#robin ellacott: the reason I'm still reading these books

[bookandcover]

I feel I need to start this writing response with several context points, in the synergistic space among which I’ll frame my analysis of this book.

Context 1: I almost didn’t read this book. I wasn’t sure I wanted to and whether I would be comfortable reading it. This was because of limited context about the book itself, paired with reading JK Rowling’s Twitter comments from last year. I did not like nor agree with what JK Rowling said on Twitter adjacent to topics of transgender identity and experiences. Her comments made me unhappy and uncomfortable, and I’ve thought about her comments a lot because they came from someone I respected and admired. Her first comment I saw—questioning the title of an article about providing accessible products for “those who menstruate” (an area of need during the pandemic)—seemed simply ignorant to me, not intended to be cruel nor targeted. But her subsequent actions—arguing with others on Twitter, defending her original point—seemed to reveal a narrow-mindedness, self-superiority, and unwillingness to listen to others who know what they’re talking about. This approach (basically the Twitter-tantrum) is one that I feel sensitive to (it reminds me, in the worst way, of the behavior of our recent ex-President on the same platform…)

Context 2: After witnessing the Twitter-tantrum, I heard this book included a transgender serial killer. That did not seem like a good look on someone who had made ignorant and stubborn comments on Twitter about transgender identities: creating one (1) transgender character and making that character a villain. This is why I was hesitant about reading this book.

Context 3: I read a lot of books. I believe that you do not need to agree with someone to read what they have to say. If we agreed with everyone we read, we would not read in a way that expands our minds and adds nuance to our own views. Do I also fundamentally believe that we should not financially support nor enable those who are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and who use their platforms to spread hatred? Yes, I believe this strongly. I also believe that all of us are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and many other things we’ve been trained by society to be (there are, of course, significant degrees within this). Yet, I believe we are capable of growth, of learning, of compassion with each other and with ourselves. While JK Rowling’s comments and what I had heard about this book made me uncomfortable, I was still open to reading it. I recognize that this is, in big part, because I was not as hurt by her comments as others must have been.

Context 4: This book does not seem to include a transgender character. The serial killer turns out to be a relatively minor character (compared to my expectations for his role). He is not transgender. He is always masculine gendered. He occasionally dresses as a woman in order to approach women in a non-threatening way, in the process of kidnapping them. He is presented as smart, strategic, and an advanced planner, and his women’s garments are described as part of that strategy and not part of his identity (although, now I’m wondering whether JK Rowling thinks this does mean the character is transgender??) Dennis Creed also fools others beyond his victims with his occasional disguises used when kidnapping women. A bystander in the case Robin and Strike investigate does not intervene nor call the police when she sees two women struggling in the street, unlike how she might if she saw an assumed “man” struggling with an assumed “woman.” Yes, this serial killer’s attack strategy seems to connect to gender assumptions we make about others, and there’s the possibility that this portrayal of a man dressing as a woman in order to attack women could be interpreted as complaint against allowing transgender women into female safe spaces, like bathrooms (I felt like this would be a stretch based on only the text, but I definitely wonder given Rowling’s larger commentary). However, I feel that if I read this book without knowing it was written by JK Rowling, I wouldn’t have found anything particularly objectionable in it, nor would I have thought it was commenting on transgender identity and experiences.

None of this context is to say that I condone JK Rowling’s words on Twitter in any way, shape, or form; what she said was unacceptable, hurtful, and ignorant. She ought to have apologized and then promptly educated herself. But I was surprised that this book was pigeon-holed (I felt) in its tagline. I can’t imagine that the internet uproar that the book included a transgender serial killer was the conclusion of someone who actually read the book (and I find that surface-level assumption about a book concerning in its own way—the internet loves to flock to the sensationalist version of any half-truth). I didn’t come to an easy conclusion, in spite of this, about whether I ought to condone the book itself. JK Rowling’s comments made me not want to support her financially by buying the book, nor emotionally by reading it and spending my time on it.

Moving now past this larger context and my conflicting feelings about the ethics of reading this book, I did find this book a bit underwhelming. This book is LONG (927 pages) and I felt it could have benefited from stricter editing in some places. It didn’t really feel that long, as it has an, at times, nearly chatty tone—the characters move smoothly through their lives and conversations—and it’s easy reading, easy pacing, easy to go along with. This had the effect, to me, of making the book a bit flat. Not flat in a boring way, because it was easy to read and I kept just coasting through it, but flat in an emotional way. The part that got my heart racing the most was definitely the scene when Robin, in disguise, is nearly caught by Luca Ricci when he visits his gangster father in an up-scale nursing home. I clenched my hands around the book in fear throughout this scene, feeling like Luca Ricci was walking behind me, looking at me, as he loomed near Robin. It was harrowing.

The relatability of Robin is definitely the ongoing high point of this series for me. As another thirty-year-old tall blond woman who is way more ready to prioritize career than family, it’s not hard to see myself in Robin. I love her resilience and her quiet confidence. I love her increasing conviction that she is being her true self through her work. I love her struggle against the expectations of others, when she so clearly knows herself. It’s easy for me to want to emulate her. On top of her character, her job is one that’s also easy for me to romanticize. I have always loved mysteries, spies, disguises, complex human psychology, word puzzles, and piecing together hints and evidence. I loved whooping my family members’ butts in Clue as a kid. I love traveling and anything I see as an adventure (growing up, I was a huge dare devil—throwing myself off high dives, picking the scariest rides at amusement parks—until I got hurt a lot as a teenager and mellowed out some). I was definitely driven to romanticize some of these activities because my parents and sister were all deeply afraid of heights, which I found funny. Robin’s professional driving skills is about all it took for me to gasp aloud in awe and admiration. (I’d be lying if I said I haven’t imagined myself as Robin when I’m driving my Toyota Corolla, which is not a glamorous car, but mine is a glamorous COLOR, which is why I picked it). Robin has an awesome job, and she tackles it with grace, and the more strength she assembles, the more self-conviction, the more I love and admire her.

Robin and Strike’s characters are going through one of the slowest slow burns I’ve ever read in a book series. And, while I love a good slow-burn romance, I definitely have some mixed feelings about this one. Item 1: Earlier on in the series, I didn’t want Robin’s character to have a romantic plot line with Strike because of all the cool other things going on with her character development. I think I’m over that, especially in this book, because it’s increasingly clear here how well Robin and Strike’s particularities complement each other. Item 2: Are they better as friends? This seems to be the big central question of this book. They’ve gotten much better at expressing how much they mean to each other. Strike tells Robin that she’s his best friend (this was a great scene) and Robin’s confidence grows through understanding how central she is to functioning of the agency. She learns more about how she needs to operate differently than Strike as a leader within this space (yay for the scene where Morris is fired!) She both emulates and admires Strike, but also increasingly carves her own path. She doesn’t need to equalize their relationship, but she does need to equalize them in the eyes of others, and we see that characters from Morris to the unbearable C.B. Oakden undermine Robin’s equality by focusing on her relative youth and her gender. Would a romance between Robin and Strike reverse some of their own productive effort to equalize their relationship? This seems to be something both characters fear, as well. I do love seeing these two characters grow together—it seems like they’re working out each other’s love languages, understanding how best to express the other’s worth and their own care for each other in a way that is understood and appreciated by them both (there’s a big growth between Strike getting Robin flowers for her 29th birthday and taking her for drinks at the Ritz for her 30th). And this growth actually seems to form the backbone of the novel.

Is this, though, a relationship growth that is inherently romantic? The line seems to be slipping closer and closer to “yes.” I find loving platonic friendships to be very rewarding and very worth examining in literature, and I love a good slow burn, but something about the inconclusive status of this relationship is starting to wear on me. I think I wish it would either settle on the platonic side clearly, so we could explore the interesting things about that space, or progress on the romantic side, which has been a long time coming. I think part of my frustration here is that the growth of this relationship is, as I’ve said, the true arc of this novel. The change in these characters IS the arc because there’s not another one, and I think this deficiency contributes to the flatness of this book for me.

My favorite of the five Cormoran Strike books was number four, so I do think part of the anticlimactic feel of this firth book was the experience of reading this following book 4. Lethal White, as explained in my post on this book from a few years back, felt like it blazed new ground to me, in terms of what a murder mystery novel could do and be, and how it could unfold. I had a lot of sympathy for that murderer. The reveal was not about cracking the case, so much as it was about understanding human experience and context. Trouble Blood, though, felt reminiscent of book 2 as a narrative arc. I wasn’t particularly engaged by the reveal of the murderer—What was new about this character as the murderer? What could this show or explore? These felt like dead end questions to me. I was also confused by this character’s acceptance of their upcoming very public trial when they had so successfully enjoyed satisfaction from the shadows for decades. Their motivations, too, seemed under-explored, put aside as the fanatic behavior of one person when it seemed there could perhaps be threads to comment on there. The emotional arc between Robin and Strike didn’t seem particularly interwoven with their systematic solving of this cold case. Therefore, the joy of this plot had to be in the reveal itself, in the unspooling of the mystery…and this one just didn’t do it for me. I know the bar is high—from The Cuckoo’s Calling onward, we knew Robert Galbraith could spin a tightly woven tale—but what’s the point if all that this is is tightly (well, no longer so tightly) woven plot?

Robin feels an emotional connection with Margot Bamborough and I think we’re asked by the book to care about her, an ambitious woman who worked toward her dreams only to have these cut short, but she just never seemed that vivid to me. Less vivid than say Pat, the opinionated office secretary who I liked a lot. The best of the book was in the subtleties—Pat’s change of heart about Strike, Strike’s relationship with Joan as she’s dying, Strike fully letting go of his emotional ties to Charlotte (I guess that was something we really needed to see happen, him letting her go and actually changing his phone number), and Robin and Strike’s conversation where they affirm their best friend status (very wholesome). Overall, I wanted more from this book. It felt very realistic, very “slice of life,” but I’m not sure we come to the murder mystery genre for realism (more drama please!) But the book was nevertheless enjoyable, in a smooth way, like a story a friend tells you—easy to hear and to internalize, with two main characters you want to root for, but more out of familiarity and habit than because of what’s at stake for them in Troubled Blood.