In the Flesh: The Ink Black Heart

Imagine listening to your racist great aunt describe Twitter to her web-illiterate friends while three different John Grisham audiobooks play simultaneously at randomly rising and falling volumes in adjoining rooms and you have a basic feel for The Ink Black Heart, J. K. Rowling’s latest cinder block-sized entry in her Cormoran Strike series of detective novels. That it opens with thirty pages of characters throwing and attending birthday parties while Rowling makes sure we remember every bit player at her fictional detective agency, as well as their family problems and personal tics, is a grim premonition for its readers. The book might as well start off with “ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE” burned into the front cover with acid. The hundred and fifty pages which elapse more or less without incident before the novel’s detective protagonists actually get a case pound that particular coffin nail in deep and with finality, and then the realization that you still have 950 pages left to go thunders down on you like two tons of grave dirt displaced by a backhoe.

The lack of craft on display in this latest Strike outing is alarming. The Ink Black Heart suffers from severe problems with pacing, characterization, and even basic prose writing and sentence construction. Multiple glaring typographical errors up to and including doubled words have been left unedited. Rowling repeats little details of setting without apparent realization, as when she twice employs the odd scene-setting device of positioning two pubs facing one another. Her sentences are tortured and lifeless, as when she opens a chapter with “The email Strike sent Robin after his dinner with Grant Ledwell, which she read while sitting on a bench in Sloane Square the following morning, concluded:” before launching into a full page of text from said email. Why call it a conclusion? Why imply the existence of more email that isn’t important enough to merit including in the narrative? The story is littered with this sort of literary cul-de-sac, little dead ends where ailing thoughts drag themselves to curl up and die.

Speaking of thoughts, The Ink Black Heart lays out every snippet of inner narrative to flit through its characters’ minds in painstaking detail without telling us anything about them except that they don’t want to communicate with each other. Strike and Robin think and counter-think and meta-think their way through the most mundane interactions, speculating endlessly on each other’s possible feelings until their relationship seems more driven by miscommunication and mistaken assumptions than your average episode of Frasier. There are, charitably, perhaps 300 pages of actual story to be found in the entire book. The rest is mind-numbing overanalysis of such trivia as a half-page treatise on the gendered ways in which men and women wipe the noses of the unwell. It’s a holding pattern, Niles and Daphne will-they-won’t-they-ing across seven seasons, except there aren’t any jokes and in place of any kind of tension-building or character development we get endless lists of takeaways eaten and bland conversations in which our two leads exchange information we’ve already learned. The focus on food without inclusion of sensation or detail is stultifying. It’s rare for a chapter to pass without two or three pubs and/or restaurants popping up, and Rowling is forever describing her characters’ subsequent bowel movements and flatulence. I have no objection to shitting in media, and I think farts are just as funny as the next person, but there is a dismal tediousness to it, as though we’re reading the daily logs of a nurse recording a patient’s gastric functions.

Rowling’s extensive reliance on the passive voice also gives the impression that someone is relating a so-so story secondhand to the reader. The joke was heard by all, the car was driven by the man, that sort of thing. It creates an unintentional distance between reader and work, a sense of alienation from the text which renders twists leaden and suspense perfunctory. I can’t say whether Rowling cared or not about the novel as anything but a chance to settle online scores, but I can state definitively that it looks as though no one involved in any part of the book’s publication cared at all what the final product looked like. That the passage in which Rowling concocts a painfully obvious strawman version of the popular critique that the banker goblins in her Harry Potter novels are heavily influenced by anti-Semitic stereotypes (greedy, hooked noses, untrustworthy, controlling all commerce and the flow of money) and then proceeds to have her no-nonsense detective sneer and thumb her nose at it made it to print is an insult to the medium itself — unaided by the fact that dreck, the character’s name, is old Yiddish for “filth” or “uncleanness”. If an editor saw this thing at any point, they had no qualms about kicking it down the road like the proverbial can without so much as touching its most embarrassing excesses.

One of Rowling’s great strengths as a writer is her ability to conjure up a sense of unfairness, to create scenarios in which something mindlessly, pettily horrible happens to someone we like or identify with such that we can’t help but burn with righteous indignation for them. She uses this to solid effect to sell the life-ruining horror of being cyber-bullied, but after the initial frisson is spent, The Ink Black Heart collapses almost completely into unnervingly petty and disdainful grudge-settling. Even read with generosity, echoes of Rowling’s online vendettas and bugbears resound throughout the book as again and again she slows the novel’s already pitiful pace to a dead stop to jab her finger into one wound or another, showing us all how unfairly she’s been treated, how malicious and malingering her enemies are. Without perspective and self-awareness to guide it, one of her few creative assets ends up doing more harm than good to the story it so palpably drives. Who wants to read about a billionaire crying that people online haven’t been nice to her? Who wants to listen to a sixty-year-old woman rant and rave like one of her own narcissistic twentysomething antagonists about how she’s been misunderstood and unfairly demonized? The Ink Black Heart has an edge, but it’s pointed the wrong way.

Even were the novel to wield its barbs more thoughtfully, though, there is still the matter of its sheer size. Because nearly everything Strike and Robin learn in pursuit of the true identity of online harasser Anomie is gleaned from Twitter or from meandering interviews with suspects, information about the case emerges at a snail’s pace. So and so was in a chatroom while another person wasn’t. This person thinks that person might have done this, but they aren’t sure. There’s little to no snooping, and precious little archival work and research of the kind that classic noir media like Chinatown made so riveting. Le Carre, though, could make books of nothing but interviews sing. He could string a reader along, revealing more and more of the mystery even as the overall picture became more confusing, not less, and keep it engrossing while he did. Rowling reveals… nothing. Worse, when she does reveal something, her characters often fail to make a connection. An affair between two possible suspects goes completely unguessed at for hundreds upon hundreds of pages. The recurrence of key Latin phrases in differing contexts goes unremarked upon.

A great detective novel can sell a missed clue, and you’d think with The Ink Black Heart’s capacious size Rowling would be able to count on time alone to insulate her from her own shoddy plotting and clue-dropping, but such suspension of disbelief requires that there be something in the book in which the reader wants to invest. Rowling’s offers no such hook. We have only our two detective leads and their will-they-won’t they tension, which again unfolds mostly in their respective inner monologues as they speculate on one another’s thoughts and then decide again and again not to talk with each other. By the dozenth misinterpreted signal it’s enough to make you want to tear your hair out. The way the two behave is more suited to sullen teenagers fumbling their way through their first romance than to a thirty and forty-something considering a life-altering change in the status of their relationship. It isn’t that this kind of immaturity is inherently boring or unbelievable, it’s that Rowling covers the same territory again and again with nothing new to add and no insight to give. The perspective that emerges is one of profound emotional and sexual stuntedness.

The book is, typically for Rowling, deeply mean-spirited when it comes to anyone non-normative, especially the fat and the disabled. Its bottomless contempt for “spoonies” and other disabled communities is particularly savage, pushing occasionally into characterizing the chronically ill as malingerers, abusers, and emotional manipulators. This is set against the brusque, manly Strike, whose disability is the result of a war wound rather than genetic or infectious disease, a common dynamic in fiction. Think of the “good” Furiosa and her amputated stump set against the “evil” Immortan Joe, with his various ailments, and his sons, one suffering from Osteogenesis Imperfecta and dwarfism, the other dependent on an oxygen mask. It’s a cheap visual way to differentiate heroes from villains, to imply that our bodies and appearances reflect our true inner natures. You only need to spend a few minutes perusing Rowling’s descriptions of chronic fatigue sufferer Kea Niven and the chronically ill Inigo Upcott to see this kind of pernicious ugliness at work, and while the views of Rowling’s characters may differ from her own, the overall tone of the book is so overwhelmingly larded with personal grievances that such distinctions begin to fray. The novel’s only character to speak out against ableism does so in a laughably indefensible way and is later revealed to be a pedophile. Strike and Robin occasionally make jokes to one another about what is and isn’t ableist.

In Strike’s final confrontation with Upcott, she ham-handedly positions them as opposite ends of a spectrum of responses to disability. On the one hand is Strike, self-made man and Afghanistan veteran, who pushed through his depression and adjusted to life without his leg. On the other is Inigo, delusionally convinced of his own frustrated greatness, ranting that he could have been or done anything if he hadn’t been cut down in his prime by his illness. Strike thinks to himself that in a prosperous country, character is the sole strongest factor in determining the course of one’s life. Can a disabled person be a malingerer, or a bully, or a viciously unpleasant serial abuser? Of course. Anyone can. It’s Rowling’s brutal insistence on making a production out of it, on contrasting responses to disability as though they occur on a level playing field and are primarily a moral matter, that mires the novel’s viewpoint in bigoted ugliness. While it’s clear Rowling intends the brilliant physicist Vikas Bhardawaj to serve as a counterweight to Upcott, we never meet him in person. He dies virtuously, offscreen and almost entirely unknown. On top of this, of course, are the requisite fat jokes about the character of Yasmin Weatherhead, whose dullwittedness and avarice are classic qualities of stock fat villains.

For all her terminally online grudges and obsessions, though, Rowling has no ear for replicating the feel of real tweets, or of the way Youtubers tend to speak and act. There is a childish stiffness to her attempts to incorporate new media into the novel’s structure, especially when it comes to her agonizing forum chat logs between multiple moderators of an in-universe game. These logs are formatted side by side such that three separate conversations occupy separate columns on the same page, carrying over to the next. It necessitates a great deal of flipping back and forth which is less confusing than it is tedious. Much of the content of said logs is punishingly redundant, covering the same interpersonal ground again and again, setting up events and then delaying and delaying until the story catches up. The usernames both on twitter and in the fictional Drek’s Game ring false, as does the Hot Topic-esque cartoon around which the book is structured, much of which seems to have been invented solely so that Rowling could portray critics of herself and the Harry Potter books as specious imbeciles.

After treading water for 900 pages, the detectives’ struggle to discover the true identity of online troll Anomie ends with an abrupt reveal less supported by the preceding text than… not explicitly contradicted by it. The killer appears, someone suffers a non-fatal injury that makes them rethink some things, and we end as we began: with our two leads not talking about their romantic feelings for one another. You could lift whole chapters out of The Ink Black Heart without changing a thing about it, could extract probably 7/8ths of its word count without having to cut so much as a subplot. It is a tantrum, an off-putting rant. To anyone interested I would suggest Bill Tapply, Dashell Hammet, John le Carre, or any of a thousand other talented, hard-working authors in and around the genre. This is a lazy, unedited insult to the craftsmanship of real novelists.

The Ink Black Heart is, in spite of its literally Biblical length, a squalid little book. Reading it feels uncomfortably like watching a couple have a nastily personal fight in front of you, or staring as someone screams at a cashier in public. It’s a 1000-page meltdown rolled off the presses by a publisher which to all appearances is uninterested in anything beyond how much money it can wring out of Rowling before she dies or becomes too politically radioactive to touch. Giving one of the world’s richest authors this much rope to hang herself is a special kind of ghastly spectacle, the sort of thing you only see once or twice in a decade. All this to say, a woman who might easily have lived and died as one of the planet’s most beloved artists instead ensuring she’ll be remembered as a thin-skinned crank even all the money in creation couldn’t insulate from her own gnawing, bottomless insecurity.