The Ink Black Heart review
Nov. 19th, 2022 09:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessThe Ink Black Heart: Robert Galbraith
I actually read this at least one Prime Minister ago, but working out what I wanted to say about it - it’s a long book, there’s a lot going on in it! – took ages.
I found it an engrossing read. I guessed the murderer and a few things a little before Robin and Strike did, but that’s because I made a leap on the basis of one clue instead of building a chain of reasoning. I don’t read murder mysteries to solve the puzzle, as much as to hang out with characters, ship them in this case, and see justice done. I enjoyed reading about the agency’s work and Robin and Cormoran’s lives and relationship(s). I was gutted by how the drinks at the Ritz ended, and rolled my eyes at how Cormoran reacted. Typically, Robin got a clue about her feelings quicker than him, and by the end of the book, he’d caught up, but it might be too late. It’s surely not.
As the book ends somewhere in 2015, the next one is bound to cover Brexit !!! (For some reason, when I started reading this book, I thought it would be the last in the series.)
I kind of pushed this to the back of my mind while reading it, and it’s worthy of a lot more meta than I can produce, but ‘The Ink Black Heart’ is the title of a cult comedy horror animated series that became a hit. One of its creators, a woman named Edie Ledwell, comes to Robin for help, who Robin has to turn down. Then Edie gets killed. Strike and Robin are asked to unmask Edie’s online tormentor, a fan called Anomie, which was what Edie was after, and quickly become convinced said Anomie was the murderer. So, a lot of the investigation involved online fandom and a fraught relationship between creators and fans. As written by J.K. Rowling, creator of the megafadom Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling who has had a time of it online for certain of her pronouncements about the characters she created etc. and these days her views. And she’s obviously processing some of her experiences through this book, although Robin and Strike are coming to fandom as outsiders, with Robin as the younger partner having to handhold Strike (and certain of the readers) through explanations of how Twitter etc works. Robin and Edie’s experiences show how misogynistic being online (especially on Twitter) can be. Even as I was totally with Robin on sympathising with the murdered woman and the teenage fangirls who face online abuse, it’s JK ROWLING writing this, not some other female creator, not someone who grew up online while Harry Potter exploded into what it is (Robin and Strike go to a comic con where all sorts of fandoms are represented except one.)
Also, it occurred to me that surely someone has seriously asked Rowling whether she’d green light an attempt at the in-book ‘The Ink Black Heart’.
Another motivation for writing about how much of our lives are lived digitally could be that the previous book in the series was about a cold case from the 1970s.
It held my interest, though, and Robin particularly stepped up. Charlotte wafted back into Cormoran’s life, causing chaos and showing a glimpse of how the very rich live, not to mention revealing her rotten core to him. I thought that the heart attacks that secondary and tertiary characters had were a bit too on the nose. (The main character in the cartoon is called Harty, which yeah, is one letter removed from Harry. He’s a blackened animated heart having adventures in Highgate Cemetery, the one character that an otherwise divided fandom universally loves, and the inspiration for the show’s title.) There’s too much exposition at times, there were also a few typos. (Yeah, yeah, ink black pot, ink black kettle.)
On a practical level, I found the rendering of ‘Drek’s Game’ (essentially THE chatroom for the fans aka Inkhearts with some animated bits) very hard to read with a digital magnifier. You could have up to three chats running side by side as columns, and while it conveyed the immediacy of various chats that not everyone was a part of happening at the same time, it took a while to get a handle on. I was much happier when it got integrated into the main text like tweets and text messages. I wonder what the audiobook did with that, and what the adaptation will do (ignore it?)
I actually read this at least one Prime Minister ago, but working out what I wanted to say about it - it’s a long book, there’s a lot going on in it! – took ages.
I found it an engrossing read. I guessed the murderer and a few things a little before Robin and Strike did, but that’s because I made a leap on the basis of one clue instead of building a chain of reasoning. I don’t read murder mysteries to solve the puzzle, as much as to hang out with characters, ship them in this case, and see justice done. I enjoyed reading about the agency’s work and Robin and Cormoran’s lives and relationship(s). I was gutted by how the drinks at the Ritz ended, and rolled my eyes at how Cormoran reacted. Typically, Robin got a clue about her feelings quicker than him, and by the end of the book, he’d caught up, but it might be too late. It’s surely not.
As the book ends somewhere in 2015, the next one is bound to cover Brexit !!! (For some reason, when I started reading this book, I thought it would be the last in the series.)
I kind of pushed this to the back of my mind while reading it, and it’s worthy of a lot more meta than I can produce, but ‘The Ink Black Heart’ is the title of a cult comedy horror animated series that became a hit. One of its creators, a woman named Edie Ledwell, comes to Robin for help, who Robin has to turn down. Then Edie gets killed. Strike and Robin are asked to unmask Edie’s online tormentor, a fan called Anomie, which was what Edie was after, and quickly become convinced said Anomie was the murderer. So, a lot of the investigation involved online fandom and a fraught relationship between creators and fans. As written by J.K. Rowling, creator of the megafadom Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling who has had a time of it online for certain of her pronouncements about the characters she created etc. and these days her views. And she’s obviously processing some of her experiences through this book, although Robin and Strike are coming to fandom as outsiders, with Robin as the younger partner having to handhold Strike (and certain of the readers) through explanations of how Twitter etc works. Robin and Edie’s experiences show how misogynistic being online (especially on Twitter) can be. Even as I was totally with Robin on sympathising with the murdered woman and the teenage fangirls who face online abuse, it’s JK ROWLING writing this, not some other female creator, not someone who grew up online while Harry Potter exploded into what it is (Robin and Strike go to a comic con where all sorts of fandoms are represented except one.)
Also, it occurred to me that surely someone has seriously asked Rowling whether she’d green light an attempt at the in-book ‘The Ink Black Heart’.
Another motivation for writing about how much of our lives are lived digitally could be that the previous book in the series was about a cold case from the 1970s.
It held my interest, though, and Robin particularly stepped up. Charlotte wafted back into Cormoran’s life, causing chaos and showing a glimpse of how the very rich live, not to mention revealing her rotten core to him. I thought that the heart attacks that secondary and tertiary characters had were a bit too on the nose. (The main character in the cartoon is called Harty, which yeah, is one letter removed from Harry. He’s a blackened animated heart having adventures in Highgate Cemetery, the one character that an otherwise divided fandom universally loves, and the inspiration for the show’s title.) There’s too much exposition at times, there were also a few typos. (Yeah, yeah, ink black pot, ink black kettle.)
On a practical level, I found the rendering of ‘Drek’s Game’ (essentially THE chatroom for the fans aka Inkhearts with some animated bits) very hard to read with a digital magnifier. You could have up to three chats running side by side as columns, and while it conveyed the immediacy of various chats that not everyone was a part of happening at the same time, it took a while to get a handle on. I was much happier when it got integrated into the main text like tweets and text messages. I wonder what the audiobook did with that, and what the adaptation will do (ignore it?)
no subject
Date: 2022-11-19 09:10 pm (UTC)I actually read this at least one Prime Minister ago
It made me laugh out loud when I read it earlier on my phone (a bright spark on an otherwise down day), and it inspired me to jump on my laptop and log in to let you know. We probably shouldn't use UK prime ministers as a unit of time... but if we don't laugh, we'll cry at the mindless stupidity/callousness/cruelty of the current political state/class in this country.
I've been keeping up with my reading page on my phone for most of the year, but sadly I can't view your layout well on mobile. So thank you for posting that particular gem ahead of the Read More cut :)
no subject
Date: 2022-11-20 01:52 pm (UTC)We probably shouldn't use UK prime ministers as a unit of time...
I do agree with this. I was inspired because there's a reference in this book, which was set in 2014-15, to Johnson as mayor of London. It must have been a knowing reference because the book must have been written during his premiership, and I was reading it while Truss was PM. But I got into a flap because after I'd read it and was drafting the review, we had the weekend when it looked as though several Conservative MPs thought that Johnson should return as PM.
I keep thinking that if we reach the end of the year, whoever is doing round-ups of 2022 in the UK will have..a lot to cover.
Your comments about the layout were thoughtprovoking. I've been thinking about changing it for my own reasons - but I don't know whether that would help people reading it on a mobile. I might have a poke around, but can't promise anything.
no subject
Date: 2022-11-20 09:54 pm (UTC)I can read this layout on mobile perfectly, thank you (but of course, it’s your journal, so continue to poke around as much as you want)
no subject
Date: 2022-11-21 08:36 pm (UTC)And presumably quite a few voters will bear that in mind at the next election.
I was mainly looking for light text against a dark background. So far, so good with this one.