Running Grave, Part One: A Ring Reading

Reading Rowling's Latest As If It Were a Dickens Novel Serial: First Thoughts about Chapters 1 to 19

Spoilers, Ahoy!

I confess to being of at least two minds with respect to how I should read Rowling’s latest novel.

I want to read it the way I read any book I like — straight-through, one sitting, all-nighters as often as not. I miss a lot that way, of course; I’m reading for plot points only and the imaginative immersive experience, not for structural and artistry fine points which are essentially invisible in a speed read. I have read the six Fiona Griffiths novels by Harry Bingham that way last month and Lou Berney’s brilliant Dark Ride just last week.

I have read every book by J. K. Rowling this way, with two exceptions: Troubled Blood and The Ickabog. The latter was released over seven weeks with several week-day chapter drops online and a weekend break; everyone read Rowling’s fairy-tale for adults the slow way because it was (supposedly) meant for parents to read-aloud to their children during the Covid lockdown hysteria. The book was not separated into parts, as is Rowling’s want of late, but its seven parts are evident in the chapter groupings of the seven weeks, which we tracked in real-time during its release.

Before that experience, though, I had tried to read Troubled Blood one-part at a time with breaks to write longish commentaries on it before reading the next Part’s chapter bundle. My focus starting out was not charting the Parts as rings or the mythological, psychological, archetypal, alchemical, parallel series, and Christian content along the way; I really just wanted to try to figure out ‘whodunnit’ before the inevitable Big Twist and Grand Reveal in the finale (spoiler alert: I failed and failed spectacularly in that ambition).

It was during that charade, however, that I discovered that Rowling was writing her Parts in ring fashion as well as the book as a whole and the series, which made the effort worthwhile. I also began the project of reading the occult content in Talbot’s True Book seriously, especially the tarot card spreads in the drawings, the surface story, and the three card layouts embedded in the full page illustrations, a project I have yet to finish. Having failed even to spot the murderer embedded in the central Part of the novel, a signature element of the Strike books, not to mention guessing whodunnit correctly by book’s end, I confess to having given up the Part-by-Part method of reading Rowling’s books as wasted effort.

Which was probably a mistake on top of the failure to guess the identity of the killer.

The revelation that Rowling writes her books both as a ring taken as a whole and the Part chapter-sets as rings-within-the-ring, a key quality of Mary Douglas’ analysis of traditional chiastic structure in her Thinking in Circles, was not something to overlook. It means that readers should take the Parts of her books almost as if they were individual stories in themselves (cf. Douglas on the Sacrifice of Isaac story-ring within the larger ring of Genesis). Knowing what we do about ring-writing via Douglas and previous structural analysis of Rowling’s work, these Part-rings will include pointers to not only the meaning of that particular chapter set but also, in the case of the opening Part, perumbration of what we will see in the story-turn and finale. En arche telos estin.

I read Ink Black Heart straight through, that is, without stops at the Parts’ beginnings and ends as I had done for Troubled Blood. I didn’t especially enjoy Strike6, frankly, and have never given it the attention it deserves consequent to that experience. I did identify Aurora Leigh as the template for the novel in subsequent readings — an ID that Rowling confirmed in an X-Twitter conversation — but have not yet followed up on that discovery. I was pre-occupied with the fun of writing my PhD thesis corrections (and it really was fun because I got to write the thesis I had wanted to write, all thanks to my external reader’s instructions); I neglected giving Heart the repeated readings it, as with everything that Rowling publishes, merits and requires for appreciation of her artistry and meaning.

I expected to read Running Grave the way I had Lethal White, Ink Black Heart, and Christmas Pig, not to mention the wonderful Fiona Griffiths novels and Dark Ride. I realized I had another option, though, during the debacle of Rowling, Inc’s, greatest gaffe, the yo-yo release and recapture twice of Strike7 chapter sets pre-publication. Not being able to read beyond the first eleven chapters, what has turned out to be the first ten and a half chapters, I had to focus for a few weeks on the first Part, incomplete as it was.

We knew from the Table of Contents given in both the Amazon and Apple drops that the first Part was nineteen chapters long. This meant that, potentially at least, because we had eleven chapters, we had been given enough information to see if the first Part was a ring. For one thing, if the story turn was in the natural center of a nineteen part story, it would be in chapter 10 with nine chapters before and after it; that chapter, if it reflected the opening chapter or chapters, would be the ring pivot, an essential aspect of chiastic writing. In addition, if the chapters just before and after the pivot mirror or echo one another in any way, we’d have our first turtle-back line, the transverse lines of a ring diagram.

The tenth chapter is Robin’s attendance incognito of a Universal Humanitarian Church (UHC) service with Jonathan Wace presiding. As Rowena Ellis, she and the audience-congregation are swayed to “admit the possibility” of a reality beyond the material dimension of life. The first chapters of Part One are the party after the church service in which Cormoran and Robin act as god-parents to Ilsa’s newborn child at its baptism. Not quite a church service, but very suggestive, especially Strike’s renouncing of Satan (single funniest line in Part One? Probably his “We had a great run,” a throw-away line with what is probably quite a bit of freight, as we will discuss below).

More impressive are the parallels between chapters 9 and 11. In the first, chapter 9, Strike meets with his half-sister (her children appear as cameos); they discuss life at Chapman Farm and cults in general, especially in light of Prudence’s description of a client she has who is a survivor of the UHC. This client continues to struggle to turn her life and thinking back to something of her own rather than that consequent to her cult programming and traumatic experience.

In the chapter immediately following the story turn in 10, chapter 11, Strike meets with his half-sister (her children appear as cameos); they discuss Lucy’s nightmare experience of Chapman Farm in its first incarnation and she relays to Cormoran that she is seeing a therapist to recover from the abuse she suffered as a child. Their conversation is a healing, revelatory moment for both.

That’s as good an echo as you’re likely to find in ring analysis. When combined with the beginning-turn parallel, it seemed likely that Part One was a ring.

When the book was published Tuesday, then, I had to make a choice: read straight through or read the book by Parts, charting each as I went and trying to figure out what might be the meaning of each book within the book should Rowling be crafting this one as carefully as she did Troubled Blood. The point of decision had to be the last chapter of Part One; I thought that if chapter 19, the last chapter, was an obvious echo of chapter 10, then I should take the time to chart Part One, reflect on its independent meaning as a stand-alone piece, and make some guesses about what it might be pointing to in the finale, its Part Nine ‘latch’ reflection, and in the story-turn, Part Five.

Chapter 19 finds Robin back at Rupert Court Temple for a UHC service led by a Wace male preacher just as she was in chapter 10. Robin recounted her second trip to this temple in her chapter 15 Agency office meeting with Strike, but that was a memory rather than an experience and the preacher was Becca Pirbright. I decided to chart the chapter as if it were its own story and give it some thought before lunging ahead with chapter 20 and the rest of Part Two.

I don’t doubt that this seems an exotic choice; I expect that I am the only Serious Striker who won’t have finished the book within the first week (or two?) of its publication. I confess I’m a little uncomfortable with this position and pretty sure that I will be spoiled well before I get to Part Nine. Especially when the other writers here are writing about the book!

That being said, I have chosen to imagine Running Grave as if it were a Dickens novel, which is to say, a story that is published in serial form, a few chapters at a time, usually with a cliff-hanger finish to be sure the reader will return for the next published installment. Something, that is, like how The Ickabog was published or how we feel at the finish of any one of the Potter or Strike novels that are not the end of the series. Considering that Part One of Running Grave, if we tack on the Prologue, is three chapters longer than Philosopher’s Stone and two chapters more than Chamber of Secrets, giving the first Part of nine in Strike7 doesn’t seem that silly.

I finished the charting-by-hand with color coding (!) of Part One, pictured above, and, while not a perfect ring, it holds up with chapter parallels across the story-turn/latch axis. What I hope to do below is share what the first chapter set’s structure has as a meaning, if any, what it suggests about the rest of the book, especially its finish, and what that means with respect to what has been revealed in previous books with respect to its mythological templates, psychomachia, ghosts, and Evan Willis’ Tetractys Theory.

The ‘greatest hits’ of that reading with respect to predictions? Strike being shot with his own arrows in Lucy’s back yard, Charlotte being devastated in explicitly religious language by her old flame, and the presence of Prudence as a character and the absence of this virtue with respect to Bijou all suggest that Robin’s disguise is in great danger of being revealed while at Chapman Farm and that Strike is going with her to a hell of his own, namely, becoming his father’s spitting image. The book opens with him holding a baby he doesn’t want; it seems his imprudent liaisons with Bijou will get him another, as he was to Rockin’ Jonny. Strike’s “run” with Satan continues and Psyche’s trip to Hades courtesy of Venus are on the menu, at least according to my reading of Part One.

Most of you know by now from your reading of Running Grave past Part One if any of those are on target or if they’re all laughably off-base. Predictions really aren’t the thing, though, about ring-reading; it’s identifying the hidden center, the meaning in the middle, as Douglas puts it, that is the allegorical depth and anagogical height of the book as we set out. Not to mention that predicting Rowling’s imaginative twists is an evergreen fool’s errand.

How did I get arrive at those plot-point possibilities, though, just by re-reading and charting Part One? Let’s start with the ring. [In the illustration below, made with the help of my by-hand copy, chapters marked in red are ones that are predominantly Strike chapters, the ones in blue are Robin focused, and the green tinted are the chapters featuring them both.]

The Ring Structure of Running Grave, Part One

A ring composition per anthropologist Mary Douglas has seven key elements, a list I have condensed to four: (1) the beginning and end must ‘match like a latch,’ acting as a question and answer or an echoing reflection, (2) the story turn must reflect the beginning and point to the ending, (3) the story-pieces before and after the turn, ‘chapters’ in Rowling’s books, should reflect in reverse order the pieces across from it, i.e., the chapter just before the turn is mirrored by the chapter just after it as will each chapter in the book down to the ‘next-to-latch’ chapters, the first ones after the beginning with those just before the finale, and (4) there will be rings within these rings.*

*I won’t be exploring this fourth point here except in so much as these Part rings exist within the novel ring and that novel ring exists within the series ring; for future ring-researchers, though, it should be noted that several individual chapters in Part One show obvious beginning and end bracketing, something of a latch.

The picture one gets if representing this structure graphically is the ‘turtle-back’ image in the illustration above. A circle is drawn with the first and last chapters being the beginning and end of the circle’s circumference, a bisecting line or diameter is drawn top to bottom which connects the story-turn and the latch of start and finish, and transverse or turtle-back lines are drawn across that bisecting axis which connect the parallel going out and coming back story pieces or chapters.* The ring analyst is careful to number the chapter-pieces rising to the story turn on the left side of the circle and those descending to the finale from the turn to the finale on the right.

*I make the spaces for each chapter roughly equal; I suppose if one is so inclined or a teacher of geometry like Evan Willis, one could make the spaces proportional to each chapter’s page length. Because chapter 10 is the story turn of the Part One ring, equal spaces is the better choice here so that the nine chapters fore and aft, though often of much different lengths, appear as parallel pieces.

When first charting a ring with pen and paper, my next step is to write short chapter synopses next to each chapter number so I have a summary-at-a-glance visual overview of the story-ring. To make comparisons even easier, I use a four color Bic pen to highlight who is featured in each chapter: as mentioned, red for Strike, blue for Robin, green for the pair together (as you can see in the original way up top, I blew this color-key in the chart by writing in red for chapter 10; Homer nods, etc.).

Let’s look at, then, the latch, the story-turn, and the turtle-back lines of Running Grave’s Part One.

The Latch: The connection of the ring or story-circle occurs at its ending, which should link to the beginning. The first chapters and the last will match or echo the other if the whole has been written as a ring.

As explained above, the ending of Part One, Robin’s return to the Universal Humanitarian Church’s Rupert Court Temple in chapter 19 in echo of chapter 10 was a strong marker that this Part is a ring; the turn will echo the beginning and point to the end. The latch of Part One similarly is the hook-up of chapters 1 and 2 with 19.

Chapters 1 and 2 take place at the reception following Benjamin Herbert’s baptism, in which Anglican sacrament Strike and Robin served as the child’s godparents. The first chapter is told from Strike’s perspective and the second from Robin’s.

It would be hard to be enthusiastic as a priest, even under the Big Umbrella of Anglicanism, to have non-Church goers, a couple who never pray or read scripture and who each embrace fornication outside of marriage as their way of life, serve as a child’s life-long guides and guardians in his devotion to Christ. Strike’s joking off-hand comment about renouncing Satan, part of the rite that he performs on behalf of the baby, signals that this is just a formal exercise for the celebrants, one without real obligation on their part or meaning. The reception is about cake, discussion about who is sleeping with whom, pictures, and chatter about the Agency’s work between the partners. Both Cormoran and Robin, though no doubt they played their roles with respect and gravitas appropriate to the ceremony, are clearly oblivious to the spiritual dimension of the service they have just attended.

The parallel with chapter 19 is that Robin is likewise excited after the UHC Rupert Court Temple service; here she has achieved her goal of being invited to Chapman Farm for a retreat. All of her red flags are up about Taio Mace, but she naively assumes that nothing of moment happened at the service she just experienced and, self-aware and psychologically-studied as she is, a religious cult whom she knows has had great success with mind-control or brain-washing poses no threat to her. She feels about Taio Wace in chapter 19 what Strike does about Belinda ‘Bijou’ Watkins in the opening chapters. Both are sure to regret this confident disregard or low-assessment of Bijou and Taio as potential dangers.

The parallels are religious environments that are feel-good rather than spiritually challenging and a casual posture towards hazardous people. Having read in chapter 17 Henry Worthington-Field’s description of the UHC’s indoctrination of recruits from their week-long retreats years ago, an initiation that probably included drugs of some kind (cf., Pirkbright’s memories in his Prologue letters to Sir Colin, page 17), a baptism of some kind, something quite different than Little Benjy’s, is probably in Robin’s future. Robin ignores the seriousness of Prudence’s comments about mind-control techniques even after learning about Worthington-Field’s experience. Strike, having been equally imPrudent in ignoring Ilsa’s warnings with respect to Bijou, may wind up holding a baby he doesn’t want at story’s end, just as he is at story’s start.

The Story Turn. The PowerPoint slide I use as a template to create ring composition illustrations has its limits, most notably in height. The latch at the bottom is inevitably very crowded. In this one, I simply moved the first two chapters over to the right margin which obscured their proper place next to chapter 19 at the circle’s bottom.

That being said, the relation of the story-turn and the latch of chapters 1-2 and 19 is very much like that between the parts of beginning and end. Chapter 10 is almost an exact match with chapter 19, as explained above, and chapters 1-2 relate to 10 the way they do with 19. The story-turn is definitely in chapter 10.

It should be noted, if only as an aside, that this took some juggling or chapter configuring on the author’s part to get to ten as she does. Not only are the first nine chapters significantly shorter than the second nine chapters (60 vs 70 pages, or >14%), but there are two chapter pairs that are very short and which could easily have been combined, namely, chapters 1 and 2 and chapters 5 and 6. I think it probable, engaging post hoc propter hoc fallacious reasoning, that Rowling did not combine them so the ring center or pivot would be more evident, essential as it is in grasping the story axis and chapter parallels before and after the turn.

The Turtle-Back Lines. I think there are seven fairly clear sets of chapters in parallel across the story axis, the line bisecting the circle top to bottom which connects the turn and the latch. Five of these pairs reflect the near necessity for the first set of chapters in a novel this long and involved to share (dump?) a lot of information; eight chapters are given over to interviews in which the dramatis personae and major events of three different plays from different time periods in Norfolk are introduced. Two of the pairs, the ones nearest to the ring latch and turn, though, are mind-benders in the clarity and richness of the parallel involved. Briefly, then:

Chapters 3 and 18: Strike has returned to his flat on Denmark Street post baptism and he isn’t happy about his life and relationship status. He takes a call from Shanker and agrees to help his old friend’s step daughter of sorts find her biological father, no charge. It isn’t so much from any charitable impulse or feeling of empathy for the girl’s leukemia that makes him be this generous; he just wants Shanker to owe him a favor. Charlotte calls for a chat, Strike hangs up on her and does not pick up when she calls back. He finds Bijou has put her name and number in his dress jacket pocket (neat trick) but bins it; he feels no inclination for sex or a relationship with anyone but Robin (32).

By the time we get to the chapter in parallel to chapter 3, Strike has already had sex with Belinda twice. Chapter 18 takes place in The Grenadier where Strike has just interviewed Henry Worthington-Field. The star of the show is Charlotte Campbell-Ross who has come to share her news; she has breast cancer. Strike is not only brutally indifferent to her “life and death” plea for empathy, he tells her that he didn’t owe her anything for showing up for him after he lost his leg, that he renewed their relationship because it “was on offer,” his “easiest” path. Charlotte “recoiled” at this and Strike explains that she did so because he had just blown up the “agreed mythology” of their relationship’s chairos moment, “shattered a sacred taboo,” and destroyed “the foundation of her certainty” (159-160).

The cancer-Charlotte-hard heartedness parallels between chapters 3 and 18 are a vibrant echo — and a meaningful one, too. The spiritual language invoked at Strike’s rejection of any obligation to Charlotte — mythology, sacred taboo, certainty — point to Strike’s obliviousness to the forces he has just released. Charlotte is Venus in the Psyche and Cupid drama that Rowling is using as her story template in this series, and, as Strike has repeatedly noted in the previous six books, she doesn’t get angry, she exacts revenge.

Or, just as he has failed to protect Lucy as a boy, something he learned only in chapter 11, and failed to protect Leda from Whittaker (or herself) before her suicide, and seems on track to failing Robin-Rowena at Chapman Farm, so he has just executed his long-term love. Death or destruction is everywhere in that chapter 18 dismissal.

The “vacant black cab” that he finds “by a happy stroke of Providence” is a coffin-wagon or hearse, I think, with Robin being the person most likely to suffer for Strike’s psychological cruelty here. Her or Charlotte herself. My first thought? Charlotte will find out about Robin’s undercover role as Rowena and get word to the UHC through Giles Harmon or Noli Seymour.

Chapters 4 and 16-17: Strike and Ellacott meet with Sir Colin Edensor and his two older sons at the Reform Club in chapter 4 and we get the backstory on Will Edensor that we didn’t have from the Prologue pieces. Robin enthusiastically accepts the case which will require an Agency operative to go undercover at Chapman Farm.

The parallel chapters are 16 and 17. The first of these finds Robin meeting with Sheila Kennett, in which interview we get another information-drop, this one all about the Norfolk commune’s first incarnation, back when the Moonbeam Strike family were there. The second is Strike’s interview with Henry Worthington-Field at the Grenadier, who shares the nightmare experience he had with a close friend during a week-long retreat from which Flora Brewster does not escape for many years (and is still a long way from recovery, post baptism). His story of the pregnant woman and Mazu in the field is chilling.

The parallel is the background information being shared and the bizarre enthusiasm amounting to recklessness of Robin and Strike in thinking this job isn’t something of a death-wish. The stories they’ve both heard, together and separately, and the straight warnings of Prudence are just disregarded as things that happen to lesser people.

Chapters 5 and 15: Strike and Robin are both together in these parallel chapters, the front in a meeting at The Golden Lion after accepting the case, the second back at the Agency inner sanctum after Robin’s second trip as Rowena to the Rupert Court UHC temple. In both, Strike expresses his reservations about Robin going undercover but he is secretly pleased by the prospect of her being separated for a spell from Ryan Murphy. They also review what they know and the next steps they should take in each chapter. After the second, Strike’s increasing inability to ‘take’ Robin’s relationship with another man, not to mention Ilsa’s hectoring him about Bijou, leads to his meeting with the barrister-bimbo for what his old friend calls a “displacement fuck.”

Chapters 6 and 13: These chapters are relatively short and each features Robin thinking about her relationship with Strike, one on a walk to Green Park Station and in the other to Bexleyheath Station and on the train thereafter. The first is largely introspective, the second one driven by Ilsa’s panicked call about Cormoran having slept with Bijou (well, stood her up against a wall).

Chapters 7 and 14: You’ll have noticed, perhaps, that I matched chapter 6 with 13 rather than 14, which would be the sequence in a perfect turtle-back. It was a relatively clear echo of 13 and chapters 7 and 14 also seem to be a pair in parallel. Chapters 6 and 7 happen simultaneously, so I don’t think this small cross-over is a big deal; each pair features one or the other of the Agency partners.

In chapter 7, Strike reads the Kevin Pirbright emails that Sir Colin had given him in their meeting at the Reform Club. He is astonished to realize that the Chapman Farm is on the same property as the Norfolk commune that was the nadir of his childhood experiences with Leda and Lucy. At least as disturbing (or should have been!) was reading about the rape that Pirkbright believed happened and the stories of the UHC prophets and their manifestations.

In the parallel piece, chapter 14, the reader gets another information dump via Strike’s interview with Fergus Robertson, who is a journalist scarred from his efforts to report on the cult madness of the UHC. The stories he was unable to publish from a woman-survivor’s testimony about Zhou, the Golden Prophet’s death, “spirit bonding” (free or not-so-free sex), and “there’s something you don’t know” should have Strike thinking of anyone but Robin as the better undercover plant. A rape victim in recovery from but still with recurrent PTSD — into a cult camp where the parallel chapters report sex crimes? Right.

Chapters 8 and 12: In chapter 8, Strike meets Wardle at an upscale Indian restaurant to ask him the huge favor of getting census records for the Chapman Farm district over several decades. Wardle shares some dirt about Ryan Murphy at chapter’s end which gives Strike reason to hope that Robin will see through his sobriety act and leave him.

Chapter 12 finds Strike reeling from Lucy’s revelations about the abuse she suffered at the commune back in the day; he is consumed by thoughts of Leda, Charlotte, Lucy, and Robin (all of whom, again, he failed to protect?). The good news? On returning to the office, he finds the census records he asked Wardle for in chapter 8. He calls Robin and hopes, when he hears Ryan Murphy in the background, that the boyfriend will get upset the way Matt used to at Robin taking his calls. Instead, he gets to listen to the couple kissing and laughing; he hangs up in a real pique — and picks up Bijou’s call and accepts her invitation for ‘dinner.’

Chapters 9 and 11: I have already written about the parallels between the chapters which bracket chapter 10, Running Graves’ Part One Story Turn. In the front chapter, Strike and Robin meet with Prudence, his half-sister on the father’s side, and they talk about cults, mind-control, and the difficulty of recovery for those who escape. Prudence, in keeping with her name, gives them books on the subject of cultish manipulation and warns them to be prudent, which is to say, extremely careful. Their response to her advice to steel Robin’s mind (“Being able to identify their techniques will help you resist them”)? “Robin’s smart,” said Strike. ‘She’s not going to buy whatever they’re selling’ (75).

Robin’s smug surety pretty much dissolves before the cultish artistry of Papa J (and David Bowie’s ‘Heroes,’ the UHC theme song?) in chapter 10. What she’ll be like after the treatment Prudence describes? “Restricted food, enforced chanting, rigid control over your physical environment, digging into your psyche [!] for the places they can apply pressure, love-bombing you one minute, tearing you down the next… nobody’s invulnerable to that, clever or not…” (76). Especially if Charlotte has taken off Robin’s Rowena-mask and blue-haired disguise.

Much of chapter 9 is Prudence’s description of one of her client’s struggle to recover from her time with the UHC. In chapter 11, Strike learns from his half-sister Lucy on his mother’s side how Mazu and company at the Norfolk commune sexually abused her as a young girl as well as how she struggled and continues to struggle to recover to the present day. To complete the half-sister visit parallel with children cameos with psychology coloration, Lucy says she is in therapy.

The biggest echo, though, in these chapters is in their pointers to Robin as Psyche and Strike as Cupid at a particular moment in that myth’s drama.

After Psyche has confronted Cupid with a lamp and knife at the urging of her sisters, burning him with lamp-oil in addition to breaking her oaths to him, she mourns her loss as he escapes to the lair of Venus to recover. [See ‘A Mythological Key to Cormoran Strike? The Myth of Eros, Psyche, and Venus for a review of this myth and the moment I’m describing.] Venus sets a series of impossible tasks for Psyche to accomplish if she is to be re-united with Love himself. Psyche is able to accomplish them because, just as she is about to despair, an out-of-this-world coach appears with the secret to passing each of Venus’ tests. Prudence, named for a virtue, the supreme, even the mother of all other virtues, is the wise crone who appears ex machina to clothe her in magic garments and give her the information to travel into Hades and come out alive.

In the myth, Psyche has to learn to repress her maternal instincts to nurture and help those in need, to be prudent rather than loving in other words, before entering Hades. Robin’s decision not to be in love with Strike, to fall out of love with him via Ryan Murphy, puts her right on track for her trip into the UHC Inferno of mid-control.

Strike matches his business partner’s chapter 9 mythic role-playing in chapter 11 by bringing his nephews a special gift: Firetek bow and arrow sets! Though he gives them the presents in chapter 11, we learn in the first paragraph of 12 that Luke, Strike’s least favorite nephew, “discharged his dart into the side of his uncle’s face, eliciting roars of laughter from Greg” (105). Cupid struck by his own arrow…

In the myth, Cupid/Eros/Amor falls for Psyche, the woman Venus dispatched her son (and lover?) to a mountain side to throw over the side. He chooses to rescue her instead; see Strike’s ‘rescue’ of Robin at the top of the Denmark Street office stairs on her first day. Here the Cupid’s dart makes him unable to control his urges, to act prudent-ially, whence his fall to Bijou’s cackling, busty charms. And enrage or murder his mother-lover Venus, the already volatile and broken Charlotte Campbell-Ross.

So What?

I’ve been playing with potential plot-points thus far, but, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, prognostication with respect to Rowling’s work, especially post publication (!), is a fool’s game, for all the teaching moments that are possible in the effort (see my ‘Seven Guides for Making Strike Predictions’ for more on that). What is the point, then, if guessing whodunnit or how it ends are off the table, in spending so much time charting Rowling-Murray’s structural artistry?

What makes Hogwarts Professor different than other sites online for the serious discussion of Rowling’s work is that we try to focus on the neglected two of the four levels of meaning in any text; see my ‘Quadrigal Reading’ for an introduction to this critical perspective, one tied to the four ways of human knowing. Most writers online and elsewhere are focused on the surface and moral levels of meaning, those tied to the knowledge we have from physical sensation and fight-or-flight, good-or-evil reasoning. Our efforts here are on the allegorical and anagogical, the interpretative levels equivalent to deduction that moves from data to principle and wisdom. Whereas other Serious Strikers and media reviewers are consumed by the surface narrative and themes, even literary allusion, and work the litmus strips of our time to see if it is acceptable or immoral, our efforts are to get at the symbolic depths of Rowling’s writing, her transformative artistry via hermetic images and psychomachian, cathartic allegory.

The ‘meaning in the middle’ of Running Grave’s Part One should be a pointer to what the author is ‘after,’ the experience she wants all readers to have via the imagination and the understanding that more reflective readers will glean. That sounds risibly pretentious, I know, at least as self-impressed as the word ‘anagogical,’ but there it is. So, what does the beginning of Running Grave, its arche, tell us about the author’s aim or goal, her telos?

It’s structure, I think, tells us the obvious and hints at the moral and the sublime.

The obvious bit is the axis of Part One being the UHC’s services at Rupert Court. Everything in the largely expository and introductory first Part of Running Grave is about getting Robin into Chapman Farm, undercover, to rescue Will Edensor, to get revenge for Lucy on Mazu, to solve the murder of Kevin Pirbright, and to reveal the madness back to the humanitarian front of Wace Enterprises. Every chapter in Part One that isn’t about Strike and Ellacott’s love lives is to set up the entry of Robin into the UHC as Rowena Ellis. The story turn and finale being in Rupert Court make that crystal clear; the surface meaning is in the story-circle middle’s bisecting line and pivot.

The moral lesson, the good guys and bad guys on offer whose behaviors we are to applaud and condemn internally, respectively, is first that religious cultists are evil folk playing on the simple good will of the unsophisticated and their naivete about a social gospel being authentic spirituality (special call-outs for the media, actors, actresses, and authors who provide cover for the cultists). The good guys are the people who struggle to expose the cults and to free those in its grasp: those who have escaped, those with family members behind the walls, those hired to get the dirt on the bad guys. The reader does not have to struggle after reading the interviews with the Edensors and the various witnesses to the crimes of the UHC to see through the Rupert Court theatrics and to be cheering for Robin, hissing at Taio Mace, trusting Prudence, and worrying about poor Will.

That, if only that, would be a typical postmodern melodrama, Brecht for Idiots, or Morality Play for the Woke — “Religion, stupid! Opiate of the Masses! Pie in the Sky when you die!” etc. Rowling believes in an immortal soul and her work is peppered with ghosts, remember, so there are numerous suggestions that Papa J and Co. have made real contact with the psychic realm of spirits, if not the spiritual realm per se, enough contact to convince their wards that the Drowned Prophet is an avenger for the UHC. It could be drugs or some other shenanigans, I want to think it is a trick of some kind, but Rowling is leaving that door open.

She has her readers in Part One at the heart of her central beginning chapter “Admit the possibility” and, with that admission, the brain-washing or the advent of revelation, make your choice, begins. I suspect, just as she has been moving Strike step by step into recovery from his godless materialism through six novels and his slow realization of his self-transcending love for Robin (and growing awareness that he remains the Dickhead that his father is when it comes to women?), that the reality of unseen realms and Powers is the experience and messaging of Running Grave, whence the centrality of the religious cult and the mystery it represents.

The allegory of Running Grave? The bracketing chapters on either side of Robin’s entry into the Rupert Court Temple make that clear. We are all ‘cultists,’ which is to say, we all believe the nonsensical messaging of institutions, especially those delivered by movies, novels, news media, government, and schools (hi, Noli and Giles!), that destroy our capacity to see things as they are, most importantly, how the shadow-casters in our Platonic Cave have us choosing lives of Thoreauvian desperation while they hypnotize us with greater-good and humanitarian, even spiritual ideas that are really idols. We deny our cave shackles and cult life in the belief that we live at the end of history, progressing well beyond our superstitious ancestors; we’re too smart to be duped by religious indoctrination or to be brain-washed.

We love and identify with Robin and Cormoran, however, our wide-awake detective heroes who reveal the hidden truths all around them. But their own hidden truths? Both are train wrecks of denial and self-blinding. Robin learns that Strike lived with Leda and Lucy at Aylmerton — and says nothing. Ilsa reports that Strike is about to be seduced by a lawyer-vampire-bitch and she is unwilling to help. She recognizes that she loves him, but rather than doing the “talking thing” about her issues and his, nada. Prudence spells out that the UHC is a nightmare — and Robin does not reflect that she is especially vulnerable to people pushing her buttons; she charges head-on because she has something to prove.

Strike, of course, is no better.

He teaches his sister that, yes, Leda was messed up but there was still love in their mother, real love; he then proceeds to give Charlotte the psychic body blow of denying that there ever was real love in their relationship, that her coming to him in the hospital post IED was nothing in the end, for which he owes her less than nothing. Good luck with your cancer, dear.

He learns that Ryan Murphy was a dangerous cad and womanizer from Wardle and just hopes that Robin figures that out. And until she does, he’ll choose to sleep with a woman that Ilsa has told him point blank is venereal arsenic, vampiric vagina dentata, though even he admits he despises her. Feeling screwed, it’s time for a “displacement fuck” with Leda’s twin in chambers, a woman in search of a baby-bond with sugar-daddy.

Every person of interest provides information about the UHC’s dangerous past and present — rape, murder, indoctrination to the point of irreparable soul-damage, not to mention the sexual assault of children, his own sister being number one, maybe, given his interior Aylmerton memory blind-spot, to include himself. And Strike remains enthusiastic about the job because it will mean Ryan and Robin are separated. This in a man who has joked about his legal duty of responsibility for his partner’s well-being.

These two are the clever folk who think themselves well out of reach of brain-washing cult leaders, blind though they are to their own interior realities and to everything invisible to them in the psychic and spiritual realms. Thoughtful and courageous as they are, they are headed for the revelation of their ignorance and arrogance, of their self-important confidence that they are not prisoners to the ideas of the age, what others think of them, and how they choose to explain themselves to themselves.

If I am right that this is the messaging of the opening and central parallel chapters in combination with the latch and turn, then their cathartic, crushing experience is what Rowling wants for her readers, namely, that they wake up and see the cave of postmodern individualism in which they live, the angst that the UHC uses to hook their members. The book, I think, will confirm Evan Willis’ prediction in his Tetractys Theory that Strike7 will be the nigredo climax of the series that ends with the separation of Robin and Strike, both broken by their blindness. And we will be astonished at this as well, primed to reflect on how little we know about ourselves and our own indoctrination.

And the mythic or sublime meaning? I think Rowling cues that up with her Psyche and Cupid touches discussed above, but especially with the advent of lead characters named ‘Will’ and ‘Prudence.’ Will Edensor is simultaneously and archetypally mentally precocious, socially retarded, and remarkably will-ful; the psychomachian drama is rescuing the Will from those who would make the person prisoner to his surety. Prudence, the queen of virtues, practical wisdom incarnate who lives above the plain of mortals, is precisely the soul quality lacking in the half-brother she idolizes and in the person most important to him.

Will imprisoned and Prudence denied or neglected leads, I think, to the death of love, a parallel with the death of Charity at the start of Deathly Hallows and the super-model suicide-murder in Cuckoo’s Calling. The anagogical-mythic depths of Running Grave? I think the structure of Part One points to one hell of a story, a mythic journey to Hades and a life-changing ride for protagonists and reader alike.

I have just enough self-awareness to realize that reads much more like a Perennialist’s wish-fulfillment fantasy of what Running Grave is about than a list of conclusions consequent to structural analysis. So, looking at the chart once again, I think I’ll restrict my summary of what the ring reveals to the most obvious, visible point: the chapters with Robin as the focus or narrator-of-sorts — 3, 6, 10, 13, and 19 — form a cross with a bar just above the horizontal middle. Robin appears headed for a crucifixion.

If this is the beginning that will be reflected in Part Five, the story turn, and Part Nine, the story latch-hook, I’d bet that she is outed in Five and escapes in Nine. The opening chapter’s picture of Strike with an unwanted baby and his execution of Charlotte in the next to last chapter point to the death of a super-model aren’t encouraging, either; here’s hoping it isn’t his actually murdering his old flame because of what she did to Robin-Rowena and that the baby at the finale isn’t the love-child of his Part One trysts with Buxom Belinda. His impudent imprudence, structure says, will at last have consequences?

Which are just more wild conjectures on plot points, I know. Bad habits… I’m really excited about the promise of Part One with respect to the allegorical and anagogical content, not to mention more ring artistry.

I’m on to Part Two! Nick and I charted the Prologue on Saturday morning and I’m hopeful that he’ll write up what we found in the days before I complete the reading, charting, and thinking about Part Two. I won’t be reading comments here on this post until I’m spoiled, which could be any day now I admit, but thanks in advance to sharing your thoughts. I pledge to respond once I’ve charted the nine Parts and the book as a whole. Cheers!