Evan Willis: Running Grave Review

            I received my digital copies (Kindle and audiobook) of The Running Grave on Tuesday morning, and started reading through as fast as I could, eager to get to the story. I finished reading late on Thursday. Except perhaps out of a care to avoid recency bias, I would say that it is my favorite Strike book yet. It is brilliantly complex in plotting, its structural and motivic ties to the other books are well constructed and deeply fun to find, and Rowling has surpassed herself in the depth of depiction of her characters. I was also interested in seeing how various theories of mine were stacking up to our large new data-set. I will begin with my favorite new piece of parallel series connection, the degree to which Rowling made sure that there was a parallel to the “Tale of the Three Brothers” as centerpiece of The Running Grave. Back in July, I proposed a theory that the series was structured as a Pythagorean Tetractys (the number 10 represented in triangular form) in parallel with the ten books of the Potter novels, Ickabog, Casual Vacancy, and Christmas Pig. I think the main structure of my theory holds up, but half of the justification for it needed to be rejected. I conclude with a few miscellaneous notes. Spoilers for the entire book follow.

The Pardoner

            As I read, I was looking for the parallel to the “Tale of the Three Brothers”, the text-within-a-text that would fill in the backstory, and the solving of which would be central in outlining the case. Before publication, I had considered possibilities for what such a story might be. The “Tale of the Three Brothers” had been a reworked version of one of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, The Pardoner’s Tale. In the Pardoner’s Tale, three men are drinking when they find out that a good friend of theirs had just been taken by Death. And so, they set out to find and kill Death. They ask a man where they can find Death, and he directs them to a nearby hill where the three men find a large pile of gold. Forgetting entirely about defeating Death, they send one of their party out to buy some wine to celebrate their sudden increase in wealth. While he is gone, the other two decide that when he gets back they will kill him so that they only have to split the gold two ways. He gets back, they kill him, and then they drink the wine, which had been poisoned in the hope of not having to share with the other two. And thus they found Death. Before I read the book, my best guess was that we would get another reworking of another one of the Canterbury tales, or that we would be getting a reworked version of one of the stories from day seven of ten from the other great medieval collection of short stories Boccaccio’s Decameron. The tales in day 7 of the Decameron and the one story in the Canterbury tales that involves Norfolk both include narratives of trickery involving uncertain fatherhood (the old theory that the timing on Strike’s birth might mean he is not actually Rokeby’s son started sounded plausible).
            But, no such story within a story appeared as I read through. The parable of the turtle seemed promising, only to never reappear except as minor plot point. In Strike’s investigation into Daiyu’s drowning, there was a Hallows-esque side mystery that had the potential to distract Strike from the main mystery he was hired to resolve. But that is not a text that people are trying to interpret, and whose correct reading is central to the resolution of the plot.

            And then I remembered the wider context of the Pardoner’s Tale in the Canterbury tales, the Pardoner himself. The character telling the story in Chaucer is a clergyman with the authority to sell indulgences and who runs a great trade in saints’ relics (which are not really relics, but the bones of pigs). It is clearly implied that he takes advantage of people both monetarily and sexually in return for these indulgences and relics. He gives his speech with the structure of a medieval sermon, opening theme followed by exemplum, an illustrative example.. He opens by boasting that he has swindled people out of money by his sermons, always preaching on the theme that greed is the root of all evil. He then launches into his tale, showing the dangerous effects of self-seeking greed. He then tries to get the rest of the group on their way to Canterbury to buy from him, forgetting that he had already boasted of swindling people of their money. This, fortunately, only produces outrage from the other members of the party.

            Modernize the character of the Pardoner, add magic tricks and all the science of psychology, and you get a global cult leader out for his own monetary gain and sexual conquest who preaches deeply moving sermons about doctrine of radical denial of material possession, centered on the cultus of a girl whose bones are all that remains after being torn to pieces by pigs. You get Jonathan Wace and the UHC. They are the direct narrative parallel to the tale of the three brothers, the text of which is the central task of interpretation undertaken by our main characters.

State of Tetractys Theory after Running Grave

            To review, my primary predictions resulting from both a Tetractys structure and the mythological backdrop were:
1. That Running Grave would act as the third part of the triad of the set of ten, the last of the nigredo triad, to be followed by a dyad albedo, and then a monad rubedo. Thus, the book was to tear down the characters to their foundations, allowing for cleansing growth to follow in the albedo. Given the Tetractys form, while we should still expect all the 1-4-7 parallelism, we should expect parallelism across the Tetractys center at 6.

2. That, given the myths of Cupid and Psyche and the Gemini being understood as structural backdrop for the whole series, we should expect the nigredo narrative to divide Strike from Robin, each individually to be purified in albedo books 8 and 9 (thought to parallel a wide-scale political event in mythological parallel to the Trojan war), to reunite to vindicate Jack/Orestes in rubedo 10.

            Prediction set 2, the mythological backdrop, seems to me fundamentally disproven by the content of Running Grave. There was, thank goodness, no two book Strike/Robin split. (What a gloomy prediction that was!) The error seems to lie in this: ever since my first post on Hogwarts Professor, I have taken Rowling’s use of mythological background as indicators of the structure of the series as a whole, rather than as recurring motif structures within each of the books.

            In the Harry Potter, while we do see Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers as a running motif throughout the series, it does not indicate the structure of the series. Each book in the series carries elements of breaking a long chain of family brokenness by means of an act helped by a subtle Hermetic figure. That this motif is heightened in the last three books, all with Snape as the subtle figure, does not indicate that the series as an entirety abides by this structure. In Order, we get the dark playing out of the myth, Snape uniting the Order and Death eaters in battle, culminating in a catastrophe of family history in the death of Sirius. In Half-Blood Prince, we get Voldemort’s backstory of family brokenness and Malfoy’s attempt to redeem his father’s failure helped secretly by Snape (notably, the Gaunt ring horcrux, the one tying to the chain of catastrophe in Voldemort’s family, is the curse that brings death to Dumbledore). We get final positive resolution of the same motifs in Deathly Hallows in which Harry comes face to face with his parents’ killer (as mediated in the background by Snape’s providing information) resolving the cycle of family brokenness. Rowling’s mythic background is repeated as intra-book motif, not as series-structure.

            In the Strike novels, we see both Cupid and Psyche and the Gemini played out within books rather than as wider series structure. Some aspect of Strike’s life he hides from Robin, dividing them at around the same time as she goes undercover for a significant portion of the case, in direct imitation of the secret of Cupid being revealed and Psyche’s descent into the underworld. In Running Grave we see this played out with the Strike/Bijou disaster playing out almost simultaneously with Robin’s descent into the underworld of the UHC. To a lesser extent we saw this play out in Ink Black Heart where Robin played the undercover role both in the game and at the art commune, roughly coinciding with Charlotte revealing that Strike was in a relationship with Madeline. A similar structure seems to be playing out with the Gemini/Leucippides, in that almost all of these books represent Strike and Robin stealing each other away to some extent from their existing or newly-established significant others, with the same underworld motif of Robin frequently going undercover. We did not get the series-mystery of the death of Leda Strike resolved in Running Grave. This reveal may prove to be book 10’s central revelation that for the last time drives the separation with Robin’s descent undercover. But, in general, I think we will continue to see these two patterns within each individual book, rather than as clues to where the series is going.

            My prediction involving Jack as Orestes-figure to have the Gemini step in and rescue in Book 10 I believe also has to be abandoned for similar reasons. Running Grave has revealed and limited the one circumstance that could have had Lucy play anything close to a Clytemnestra role, despite fitting in that genealogical niche among the children of Rokeby. Rowling, I think, kept her direct use of the full Orestes myth to the Potter series.

            As to the Tetractys as model, I think the main thing that could have thoroughly debunked that portion of the theory would have been a strong dissimilarity of Running Grave to Deathly Hallows or such a strong similarity that series wide plots would be resolved in Running Grave. The other proposed suggestions for parallelism such as Extended Play or 7 with 3 extras, would have had us continuing to see Half-Blood Prince parallels, more strongly paralleling another book, or more absolutely resolving the series. And I do not think there is any doubt as to the parallelisms, and we don’t have the main series-threads resolved. Even if we would never have guessed Charlotte as the Dobby-death parallel (glad to be wrong about Barkley or Shanker), we were correct to predict that there should be such a death mid-book that would purify Strike’s purpose as Dobby’s death did to Harry’s. The dismissal of the mythological backdrop as series-structure, and thus the Trojan War parallel to the politics of the Dyad, does mean that I have little suggestion as to the general character of books 8 and 9 except that I still think that they will parallel Ickabog/Casual Vacancy or Casual Vacancy/Ickabog. (By Rowling’s account 2003-2007 was the time of composition for Ickabog, 2007-2011 for Vacancy, and 2012-2020 for Christmas Pig. If Tetractys theory is true, there was continuous writing of the first Tetractys with initial planning date of around 2003 in order to add the needed elements to Half-Blood Prince. If parallelism is by composition date, Ickabog is next, if by publication, Casual Vacancy is next.)

            Running Grave seems to ultimately support the claims of a Tetractys structure (purified of the series-structural-mythological aspects which collapsed). In part, the collapse of the mythological structure itself makes the Tetractys more likely, as 10-book parallelism becomes a much easier thing to manage without that pre-set series-wide structure. The novel, on an Alchemical level, was aimed at the torture of the characters to bring them to their fundamental selves, a true nigredo stage work. Though aquatic imagery runs throughout the book, it is focused on a renunciation of what is not currently working in favor of new decisions, and is carried on by the composite Umbridge/Bellatrix of Mazu. It is water not as purifier (as in Albedo), but as solvent (dissolving the metal down to Prima Materia). As an aquatic nigredo, we have almost exactly what we saw in Troubled Blood, which had as its focus the reduction of Strike to his most fundamental elements in the presence of water. Troubled Blood and Running Grave feature centrally the (attempted) suicide of Charlotte as a driving factor in Strike’s thinking. This parallelism across the center of 6 within the nigredo Triad explains these elements. To sum up: Theories that have attempted to explain the expansion to ten books by some lack of one-to-one parallelism with the Potter novels seem untenable due to the extensive Hallows/Running Grave parallels, while direct parallelism across ten book sets seems supported by an aquatic nigredo in Grave that parallels across Tetractys center to the aquatic nigredo in Troubled Blood. Two books of albedo cleansing of the characters still seems a safe call for 8 and 9.

            In what may be the historian of mathematics in me seeing patterns, there is also I think a subtle nod to the cult of the Pythagoreans in the UHC. Historically, a member of the Pythagorean cult, Hippasus, proved incorrect the central belief of the cult that everything was made of natural numbers and their ratios by showing that the diagonal to a square was incommensurable to the side (an irrational multiple of the side length). A few weeks later, Hippasus died by drowning, likely having been murdered. The Pythagorean cult decided to keep this secret hidden from the general public for fear of inducing a panic, and supposedly hid their knowledge of irrational numbers in the central symbol of the society, the five pointed star or pentagram (whose segments are also of irrational length to each other). Thus the drowning-under-suspicious circumstances leading to a five sided central cult symbol of the UHC sounds very much like a call-back to the Pythagorean cult.

Status of Mercury Markers Theory

            I am unsure of the current status of my Mercury Markers theory, in that the one explicit reference I noticed was to Shakespeare’s Puck in the chapter that introduced Prudence, leading me to half expect Prudence to somehow be associated with the UHC for much of my read-through. This concern did get airtime however in the moment when Will Edensor accuses Prudence of being associated with the UHC by reason of the Jungian therapist’s office bearing a resemblance to Mazu’s office (a subtle parallel to Harry’s confusing Andromeda Tonks with Bellatrix upon first seeing her in Deathly Hallows). This confusion seems to point to Rowling trying to draw a pro-Jungian distinction between the Jungian doctrine of universality and synchronicity and the misuse of elements of those doctrines by the UHC. That the immediately following chapter introduced the first direct appearance of Jonathan Wace, who is very obviously the villain, could still substantiate the theory. The Aesclepian appearance of the Healing Prophet, in that the rod of Aesclepius with its one snake (a common symbol of the medical profession) is often confused with the Caduceus of Hermes with its two snakes (a symbol indicating theft and trickery, all too frequently also mistakenly used as a symbol of the medical profession), may be the non-red-herring Hermes figure indicating the culprit. That said, given the nature of Running Grave as a book that is less interested in finding out who did a thing, but in gathering evidence by which one can take down the one you know from the beginning is evil, I don’t know to what degree this theory is testable by means of this book.

Extra Miscellany

            As Christmas Pig is my favorite Rowling novel, I also appreciated a handful of times that Running Grave seemed to point to elements from that novel. Notably, we get a couple references to loss or deprivation of stuffed rabbits (if you needed another sign that the UHC was up to no good) and one of the side cases the team takes on is given the nickname of “Toy Boy” (I may have missed it, but its possible that there may be a gaffe here as I cannot find where in the book they describe what this case actually was about.) The language of getting past a “false self”, so central to the UHC, is language borrowed and twisted from the psychotherapeutic works of D.W. Winnicott, better known for propounding the theory of “transitional objects”, objects useful that Rowling cited as central in interviews about the central themes of Christmas Pig.

            In a neat note of parallelism to Deathly Hallow’s epigraphs, we had both a mention of Quakers and an Aeschylus quote late in the text that is referred to in the final line of the novel.

            On an entirely personal note, and with far less seriousness than any of the above, I was entertained despite myself at “what Robin thought was the oddest of all facial hair variations: a chin curtain beard with no moustache,” (774), as I  happen to wear exactly that variation of facial hair.