Inside the first gallery, before you can even examine the art, you hear a semi-natural sound, something between a thrush's call and a cuckoo clock, then a kind of Papageno's song of mews, blips and nonsense syllables, broken by a military rat-a-tat.
In addition, the news that Ms. Rowling wrote "The Cuckoo's Calling" broke over the weekend, ensuring that the subsequent rush of sales would occur in the same calendar week — ideal for the purposes of best-seller lists, which typically collect numbers from Sunday through Saturday.
Only cuckoos, calling from the bamboo and the banana groves, broke the silence.
When The Cuckoo's Calling eventually found a publisher in 2013, it was achieving respectable sales before the secret of its authorship broke, and it then shot to the top of the bestseller lists.
The better to hear the cuckoo.
One recent afternoon, he peppered a conversation with performances from "The Missouri Breaks," "Scarface," "Carlito's Way," and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," among other movies.
** "Natural History," but for its awkward fourth line, is a perfect little verbal mechanism: **{:.break one} ** The Cuckoo Is at its best In clocks.
** On another occasion, in The Auk, the American Ornithologists Unionn quarterly, he observed, of a subspecies of Malaysian cuckoo: **{:.break one} ** Riley (Proc. Biol. Soc. Wash., 51: 96, 1938) named a race, minor, from Borneo, on the basis of "averaging a lighter gray on the head, throat, and chest; the size smaller in comparison with sumatranus".
