The great big JK Rowling beat-up

Having read her controversial new book in just one sitting, JK Rowling’s great crime is not transphobia — it’s bad writing.

JK Rowling doesn’t deserve to be attacked on the ‘trans issue’.

It’s difficult to know what to make of the strange case of JK Rowling. In the past few days she has succeeded in enraging the world of social media –– one suspects largely made up of her erstwhile millennial and Generation Z fans –– who are appalled because they imagine that her new thriller, Troubled Blood, under her pen name Robert Galbraith, is a blatant attack on the trans movement.

I’ve just read the book and for a long bewildering moment imagined that my faculties had left me because the denouement of this latest Cormoran Strike novel did not provide any transgendered allegories of murderousness.

I had avoided reading the details of the accusation because the book was some kind of detective story and it seemed unfair to it and to the experience of reading it for the game to be given away from the outset.

Thursday was spent doing nothing but speed-reading it. The book is exasperating not because of any sociopolitical heresy but simply because it is not a very enjoyable experience.

But the character who has inspired the wrath of youth, whose status as a murderer is a donnee of the book from his first mention, is not transsexual; he is simply a mutilating heterosexual rapist and serial killer who –– and you tend to have to strain your mind to even remember this ––happens to don transvestite clobber as a cover.

In other words, Rowling’s well-known worries about the trans movement that have aroused controversy receive absolutely no symbolic expression in the book. Those worries were put quietly and with plenty of qualification in her TERF Wars article of June 10. She said then that “transition may be the answer for some” and that “trans people are vulnerable” and “need and deserve protection”. She is worried about the variety of dysmorphia, the apprehension of being stuck in the wrong gender’s body, and any consequential hastening or premature licensing of the decision to have a sex change.

Surely this is fair enough. Why shouldn’t she say “young people struggling with their mental health are being shunted towards hormones and surgery when this may not be in their best interests”? She has talked about her own experience as an alienated tomboy and said: “If I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition … I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he would have preferred.”

This is quietly put and considered and, for heaven’s sake, very brave. But the fact these sorts of remarks have been published as evidence that the author of the Harry Potter books is transphobic just indicates that her antagonists cannot read.

The one objection that can be made to Rowling’s view of the trans movement is empirical. Is she exaggerating the number of young people who are encouraged to have their hormones and their bodies fiddled with? Is there in fact a widespread awareness that the refusal of many kids to identify in a binary way may be dysfunctional and there’s plenty of caution in medical and psychiatric circles at least to postpone decisions in this area until adulthood? Still, even if the percentage of troubled teenagers who receive endorsement for their desire to make the shift is as low as 1 per cent, that still might lead to wrong decisions being made at great cost.

The moderate critics of Rowling would counter this by saying she was underplaying the angst that went with the transgendered impulse and the need to give support. What does seem clear is that plenty of millennials think the trans movement is as unproblematic and clear-cut as gay marriage (which they supported in the plebiscite). Their elders shake their heads because they cannot for the life of them see that this is an issue like homosexuality was 40 years ago where sane enlightened opinion simply shifted for the better.

And how ironic it is that this “kill the witch” treatment on social media (“RIP JK Rowling, her career is dead”) should be meted out to a woman who is not only widely revered for her wizarding books but who is as close to being a socialist as anyone with her money –– much of which she gives away –– possibly could be. Remember Clive James when he first encountered Harry Potter said he thanked God that the vision was so humane and benign.

Of course her most recent bits of fiction are the Galbraith Cormoran Strike novels and, although they can exercise charm of a kind, they are not popular writing of the same order. To begin with, they are inordinately long. OK, the Harry Potter books got increasingly long and could have done with editing. But the Cormoran Strike books go on and on without exhibiting any great elegance or efficiency in the exposition of plot, which is a bit of a killer when it comes to the ratiocinative allure of crime mystery and detection where plot — or at least plot and atmosphere — are everything.

The central typology is good — a detective with a prosthetic leg called Cormoran Strike, evocative of ravens and hit rates, and his partner in crime-solving (and potential love interest in perpetua), Robin, are attractively conceived even if they don’t rival the combo of boarding school story and magic on broomsticks or vivid figures such as Dumbledore, Professor McGonagall and Snape, the central trio of kids aside. Rowling may not be a towering artist of children’s literature like Philip Pullman but she is a supreme storyteller ranking with Agatha Christie, say, but not in the case of these whodunits.

One of the things that goes with this is that the basic characterisation of the Galbraith ensemble tends to be done with a lurching tameness that is far too mundane. Accents, for instance, cockney ones, primarily, are slavishly notated in a way that would make Charles Dickens blush. And when it comes to horrible sex crimes, the off-putting detail is laid on with a trowel, as if Rowling imagined she was engaged in serious social realism rather than indulging herself as a trashmeister in a field where she is not expert. That said, her monster of a murderer, Dennis Creed, is the most vivid character in the new book because he touches some dramatic nerve in her.

But for heaven’s sake, stop attacking the woman on the trans issue, like a mob of Hitler youth. Her heart is so obviously in the right place. This is the cynical and spiteful beat-up of a post-truth world.