On February 27, Mortal Whiteness, the fourth novel about the private detective Cormoran Strike written by Robert Galbraith (alias of the Harry Potter book creator Joan Rowling), appears on the shelves of Russian bookstores.
In the cycle of criminal novels Galbraith tells about a war veteran who, after demobilization, decided to become a private detective. Together with her assistant, Robin Ellacott Strike takes on the investigation of the murder of a famous model. After a successful campaign to solve crimes in the first and second book, Strike’s business has gone up the hill. The events of the third part shed light on the past of the detective story.
On the morals of the London aristocracy
According to the plot of the fourth book, an unbalanced young man, Billy, tumbles into Cormoran Strike’s office at first glance, saying that he had witnessed the murder of a child. An inexperienced employee of the agency calls the police. This scares Billy, but the words of the witness do not go out of the head of the detective. Already at the beginning of the investigation it becomes clear that the story that happened to Billy is not a figment of the imagination, and not the last ranks of the British government are drawn into it.
The new novel by Joanne Rowling in the series about Cormoran Strike is dedicated to the life of the aristocratic elite of London - its orders, customs, relationships, traditions. It turns out that even in the splendor of luxurious clubs and expensive restaurants there is a place for terrible secrets.
Together with Cormoran, readers walk through a foggy city and move from luxurious salons to the dark alleys of the London outskirts. In this book, the heroes will not only open up with a new side, but also show that they are the most ordinary people with their own problems, prejudices and fears.
Being engaged in the next case, the grim detective Strike and his assistant Robin will learn to understand each other better without words - the author will write about this as if in between cases. Here, the investigation itself is the background, the reason and the basis for structuring the relationship between Cormoran and Robin. Heroes are also driven by doubts, they look for evidence and evidence of their feelings, dismiss incorrect theories and build new ones. And the writer will once again demonstrate her ability to masterfully weave various threads that are important for the plot and semantic content of the book into a single narrative canvas.
Adult novels about everyday life
Rowling began publishing a series of strikes about Strike under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith in 2013. For six years, the first three criminal novels - The Call of the Cuckoo, Shelkopryad and In the Service of Evil came out from the pen of the writer.
Shortly after the exposure of Rowling’s authorship, the sales of the first novel were several dozen times higher. On the authoritative Internet portal Goodreads, the rating of all three books about detective Strike is 4/5.
According to the editor of the publishing house "Azbuka" Alexander Guzman, often literary novelties are considered by publishers long before the potential publication. At the same stage, the real name of the author may be mentioned, if the latter preferred a pseudonym.
- Shot from the series "Strike"
- © kinopoisk.ru
“Specifically, in this case, I am not ready to retroactively restore my (or colleagues) then reaction, after all almost six years have passed. If I remember correctly, the text came to me after the alias was disclosed. How much was there between the original publication and the leak ... three months. And if we talk about some abstract hypothetical situation, then we, as a rule, consider all potentially high-profile innovations not when they are already released, but much earlier, in a year or two, at the stage of an agent application, etc., well, in applications , mailings and other materials designed for buyers of licensing rights, as a rule, no one hides anything: well, that is, if someone already known is hiding under the name “debutant” (usually in a different genre), then the real name can immediately and not to register, but the fact itself will be mentioned - except maybe , those cases when the whole point of the project is precisely in large-scale, from top to bottom, mystification, ”said Guzman in an interview with RT.
However, after the Harry Potter franchise, Rowling did not immediately begin writing detective stories. The first novel appealing to the adult public was the Random Vacancy, which translator Elena Petrova calls the switch-novel between fantasy saga and the Strike novel cycle.
According to Petrova, “Random Vacancy” is different from Strike’s books, but not strikingly: the novel occupies an intermediate position in Rowling’s work, but it’s still much more so to the second saga. According to the translator, only the topic of growing up remained from Pottery in the Random Occupation, and with the second saga this novel is united by keen interest in modernity and everyday life, as well as the language factor.
Petrova emphasizes: in her first “adult” novel, Rowling, along with her characters, slightly echoed the ethically reduced vocabulary, while in the Strike saga this layer of words took its natural place in the language palette of the text.
“I see loyalty to readers in conveying to them, in particular, the author’s manner of writing, marked, among other things, by a realistic look at the style of communication - in very different situations - people from very different backgrounds. Let's not forget that in Robert Galbraith's novels there is an old-fashioned speech of elderly, educated characters, slang, and professional jargon, and youth chatter, ”explained the translator.
In terms of the manner of presenting the text, “Random Job” has a clip structure with the Strike saga: the chapters are rather short and approximately equal in size, they are easy to read and ask for on the screen.
“Finally, in all the novels that we are talking about - from“ Random Job ”to“ Deadly Whiteness ”- epigraphs and other references to other texts play a huge role. They not only enrich the meaning, but (which is especially important for me) give a reason to recall and reflect in the notes the brilliant Russian translators of different eras: Caroline Pavlova, Anna Ganzen and Peter Ganzen, Polina Melkova and many others. I bow low to them, ”Petrova shared her opinion.
The main challenge for the translator, she noted, is the ability to convey the author's speech, puns and literary turns.
“If you manage to convey the author’s sense of humor (either subtle or coarse), a pun, irony, rhyming - it’s like happiness. If the author's text is saturated with names and titles, it is not necessary, it seems to me, to replace them with generalizations or omit them altogether. Why deprive him of the opportunity to learn something new? ”She concluded.