The first two Galbraith books established Strike and Robin’s relationship. This feeling of resistance is what gives such emotional depth to “Career of Evil,” her gripping third novel about the private investigative team of Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, which (especially in its subtle shift of focus toward Robin) achieves a new candor about the gap between solving crimes and repairing their damages. But it also seems clear that she’s honest enough to push back against the self-deceptions that lurk within it. It seems clear, perhaps, that Rowling feels at home as a writer in a certain kind of consoling narrative.
What Rowling writes these days, under the pen name Robert Galbraith, are crime novels: the closest equivalent adults have to the apotropaic formula of childhood literature, parading the unimaginable in front of us and then solving it, stabilizing it. Not everybody was going to make it back to the shire. When Rowling wrote the words “the spare,” though - a chilling turn of phrase, capturing all the jaded obscenity of Voldemort’s violence - she refused to offer any longer the comforting pattern of peril and triumph that she had in Harry’s earlier adventures.
You don’t control much when you’re young, and your fears can be so vivid that it’s a relief to see them first adduced and then defeated in a book, a movie.
“Kill the spare,” Voldemort says, and there he goes, murdered, the first truly substantial character in the series whose death we see in real time.Ĭhildren’s stories are often powerfully reassuring. It comes almost exactly at the midway point of the Harry Potter novels, after Harry and his friends have successfully thwarted Voldemort several times already on this occasion, though, Cedric, innocent of any involvement in their enmity, happens to be present. The death of Cedric Diggory is one of the most interesting moments of J.K.
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