(by fair means or foul)

 My life ran to sublime chaos last week. I was determined not to read all the Strike books – it’s not just that they’re huge, it’s that they are huge and they are compulsive page-turners, so they guarantee you a week at least of putting your keys in the fridge and your milk on the bookshelf, whilst letting the ‘stuff to do’ list pile up.

But curiosity got the better of me, and I jumped on a borrow of The Ink Black Heart.

It’s not just the detective thriller thing, it’s that Galbraith is a world-class world creator. Unless you really are a leisured-class Victorian, you’ll not be keen on masses of wordy descriptions in your reading, so an author who can evoke a good quality ‘mental film’ while you’re reading without spending half a page discussing the wallpaper is going to be particularly successful. I went back to the book at every opportunity the same way you go back to favourite places on holiday. I wanted to be in that daft North Grove art community, that cemetery (the real place and the cartoon one) and even in the now-famous Denmark Place office.

But The Ink Black Heart also evokes another world we all need to be thinking about – the world that includes ‘social media’ and ‘gaming communities’ – that ‘fandom’ that younger, more progressive people than me tell me I can’t possibly understand. I know this is going to annoy some people, given who Galbraith actually is, but she has extremely efficiently taken the trouble to understand fandom.

A sense of urgency and distress builds as you progress through The Ink Black Heart that has nothing to do with the (very compelling) detective story. In me at any rate, it was comparable to the distress caused by climate crisis, and the need to defeat corrupt, destructive politics. It was the deepening wish to rescue our kids from internet-world.

Not because they’re surrounded by both mercenary and sexually hungry groomers (although they are, and we worry about that), not because there are bone-headed racists and fascists amongst them (although there are, and we worry about that) but because Galbraith shows so neatly how socialising online flattens out relationships and radicalizes debates, driving everything to absurd extremes with no depth.

By the time I was a couple of hundred pages in, a parallel debate had kicked off in my head – why am I so sure being lost in a book is not just as bad as being lost in a message-board world? It went to and fro for several days, causing me yet more absent-minded accidents far away ‘IRL’, but what won it for books (in my head at least) was this: if you’re still reading this review, half-a-dozen paragraphs down, then you’re capable of reading a book and if you read books, even fast, action-packed books, you have room in your head for a more than superficial thought, room for internal debates to get going, for what I call ‘two-step thinking’.

Characters in a film or video game can become ‘goodies’ or ‘baddies’ on the slenderest of evidence, unknown people on social media can do so on the strength of a one-line moral clout. Characters in books however, have room for back-stories, for complex mixes of emotions and most importantly, room to grow and change. Galbraith presents these possibilities alongside presentations of the shallow, insecure convictions of those immersed in online worlds.

If you’re now itching to argue with me, to say how intensely felt online stuff can be, I’d say yes, intensely felt yet trivial and misleading – a dangerous combination that can break out in real-world violence and/or self-harm.

How many times have I come away from social media debates thinking something like this:

Strike wondered whether Yasmin had lived in a virtual world of anonymous people for so long that probability and plausibility fled from her reasoning processes. One theory seemed to be as good as the next, as long as it satisfied her need to be an insider.

I can’t give you a load of examples now, because I can’t remember them. When I finished the book, I didn’t come rushing straight to the keyboard to write the review as I normally would. It took me nearly a week to get here, because I had this incredible urge to get on with those chores, to go in the garden, to visit the park, the beach, the High Street, to go and actually talk to my actual friends – because online debate, online socializing and, especially, online politics (the latter is the battle for the moral high ground I referred to, where a clever one-liner or a few daysworth of bullying can count as a political ‘win’) – these are never, ever going to be half as good, or half as effective, as ten minutes out litter-picking in the car bay on a sunny morning.

I recommend you take a week or so out of your life to read this book, then go out. If you possibly can, take the kids, or your grand-kids, with you.

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Kay

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