This is by J.K. Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith, and it's the fourth in her Cormoran Strike series. Strike is a private detective with an unusual background (father a rockstar; mother an itinerant addict), to which he adds a tragic career (he joined the military, but a bomb explosion in Afghanistan takes off half his right leg, so he needs to use a prosthetic). I've never seen the TV series, but in my mind he looks NOTHING like Tom Burke... The main female protagonist in the series is Robin Ellacott. She started as Strike's assistant, but her investigative skills ensured that she rose to become his right-hand-person.

I started reading the Strike books when I was living in Indonesia, and thus began a tradition of reading them in Indonesian... This continued even when I was settled back in Malaysia, and the English versions would have been easy to come by.

The first, The Cuckoo's Calling (2013), I read in 2014. Diary entry: "It's a good book to read in Indonesian. A little stretching in terms of vocabulary, but not too much so, and with a very definite plot to follow. But I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like it in English. Larger than life, somehow. Too much quirkiness, too brightly painted." I know... Sounds book-snobby. OK, I AM a bit book-snobby... But, on finishing, I admitted: "It's a reasonable read."

So, 2015 found me reading the next one, The Silkworm (2014). Diary entry: "I found the story rococo in the extreme. But it was enjoyable. I like the main characters. I wanted to know the end. It mostly seems to get good reviews."

It wasn't until two years later that I tackled the third in the series, Career of Evil (2015). This one actually made it into one of those composite Three Books posts that I used to do for Travel and Food. I'd largely enjoyed the first two books, but the third I just found way too lurid. And it ends with the marriage of Ellacott to her long-time boyfriend/fiance, Matthew Cunliffe. As no-one in his/her right mind can like Cunliffe, and we all know there's a bit of an unspoken spark between Ellacott and Strike, we feel a bit cheated. How can bright Ellacott be so deceived? Or is this all a bit of a stringing-out device, designed to keep the will-they-won't-they tension running on into the next novel?

Well, the answer to that last question is a resounding yes. And, frankly, that's one of the problems with this fourth book, which appeared in English in 2018, after a gap of three years (my Indonesian version, translated by Siska Yuanita, came out in 2019).


There are a lot of horses in Galbraith's book. These are from Mongolia, 2016

We start off with a lengthy prologue which takes us back to the wedding, and Ellacott's discovery of Cunliffe's duplicity (in deleting Strike's phone messages), and her apparently revelatory meeting with Strike, and her regrets, and her eventual decision to stick by this ill-advised marital commitment.

The relationship-management thing then goes on for pretty much the entire book, until her hopeless husband is shown to be having an affair (as we all knew he would) with his best friend's fiancee.

And it's not only Ellacott. We go lengthily through another of Strike's failed relationships (with Lorelei). And even the tedious Charlotte is back (she's the glamorous girlfriend Strike had broken up with right at the beginning of the first book).

Then there's a sentimental scene where Strike accompanies his nephew to hospital, and Ellacott drops in to support him. I guess this is planting the idea of a more "normal" family life in Strike's mind, but I found it a bit of a yawn.

Seriously, if I'd been editing this book, I'd have been cutting, cutting, cutting. It's just way too baggy. It's not that the Strike-and-Ellacott thing is entirely extraneous. In the previous books it has proved an enjoyable background to the mystery at hand. It's just that there's too much of it here, and you find yourself starting to think, "OK, so when are we going to get back to the crime?"



Overall, it's a very long book. The English version, I'm told, weighs in at 650-odd pages. I looked up the audio-version, and found it would take 22.5 hours to read. (By comparison, the first one would have been just shy of 16 hours long, the second just over 17, and the third almost 18 -- so we're talking about quite a jump.)

Add to that a LOT of plotlines: The report (by a mentally unstable young man) of the murder of a child; the blackmailing of a government minister for causes initially undisclosed; a counter-blackmailing attempt; radical leftists protesting the effects of the 2012 Olympics (this is the year the action takes place); the central murder (or was it a suicide?); a war crimes backstory; an artwork saga; a long-ago case of harassment that ended tragically; and the final showdown on a derelict barge, because Ellacott -- AGAIN -- has acted rather foolishly.

I don't mind a hectic storyline. But, as Sarah Lyall argues, this "big, stuffed-to-the-brim, complicated bouillabaisse of a book... can feel over-seasoned". There's too much blow-by-blow detail, "exhaustively described and occasionally exhausting to hear". The review in The Scotsman agrees, finding it "rather too verbose", and complaining about the repetitive, make-sure-we-don't-miss-it nature of some of the sections.

I was relieved, though, that there was a lot less gore spattered around than last time...

But let's back up a bit. I've used the English title for the heading of this post. The Indonesian title -- Kuda putih -- just means The White Horse, and that's fine as an indication of the pub with that name, and the Uffington White Horse, both of which feature in the story. But "lethal white" here actually refers to "lethal white syndrome", an inherited equine condition that means any affected foal can't digest its mother's milk. It turns out that's a key element of the mystery, but I won't say how, because I try not to include spoilers in discussions of detective stories (not, at any rate, spoilers related to the crime).



Galbraith/Rowling enjoys epigraphs, and Lethal White's all come from Henrik Ibsen's four-act play, Rosmersholm (1886). I've neither read it nor seen it, but this blogger notes that the play features scandal, corruption, and an unhappy marriage (all themes that run through Lethal White), and one of its motifs is the folklore surrounding the White Horses of Rosmersholm (in fact, it was originally entitled White Horses).

Another commentator takes this a bit further, quoting a source that says all the white horses mentioned in Rosmersholm are "images of the ghosts which haunt the characters’ present, a historical legacy of one family which is resolved in the present under the continuing influence and presence of the past".

And, as a bit of a digression, here are some fun facts about Rosmersholm. Ashenden, Somerset Maugham's eponymous hero, remembers it: "In his day he had been an ardent Ibsenite and had even flirted with the notion of learning Norwegian so that he might, by reading the master in the original, get at the secret essence of his thought. He had once seen Ibsen in the flesh drink a glass of Munich beer." And Rebecca West, whose real name was Cicily Fairfield, and who wrote The Return of the Soldier, took her pseudonym from a character in this play...

Back to the point: Our previous commentator argues that the white-horse ghosts evoked by the continuing use of the epigraphs relate not so much to an individual family as to "the historical present of the UK as a pathetic and decadent descendant of its heroic, deeply flawed, and even criminal past", adding: "Lethal White seems a not especially subtle assault, in other words, on the poisonous legacy of British colonialism and imperialism."

Maybe. But if Galbraith/Rowling is making a political point, it would have come across more forcefully had the whole scenario been a little more subtle. It's a huge send-up of the upper classes, and of course, we all like that, because those of us who aren't from that layer of society resent the inbuilt privilege of those who are. Strike's comment that they "all know each other" accurately describes the Old Boys' Network that has had far too much influence in the UK for far too long. But the critique here becomes a bit of a pastiche. The dogs; the horses; the children who are dressed as if for the 1940s; the pearl necklace; the weird, infantilizing nicknames (Izzy, Fizzy, Flopsy...). I wouldn't know this from the Indonesian version, of course, but according to The Scotsman, "the aristos all say 'rilly', 'yerse' and 'gels' when they mean 'really', 'yes' and 'girls'". It's an amusing caricature, but its exaggeration detracts from its power to convince.

Similarly with the leftists, who turn out, surprise, surprise, to be fairly superficial and hypocritical.

For Alison Flood, "there is sharp social comedy to be found here". I'm more with Constance Grady, who maintains that the political ideas are just not that interesting, and come across as "a little bit too smug". Certainly, I would say, they're not commensurate with the portentous notions suggested (or so I read) by the Rosmersholm quotations.

All in all, then, a teentsy bit disappointing. Nevertheless, it kept me reading; and I will definitely be proceeding to the fifth instalment in the series, if only because we already have it (in English this time), and the Other Tern -- not an easy bird to please -- has given it a tick of approval.