My recent visit to Higginbothams yielded new treasures and “The Silkworm” by Robert Galbraith is one of them. By now everyone is probably aware that Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym for J.K.Rowling, the famed author of the Harry Potter series. I now realize why Rowling used a pseudonym. Despite knowing that this is a different book in a different genre, I just could not shake off the bias of reading a book by J.K.Rowling in my head. At the end of the book, I realized that I liked the book but did not love it. But then I never loved the Harry Potter series either. However, I was hooked to both of them because Rowling has an amazing grip on her reader in terms of the story she writes and the plot she creates. Unlike other people who weren’t happy because they were looking for the familiar writing of Harry Potter, I found some similar traits in Rowling’s writing of the two different series. The huge plot with multiple sub-plots, personal stories of many characters are common across both Harry Potter and the Cormoran Strike series. And they are equally slow stories with the reader feeling that the story is going in no direction till it abruptly reaches its logical end. The Silkworm is a comparatively slow thriller, the slowest I have come across till date. The story plods its way into numerous lanes and by-lanes of characters, suspects, their stories, their plots till you begin to feel as if you are in a car that has lost its way in the woods. However, in the journey through the woods you get to know each tree and its bearings well enough to enjoy the ride to your destination. And that’s the beautiful thing about The Silkworm or ‘Bombyx Mori’, the Latin name for the former and an unfinished manuscript. It manages to hook you into its story of a private detective , Cormoran Strike trying to find a missing and obnoxious literary author of ‘Bombyx Mori’ named Owen Quine. Strike realizes after making some initial queries, that Quine’s disappearance is not so simple at all. Complicated by the fact that Quine was going to publish his latest book in which he treated members of the literary fraternity sacrilegiously, and that he was an unfaithful husband and a bad father, every person close to Quine automatically seems to have a motive to harm him. And truly enough, Quine’s dead body shows up finally, after 158 pages of introducing majority of the characters and giving us a glimpse into the lives of these people.
In the process of solving the crime, we get to know more about Strike and how his past as an illegitimate son of a rock-star who has made his own life and is ex-Army shapes him as a person. He is aided by an able assistant Robin who wishes to become an investigator herself. There is an almost unseen and smouldering triangle between Strike, Robin and her fiance Mathew with Robin being forced to put up a brave face and pacify her fiance. The focus and development of each of the characters is probably the beauty of Rowling’s writings but to go to the extent and make Strike’s leg or lost leg a character can be really annoying. The leg has equal attention and mention as Strike in the story. The story has a lot of dialogue and sometimes it feels like it was written for converting to a film later. The characters are very human and sometimes annoying. Like most thrillers, Strike is the sole hero ; he is always right ( almost) and he seems to have the last word on suspects and theories. Towards the end, a lot of the investigation leading to collecting evidence doesn’t get detailed out so that the reader can hold their breath till the very end to know who the murderer is. Very smart but I still prefer Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries from start to end in terms of writing and the peeks into the solving of the mystery.
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