JK Rowling, as Robert Galbraith, wrestles with demons in Career of Evil

JK Rowling is back, along with her good guy Cormoran Strike, but is she delving too deeply into evil?

JK Rowling looks deep into the moral sewer in Career of Evil. Picture: Andrew Montgomery/Wall to Wall Media

JK Rowling is at work on a play for London’s West End about the afterlife of Harry Potter, which sounds like a weird career move because for the past few years she’s laid aside the wand that made her the most successful writer in the history of the world — give or take the Bard, the Bible and Chairman Mao — and has been happy enough to sell in her millions rather than her tens of millions.

First there was The Casual Vacancy (2012), an overtly serious novel of small-town English provincial life. Then she — writing as Robert Galbraith, a pseudonym that was quickly unmasked — embarked on what has become the Cormoran Strike detective series, debuting with The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013) and following-up with The Silkworm last year.

Cormoran has one leg, is the son of a rock star and a poor junkie girl, has done the hard yards pursuing the clues in the theatre of war (Afghanistan in this case) and is now a private eye who plies his trade with the assistance of (wait for it) Robin, a Yorkshire lass who adores him, though in this third instalment she also comes with a bloke she’s set to marry.

The JK Rowling of the Robert Galbraith books — Robert as in the Bruce (the guy who took his bearings from the persistent spider and became king of Scotland) and Galbraith as in the great Keynesian economist who stands in contrast to the nastiness of the open market — is a very weird trash meister of the penny dreadful kind.

She writes crime novels that drip with the dreck and blood and body fluid of contemporary life in its most shocking and sordid and ghastly aspect — a tabloid world of dismembering evil and brutal thuggery — but she also provides the comforts of a soap that’s magnified to epic proportions, as well as scenes of common garden life that are presented with an encyclopedic detail that amazes the mind.

The upshot is a kind of trash writing that is naively executed but which takes itself seriously to a truly tremendous extent. And this has its own compelling quality even though it’s remarkably odd.

The basic plotline in Career of Evil is that Cormoran, the good-guy Long John Silver, is sent — via Robin — a severed leg that belonged (it becomes clear) to a young woman. Indeed his loyal assistant has been fielding inquiries from various strange people who would like to have their limbs severed and want to know what Captain Disability would advise.

It becomes commandingly clear — this is how the Galbraith novels work — that Cormoran has a list of suspects. Three horror stories of blokes who have done terrible things to women and children, who are smelly and ugly and awful, and generally present the most appalling side of life in the modern world, the side that wants to rape you even if you’re a little girl, or cut off bits of you.

Much of the book is spent traipsing around and tracking down these three horrors as they limp and crouch and crawl about the earth, wreaking of evil and rot, preying on the world of innocence and on womanhood in particular. One blames Comoran for one thing, one for something else. He tweaked to the fact that child molestation was lurking here, that murder was at the back of something else.

It is all intensely creepy and grotesque and here the face of evil is presented very much in terms of the damaged face of working and marginal life. Career of Evil is full of Scottish and Geordie voices muttering foul nothings and moving and crawling in a semi-crippled way towards every kind of intimation of mutilation and doom.

One of the suspects in the book is Cormoran’s stepfather, the man only slightly older than him who he believes in fact killed his poor mother. The stepfather has a delayed entry in the book, though when he does appear — with the very reek of evil all around him, the odour of iniquity — he turns out to be a figure of rather striking charisma, and for a flickering second we get the sense of the Galbraithan Rowling as a wizard of archetype and its transformations, the kind of dark and dazzling talent for popular storytelling that she showed in The Prisoner of Azkaban, the best of the Harry Potter books.

Otherwise what we have in Career of Evil is the oscillation between the good deeds of Cormoran and his Girl Friday and the intentions of the moral sewer of a criminal who will hack bits off you in his pursuit of ghastly fantasy. Oh, and we also enter the criminal’s mind for the odd chapter and he rhapsodises about what he wants from the anti-world he’s creating.

All of this is done in massive detail and if you read it s-l-o-w-l-y, savouring its every word — which does seem to be the author’s intention — it is liable to send you stark mad because the technique is exceptionally heavy-handed and the bad guys, the select handful of them, are just too awful for words.

It’s as if Rowling, having given up Quidditch and with it all the aerial flights of wizarding, feels compelled to pursue an absolutely melodramatic naturalism. The potentially enchanting part of her talent is all in the direction of typology, hence the Dickensian, dashing way she names her hero.

But when it comes to the representation of evil — which she’s not really obliged to do in a detective story unless she’s hoping to emulate Dostoevsky — she hits up against her own fatal weakness for moral earnestness. No one wants to defend doing terrible things to people — kiddie fiddling, never mind rape, murder and mutilation — but if she wants this kind of subject matter she should remember that in a Jimmy Savile world, the face of the abuser may come with a smile that charms even if it’s creepy. And there are moments in Career of Evil where there’s a glimpse of this.

And, of course, there’s also the more or less wholesome soap of the heroine’s mixed feelings toward Cormoran and the man she’s supposed to marry. It’s a naive romance of adult life, sometimes lame, sometimes compelling. And the staggering thing is that the most popular writer on earth wants to combine it with a representation of wrestling with demons that come looming from some human wasteland, ghastly and sensationalist.

Rowling, who combined the boarding school story with the world of magic, finds her bogeymen in Career of Evil through her obsessive awareness of the damage — and through the damage, the demonology — of working-class life. It’s funny territory for one of nature’s romancers to traverse and it’s a reminder that it was Jessica Mitford, the leftie, who was always Joanne Rowling’s heroine.

Peter Craven was founding editor of Quarterly Essay.

Career of Evil

By Robert Galbraith

Sphere, 512pp, $32.99