Five Notes with Spoilers after a first viewing of the BBC1 adaptations of Robert Galbraith’s Cuckoo’s Calling:
(a) Rowling made two big mistakes in the first Cormoran Strike novel which she cleans up in the adaptation for the little screen. The two great Flints of the first mystery were the CCTV film gaffe about the two men running together away from the scene and the murderer keeping Rochelle’s mobile phone. Her superstar editor should have been fired for those two mistakes; she fixes it for the BBC1 audience. Whether the change is canonical or not given the many differences in the two stories will be the subject of later conversation.
(b) She ‘cleans up’ the outrageously gay Guy Some character, who is a comic caricature akin in degree to Fagin the Jew in the published original, but at least if no longer overtly gay he is still black on teevee. The deadly Shanker, in contrast, becomes something like an IRA bomber-elf in appearance — a well trimmed auburn beard? — rather than a gangly London street thug [“Tattoos covered his wrist, knucles, and neck,” “gaunt and pale, his head was shaven, a few freckles were scattered across a broad nose and his mouth was wide and thick-lipped,” Career, p. 126]. Shanker doesn’t appear in person until Career in the books and is well worth the wait. Mixed race and a walking human example of spontaneous combustion, he answers to no law or principle beyond his advantage and visceral loyalties. This guy? He’s short enough next to Burke’s already diminutive Strike to qualify as a leprechaun side-kick and looks nothing like Shanker as described in Career.
(c) I may have missed it but they don’t seem to have ever shared with the teevee audience that John Bristow visited Lula’s apartment the day of the murder. Learning that critical information only at the reveal breaks one of the ironclad rules that Rowling always highlights about giving the reader/audience a fair chance (what we’re told, by Bristow, is that he was home watching movies with mum the night of the murder, his alibi, and she does not contradict him). That they cut out Strike’s “bat shit insane” line in the office finale and his recitation of Tennyson’s Ulysses in hospital were also major disappointments. [Ah, Bristow does mention in his first meeting with Strike that he saw Lula the morning of her death. I’ll have to check to see if he says it was in her penthouse home…] [Read more…]
A Few Thoughts About Epilogue Day from David Martin
But this epilogue does something more than that. It brings the story full circle, with the sending off of the next generation. The “building” of the bildungsroman is complete – for Harry and his generation. Harry came of age with his seventeenth birthday back in chapter seven of Deathly Hallows, but now our characters are fully adult and married with children of their own. In a way, chapter 36 ended the main story of Deathly Hallows, with the defeat of Voldemort. This epilogue ends the whole seven-book series. In terms of Rowling’s circle patterns, this chapter pairs well with the first chapter of the series way back in Philosopher’s Stone: The Boy Who Lived. That boy, who was a baby in that first chapter, is still living, and he is now a man. We have gone from the Dursley’s “perfectly normal, thank you very much” to Harry’s “All was well.” 
This restoration began in chapter 36. Voldemort, the great disrupter of the way things should be, was defeated. After his death “the news (was) now creeping in from every quarter as the morning drew on; that the Imperiused up and down the country had come back to themselves, that Death Eaters were fleeing or else being captured, that the innocent of Azkaban were being released at that very moment, and that Kingsley Shacklebolt had been named temporary Minister of Magic. . . .” (Deathly Hallows, 744-745) Later two of the three hallows are dealt with so that they will not bring any more disruption. Harry’s holly and phoenix wand is restored to him.
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