![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Hallmarked Man
Sep. 24th, 2025 11:50 amBut I didn't work on the Work In Progress yesterday.
Instead, I read around 200 pages of The Hallmarked Man (JK Rowling writing in drag as "Robert Galbraith").
And I felt guilty!
Had I spent the afternoon simultaneously shooting smack, embezzling $10 million from Amnesty International, & fucking the entire basketball team at Wallkill Middle School, I don't think I could have felt more guilty.
So weird how after a lifetime of moral ambiguity and anomie, I've metamorphosed into Marcus Aurelius in my advancing years.
###
Galbraith—Okay, take off that mustache, JK!—Rowling is not a great writer. I only made it through Harry Potter because RTT—now a man of nearly 31!—demanded it as bedtime reading. The Harry Potter movies made me appreciate the impressive scope of Rowling's imagination, but I never got that from her prose because her prose, frankly, bored me. It is very subject->verb->object.
The Cormoran Strike novels, though, are far better written than the Harry Potter novels. And the world-building is just as immersive. The immersion is not into magic but into a highly stylized London where everybody's weird regional accents must be phonetically transliterated: Ah want tae and Ah’ve got people aftae me and an’ you don’t wanna start fuckin’ wiv the geezer ’oo put out the ’it, awright?
Rowling is worse than Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, & Margaret Mitchell in this regard. (For how many years after I read Gone With the Wind at age 9, did I search dictionaries for the action verb to gwine?) I much prefer the Thomas Hardy method of rendering dialect in misspellings, colloquialisms, and archaic word forms.
(To get around this, I've started listening to the audiobook while I'm reading the book. Robert Glenister is a truly fabulous reader.)
Also, it is actually inadviseable to read more than 50 pages of any Cormoran Strike book in one sitting because there are just so many minor characters to remember, and one keeps losing track of whether they are important to the immediate plot or part of the endlessly expanding & permutating Cormoran Strike backstory.
Cormoran himself is an interesting character. But his foil & love interest, the girl detective Robin, is not. Robin is a blank hole on the page into which words like "plucky", "resilient", "resourceful", are poured like cement. Robin is bor-rr-ing.
The Hallmarked Man is the eighth novel in the Cormoran Strike series, and at this point, any mystery plot is entirely subsidiary to the will they/won't they question, as in When will Cormoran & Robin dew-ww-wwww it, and will Rowling describe it on the page?
Does this make The Hallmarked Man a romance novel maquerading as a mystery-slash-procedural? Or a mystery-slash-procedural cross-dressing as a romance novel?
Hard to say.
I do wonder what male readers make of Cormoran's perpetual mooniness. I don't think men fall in love like that. Though I'm not a man, so what do I know?
Instead, I read around 200 pages of The Hallmarked Man (JK Rowling writing in drag as "Robert Galbraith").
And I felt guilty!
Had I spent the afternoon simultaneously shooting smack, embezzling $10 million from Amnesty International, & fucking the entire basketball team at Wallkill Middle School, I don't think I could have felt more guilty.
So weird how after a lifetime of moral ambiguity and anomie, I've metamorphosed into Marcus Aurelius in my advancing years.
###
The Cormoran Strike novels, though, are far better written than the Harry Potter novels. And the world-building is just as immersive. The immersion is not into magic but into a highly stylized London where everybody's weird regional accents must be phonetically transliterated: Ah want tae and Ah’ve got people aftae me and an’ you don’t wanna start fuckin’ wiv the geezer ’oo put out the ’it, awright?
Rowling is worse than Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, & Margaret Mitchell in this regard. (For how many years after I read Gone With the Wind at age 9, did I search dictionaries for the action verb to gwine?) I much prefer the Thomas Hardy method of rendering dialect in misspellings, colloquialisms, and archaic word forms.
(To get around this, I've started listening to the audiobook while I'm reading the book. Robert Glenister is a truly fabulous reader.)
Also, it is actually inadviseable to read more than 50 pages of any Cormoran Strike book in one sitting because there are just so many minor characters to remember, and one keeps losing track of whether they are important to the immediate plot or part of the endlessly expanding & permutating Cormoran Strike backstory.
Cormoran himself is an interesting character. But his foil & love interest, the girl detective Robin, is not. Robin is a blank hole on the page into which words like "plucky", "resilient", "resourceful", are poured like cement. Robin is bor-rr-ing.
The Hallmarked Man is the eighth novel in the Cormoran Strike series, and at this point, any mystery plot is entirely subsidiary to the will they/won't they question, as in When will Cormoran & Robin dew-ww-wwww it, and will Rowling describe it on the page?
Does this make The Hallmarked Man a romance novel maquerading as a mystery-slash-procedural? Or a mystery-slash-procedural cross-dressing as a romance novel?
Hard to say.
I do wonder what male readers make of Cormoran's perpetual mooniness. I don't think men fall in love like that. Though I'm not a man, so what do I know?
