The Ink Black Heart...of Twitter

a review of a JK Rowling mystery novel

Robert Galbraith is the pseudonym for JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, under which she writes mystery novels.

The Ink Black Heart is the sixth novel in her Cormoran Strike series, but she did such a good job with integrating the backstory that I had no trouble following it despite not having met any of the characters before picking up this one.

Cormoran Strike is a private detective in London, who owns a detective agency. Robin Ellacott is his business partner and friend, and the two of them have an ongoing will-they-won’t-they sexual tension that is obviously present and makes their interactions more interesting, but never crosses the line into being salacious or sappy.

Twitter As A Character

The novel focuses on an internet phenomenon, a cartoon called “The Ink Black Heart,” that takes off beyond anything the creators could possibly have imagined. The creators are a male and female pair, and for well-constructed story reasons, the female half gets the majority of the online abuse. A troll on Twitter with a large-not-huge following manages to seed intense discord in the fandom, causing controversy and initiating trouble, much of it on specious “social justice” grounds. Crucially—as this is the exact tactic that causes so many people online to become part of mobs—even people who don’t like the troll’s bullying, doxxing, and other nasty tactics won’t criticize him directly or openly, feeling that the white woman creator is problematic and not worth defense due to her failures to be Woke enough. They want to be on the right side of history, and defending a white woman (who now has money) who they’re being told has reached success by being “problematic” is just too big a risk to take, regardless of how much the bullying is obviously causing her to suffer.

When the troll’s machinations threaten an animation deal, one of the creators turns up to ask the detectives to identity and locate the troll. Feeling that they can’t help her, they send her to an agency with more experience in handling cybercrimes.

She is murdered, and her (male) co-creator savagely attacked, left with lifelong crippling disabilities, the next day.

Having invested too much money in the possibility of an animated series to just walk away, the production company hires the agency to find the troll in the hopes of either exposing (as a monster and potential killer) or making peace with this very loud voice in the fandom.

The story of how the detectives work to find the troll is so deeply engrossing and engaging that the novel felt like 300 pages, despite it being over 1,000. It’s beautifully written, masterfully paced, and an enormously fun read.

There is also a Discord-like community around a game based on The Ink Black Heart, and the combination of those scenes and Twitter show how deeply Rowling understands the Venn diagram between how people are online and how they are in real life. How people’s faults and flaws are magnified online, but also how their best traits can find unique expression. In particular, the phenomenon of online activity causing psychological fragmentation is illustrated with such precision and beauty that I hope whatever expert Rowling consulted writes his or her own book on the topic (because I desperately want to read it!).

The ending is satisfying and feels worth the work to get there.

How to Use Real Life Experience in Fiction

The parallels with Harry Potter are obvious, particularly how the instant that the author was deemed “problematic,” suddenly every aspect of the cartoon was racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise bigoted and evil. Yet I only noticed the parallels because I’ve followed it all so closely. A reader who hasn’t followed the drama about Harry Potter and therefore knows nothing about how, for example, it was deemed racist that an Asian character, Cho Chang, is in Ravenclaw (the house for kids whose primary focus is academics/knowledge/intelligence) wouldn’t have a clue that Rowling was using her own experience here. It was well-done and not obviously autobiographical.

Tumblr As A Background Character

Having been on Tumblr when I was younger, it is something of which I am absolutely certain: Tumblr is the source of much of our ongoing cultural bullshit. It’s where nonsense like “demisexual” picked up momentum. It’s where the idea that privilege disclaimers are a crucial part of discoursing with morality was concretized—including listing one’s privileges and “axes of oppression” in one’s Tumblr bio. It’s where neopronouns and “non-binary” genders and other silliness got started. Most crucially, it’s where “spoonies” became a thing—the “community” that defines itself around chronic illness and the managing thereof, as well as the ongoing struggle against “ableism.”

Tumblr brainwashees went on to college and became TAs. They are now junior professors going for tenure, with the universities having “idea laundered” (credit to Bret Weinstein for that trenchant metaphor) Tumblr bullshit into the academy.

In the course of investigating possible suspects, Strike and Ellacott find the Tumblr pages belonging to some of them, and Rowling absolutely nails the power and influence Tumblr has on the characters. I grinned like an idiot reading these pages. She got it exactly, exactly right.

Disability “Representation”

I have a lot of friends who write, and I’ve done a fair amount of consultation when they wanted to have a character with PTSD, a chronic injury, or hearing loss—helping them get the details right. The politics of “disability representation” are silly and stupid, but it’s still a good idea for writers to go to great lengths to get things right, especially things about which they have no personal experience. Having given a lot of thought to “representation” because of these experiences, I always notice when a character is disabled in a way that the author isn’t, and have special interest in how an author handles this.

There were several ways that Rowling weaves issues of disability into her story, and I really appreciated how well she handled them. It was a lesson to me as a writer and a pleasure as a reader. First, a peripheral character has Multiple Sclerosis, the disease that killed Rowling’s mother. She mentions it in passing, that the character’s career trajectory is changing as a consequence of a relapse. I appreciated this. Without getting preachy or doing an irrelevant info dump, it caused the world she was building in her story to feel much more real and complex.

Second, Robin is a survivor of sexual assault. She doesn’t appear to have full-blown PTSD from it, but the way it affects her is realistic and very well-handled, making her a much more complex and multi-layered character than she would be without this history and Rowling’s skilled handling of it.

Finally, Cormoran is an amputee. He lost part of one leg while serving in the British military during the era that the UK was working with the US in Afghanistan and Iraq. (He also has some psychological baggage from his time in combat, but like Robin, does not appear to have full-blown PTSD from it.)

Strike’s chronic injury was especially well-handled. Rowling handled this with such realism that I wonder if she has a previously undisclosed chronic injury, herself. At the bare minimum, she did excellent research. Strike has an ongoing calculus in the back of his mind, always weighing exactly how much he can use his stump before he has to rest. Under stress or in the heat of a moment when he seems to be getting close to a breakthrough in the case, Strike convinces himself that he can push himself and it’ll be fine. It’s never fine. Often when dealing with the consequences of having pushed himself beyond the limits imposed by a chronic injury, he wonders how he could’ve been so stupid. This was all so exactly like my own experience of living with a chronic injury that I was delighted to read it, and filed it away as a potential example for explaining life with my shoulder in the future.

This aspect of the book, besides being of special interest to me, really did a lot of work towards making Strike feel like a much more fully embodied, realistic, and human character.

I highly recommend this book if you like mysteries or want a good, engrossing story to jump back into reading.

In particular, if you’re addicted to Twitter, this is an ideal book to try to start reading again, as reading fake tweets in a story about Twitter will satisfy some of the same mental itches (or at least, it did for me).

The Rest of the Series

The Ink Black Heart was so enjoyable that I ordered the first five books in the Cormoran Strike series, and I’m really looking forward to reading them.

Does anyone watch the TV adaptation? How well do they handle it? Is it worth watching?

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Thank you to everyone who encouraged me to write book reviews! The overwhelming and mostly positive response to that post was very encouraging and edifying. I really appreciate you all.

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