish. I didn't really care much for the stuff I'd read up to the point where the book got levitated Dorothy Parker style across the room but, who knows, the final act might be utterly brilliant erasing everything that has gone before. So with a huge pinch of salt I shall tentatively give you my impressions of what I've read of the novel...
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Actually before I give you my ill informed jottings I suppose I should say first that I was not a fan of Harry Potter. I found the Potter books to be complacent ruling class propaganda for the boarding school elite who somehow still run Britain. Potter came at the end of a long and inglorious line of boarding school stories with all the familiar classist and racist (the Irish kid is always blowing stuff up is my favourite Rowling example) overtones. George Orwell put the knife into these stories in 1940 and its pretty sad that they are still being published without any irony at all in our day. Even without the dubious politics the Potter books weren't really my cup of tea. As I've said many times they're childrens books, books for children, so adults shouldnt be reading them! Anyway, I found the writing pedestrian and unchallenging, the plots annoying and the characters irritating. If you must read books like this then go for Philip Pullman who is Harry Potter for smarter children. He is good. Really good. 
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That said, JK Rowling has put all that behind her and has now written a book for adults called The Casual Vacancy. Its about a vacancy on the rural English parish council of Pagford and an attempt to divorce the town from the nearby housing estate full of oiks. Rowling's heart and politics this time are clearly in the right place (although the descriptions of the housing estate - all used condoms and pregnant chavs - are pretty condescending) but her style is just as dull as ever. The mannered sentences grind away at you line after line, wearing you down with their unfunny jokes, endless adverbs and trying-too-hard similes. The narrative plods in an entirely predictable manner and at no point does the reader fear that they will be taken out of the story by arresting prose or a startling idea. Rowling wants to be taken seriously as a satirist but even the liberal use of the word fuck and modern teen speak can't convince me that she knows what she's talking about. Alas, few billionaires make good social observers...
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The Casual Vacancy is a kind of update of the Anthony Trollope novel, The Warden (as if Trollope needs an update) filtered through the smoggy lens of Rowling's New Labour values and a sense of humour which is very late 80's/early 90's. Rowling has clearly digested a lot of Trollope, Barbara Pym and Douglas Adams and unhappily this book reads like the sort of thing Barbara Pym would have tossed off in a hurried weekend and then put in a drawer because it clearly wasn't going anywhere. I can see what Rowling's targets are, they're the same targets that Jez Butterworth nailed in his brilliant play Jerusalem which Rowling obviously saw and admired. In fact, if I were you I'd get a copy of the play and read it rather than The Casual Vacancy. You'll laugh, you'll cry and you'll think which will definitely not happen if you read the Rowling. But, then again, like I say, maybe it gets better towards the end. If so please let me know in the comments below and I shall stand chastened in my wrent garments before you all... Thanks. 

JK Rowling's Crime Novel

The book world is, apparently, abuzz with the news that JK Rowling's first adult book is going to be a crime novel called The Casual Vacancy. This is how the Guardian broke the news:
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The Casual Vacancy, perhaps the most hotly anticipated book of the year, will be published on 27 September and is set in a small town called Pagford, described by her new publisher Little, Brown as an English idyll "with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey". The story is set in motion by the unexpected demise of Barry Fairweather, a stalwart of the town's parish council who dies in his early forties. Pagford's chocolate-box façade hides a town riven with strife, and the struggle to replace Fairweather "becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen", with "teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils," the publisher said. 
As the election to find his replacement unleashes "passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations", the novel puts Pagford's rivalries under the microscope. There had been speculation that Rowling might be entering the genre of hard-boiled Edinburgh crime fiction after discovering that her editor, David Shelley, counts Dennis Lehane, Val McDermid, Carl Hiaasen and Mark Billingham among his authors.
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I don't know about you but this is not the novel I'm most anticipating this year (that would probably be the new Iain M Banks culture book) but I'm certainly not going to diss this work before it comes out. It does however seem very Barchester Towers to me and I have to say that Trollope's shoes are big shoes to fill. I'm also alarmed that Ms Rowling still thinks names like Fairweather are a good idea. I wonder if the villains will have names like Slimeweasel and Grindstone. Silly give the game away names are fine in childrens books but we expect better in the crime fiction world. I wonder too if the cliche of the English village with sinister goings on underneath wasn't already exploded by Agatha Christie circa 1925. In fact this trope had become so worn out by 1932 (!) that Stella Gibbons was able to parody it in her excellent novel Cold Comfort Farm. It's also the plot of pretty much every Barbara Pym book and the trope even got the Hollywood treatment in Hot Fuzz. Anyway we shall see. I will await her book and give it a fair review. I wont however be tugging my forelock just because Rowling is the most powerful author in the book business.

Harry Potter and The Chamber of Chavs

My eldest daughter has started reading Harry Potter and she loves the books. The Potter novels have opened an exciting, cool, imaginative world for her and for this I am grateful to JK Rowling. I am not that familiar with the Potterverse because as Richard Harris explained when asked why he hadn't read any Harry Potter novels in preparation for his role as Dumbledore "it just ain't my kind of reading". But that's ok - these are books for kids and kids love them. As my daughter has read me bits and pieces out of the novels I have become more aware of the characters and the plot and I can see that there are strong female role models which is a very good thing and I haven't come across any racist or bigoted stereotypes, also good.
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However there is one thing that worries me about JK Rowling's world and that boils down to class. It seems to me that whenever a muggle villain appears in the Harry Potter universe they are always fat, vulgar, blingy and common. In other words they're a chav. As I understand it the Potter novels are about a bunch of special children who go off to boarding school to learn arcane things that the poor unfortunate muggle children couldnt dream of. JK Rowling went to private school as did a very small, privileged 5% of the UK population. Prince Charles has endorsed the Harry Potter books and its no wonder. He took a steam train north to a drafty, rather dangerous boarding school in Scotland when he was a lad and he would have sent William and Harry there too but for Diana's insistence that they remain closer to home. It's interesting that in the clips I've seen of the Potter films all the children at Hogwarts speak in nice accents. Are there poor kids there? Do you have to board? What if you can't go because you have to help out in your parents' shop or look after your siblings because your mother goes to work?  I don't know...
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As an aside, I find it completely baffling that boarding schools still exist in the real world in 2011. Why have kids in the first place if all you want to do is send them away for their entire childhood? There's something very perverse, creepy and Dickensian about this whole idea and I can't help thinking that parents who send their children away are morally suspect. 
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But back to the chavs - Ms Rowling - who's as thin as a rake - seems to have a particular hatred for anyone who has let themselves go. She devotes quite a bit of  time describing the rolls of fat in Harry's uncle's neck and we are clearly meant to despise this vulgar chocolate biscuit eating oaf. We also are meant to hate anyone (like Harry's aunt) who's overly concerned with money - this, of course, is also a ghastly, vulgar pretension of the lower orders. And Harry's poor aunt makes things worse by her desperate and unintentionally funny attempts at social climbing. It seems to me that the worst thing you can be in the Potterverse is a chubby, state educated, commoner who has no interest in magic but who wants to earn a few quid and try to get ahead. I think Malfoy is supposed to be a spoiled rich kid looking down on Potter and his ilk, but Malfoy's only a strawman sort of villain and his problem seems to be is that he isn't an aristocrat - old money - but a jumped up nouveau riche type. What Rowling is telling us in these books is that 1) we should trust the true aristocracy and that 2) the lower classes shouldn't put on airs or attempt to rise above their station - if they're not special enough to get accepted to Hogwarts they should know their place and doff their caps to the privately educated elite who have been running England for the last two centuries and will almost certainly be running it two centuries from now. As anyone who has studied the Great Reform Act of 1832 will tell you the English rulling classes are past masters at maintaining their position through faux liberalism while not so secretely promoting a deeply conservative agenda. 
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Maybe I'm wrong about this. I certainly don't know the material well enough to justify my argument with more examples so perhaps you, gentle reader, could provide some counterfactuals to set me straight...If I'm wrong I'll do the decent thing and admit it.