Running Grave: Part Three Ring Reading

Four More Weeks at Chapman Farm in Circles and Squares

This is the third in a nine part series of posts in which I will be reading Rowling-Galbraith’s seventh Cormoran Strike novel, Running Grave, as if each of its nine Parts or chapter sets were books themselves. I’m doing this because Rowling has in previous books, most notably Troubled Blood, written the Parts of her novels in the same structural form that she does the book as a whole and the series of books taken in a set, a traditional story scaffolding called ring composition (see the first post in this series for an introduction to that).

The idea, in a nutshell, is to read Running Grave as if it were a Dickens novel, a super-long book best read as nine, serialized, semi-stand-alone parts.

Having charted the Prologue and Parts One and Two, the Part-Ring theory seems to be holding up; each has shown the signature elements of a traditional ring, namely, a latch, a turn, and transverse parallels between chapters before and after the turn in reverse order. Charting Part Three last night, it, too, can be read as another instance of Rowling’s ring writing, though it more obviously is two overlapping squares. Part Three’s chapters, as in Part Two, alternate between Strike’s and Robin’s perspectives and activities outside and inside Chapman Farm.

Before diving into that structural analysis of the third Part of Running Grave, though, I want to step back to note the background assumption of my ring reading of Strike7. The premise of my breaking down of the book’s constituent Parts into their structure is that Rowling is writing ‘rings within rings,’ that the chapter sets of the book are to the book as a whole what the novel is to the entire series. I’m assuming or taking as my unproven premise that Running Grave is a nine Part Ring that will look like this in the end:

Aside: I understand that the ‘Latch’ is probably the Epilogue/Prologue pair which would make Parts One and Nine a fourth turtle-back line. My reason for portraying the book picture this way will be evident in a moment.

I take this as my premise because it has been the rule for Rowling’s writing that her go-to structural choice is a ring — for books, series, chapter sets, even longer twitter threads. Having noted that, it makes the breakdown of the first four Parts of Running Grave relatively straightforward; there is no parallel piece with which to compare that Part in the larger ring of the story (e.g., I speculated about what Part One’s revelations would have as parallels in Parts Five and Nine, the turn and close respectively, but I couldn’t compare them because I haven’t read them yet). Things will get more interesting on the ‘back side’ of the novel’s Parts when parallels with the apposite numbers should be in play if the author continues to conform to chiastic formula.

The thought I had this morning, though, after charting Part Three is “Maybe not.” Part Three, as in Part Two, is in alternating views of what Strike and Robin are doing. Charted, it looks like a pair of over-lapping squares. Seeing this nine piece structure deployed for two Parts in a row, the possibility that the book as a whole has alternating corners as its nine part structure seems credible. Here’s what that would look like:

More on this, of course, as the story unfolds. Today, I’ll look at Part Three of Running Grave as a ring composition, speculate about its possible Part Seven echoes, and note the similarities with Part Two’s structure.

The Latch: I think Chapters 37 and 51 are the hook and loop of Part Three. Dev Shah, for starters, pretty much goes off on Strike in chapter 37’s office scene for being soft on people having sex with children. Ryan Murphy starts off his conversation with Strike in chapter 51 at St Stephen’s Tavern by describing the Aylmerton Commune as the “biggest paedophile ring” in history up to that point which brings Strike up short as repressed memories of his time there, specifically of an abused girl come to the surface. On his way to his meeting with the Graves at their mansion and estate in Norfolk in Chapter 37, too, Strike is depressed because of childhood associations with the area.

Though I separate them on the diagram, I have to connect chapters 38 and 49 as well, if not as the latch per se. These are the only interviews related to the Edensor case that Strike has in Part Three, in which he speaks with the Graves family and with Barry Saxon, the Normans and Saxons respectively given Delaunay’s surname, and Strike leaves each interview with information or a clue about the people who were involved with Daiyu’s fatal trip to the beach (Carrie Makepeace and Paul Draper).

The Turn: Chapter 43 and 44 make the natural story turn; Part Three has fifteen chapters so its geometric center is 44 because it has seven chapters before it and seven chapters following. It links with the latch of beginning and end because it starts out with another uncomfortable exchange between Strike and Dev Shah, this time with the contractor sharing the Private Eye piece that names Strike as party to QC Humbold’s affair with Belinda Watkins. Strike meets with Bijou after hunting her down with information Ilsa has provided and has a wonderfully uncomfortable meeting with her, well, ‘for her,’ at The Ship. The parallel is with the closing chapter, Strike’s icy if informative meeting with Ryan Murphy at St Stephen’s Tavern; in the one, he has it out with a woman with whom he wants no relations and, in the other, he refrains from speaking his mind with a man with woman he wishes a woman was not in relation.

The Turtle-Back Lines: They are three chapter parallels in Part Three, again, each made up of chapter singles and pairs relating what Strike and Ellacott are doing.

Chapters 39 and 50: Robin does not get messages from the plastic rock in these two weekly reports — each of the four Robin passages in Part Three represent a week at Chapman Farm, in “the Lion’s Mouth” — and both begin with troubling classroom presentations about expectations of UHC members. The first is their needing to break with family and loved ones via written letters; Robin is not disturbed by the deceit as much as she is by her not having thought of setting up an address for this kind of thing. The second in parallel are the lectures on ‘carnal relationships’ and the ‘possession instinct’ by Taio Wace, through which the women are groomed to be “Receptives” (thank you, I Ching!) for sexual advances from any UHC man (I almost wrote “any male member”).

Each of these chapters, too, features the agony of family life on the Farm. In 39, Emily Pirbright arrives and the misery of the two Pirbright sisters and especially of their mother Louise, at least with respect to sister-sister, mother-daughter relations (Becca is a winner in terms of status and privilege) is front and center. In 50, across the axis, Robin witnesses and confronts Will about his daughter Qing’s future, which exchange seems to penetrate at last his brain-washing armor in its daddy-daughter chink.

Chapters 40 and 47-48: Strike is in Cornwall, as pledged, to accompany Uncle Ted to his GP appointment which ends in a diagnosis of dementia. The rest of chapter 40 is Strike checking his email inbox to read Robin’s latest drop, Shah’s report about the unpleasant Makepeace family in Manchester, and no response from Torment Town. He spends most of his time searching online for Cherrie Gittins. In the opposite chapters, Strike is back in London but he touches base with Ted, who has forgotten his visit, Torment Town still has not responded, Shah has another unpleasant encounter and mission accomplished, and Strike takes his search for Carrie Makepeace to another level.

Chapters 41-42 and 45-46: Both these chapter pairs begin and the second ends with Robin having made a visit and drop at the forest’s plastic rock. She reflects in her notes to Strike but mostly in her self-reflections about the degree to which the UHC’s indoctrination techniques are getting to her, wearing her down, and the mental tricks she has to invent to maintain her awareness of her mission and her self-identity beneath the cult-member mask she wears.

The big parallel, though, I think, is in the representation of the cult’s destruction of its women. In the front chapters, a child escapes from the dormitory, so Mama Mazu has Taio punish the young women who were supposed to be on watch. These women debase themselves, begging for her mercy, but they wind up screaming in the Temple as their hair is cut (and worse?). On the back parallel, Robin talks with Penny in the dormitory bathroom as each removes the coloring from their hair by UHC order. When Robin points out the hypocrisy of their having to change their color to its “natural” state when Mazu Wace clearly dyes her hair black, Penny all but has a nervous breakdown and hides from Robin in a shower cubicle.

Summary: These are some strong parallels and demonstrate a consistency that, along with the story turn and latch, make me think it is no stretch to say that Part Three is also a ring. I want to note that Rowling-Galbraith had to stretch to make this Part as many chapters as she did; there are only three that are eight pages or longer and seven are only four or five pages long. Several of them could easily have been combined and been little longer than single-entry chapters like 39 and 50, covering a whole week of Robin’s activities and thinking (cf., 37 and 38, 43 and 44, and 45 and 46). Is it ridiculous to assume that she made these divisions or neglected the possible elisions for ring symmetry?

The Square Lines: As strong as those parallels are, as noted above, the Part Three structure remains as it was in Part Two, an antiphonal back and forth between Robin’s experiences on the inside and Strike’s efforts and thinking on the outside of the Farm’s fence. Those parallel stories advance in a hopscotch fashion or something like overlapping squares:

If you read the Robin chapters in series without the Strike chapters between, the progression of Robin’s indoctrination, her resistance to its influence, the depths of the UHC cult’s control over the inner and outer lives of its members, especially their thinking, and their freedom to injure them, not to mention the sexual abuse, is highlighted. Similarly the Strike chapters reveal his difficulty in ‘keeping it together’ without Robin there; his failure to follow up on Pat’s odd behaviors with respect to Littlejohn and renewed distance from Strike is hard to imagine if his partner was present and Robin’s absence in the Graves and Saxon interviews will surely be felt down the line.

All that to say the ring structure interpretation of Parts Two and Three, at least, should not obscure the back and forth narrative structure deployed in Rowling’s telling of her protagonist’s stories while they are separated. Just as in the antiphonal chant and response structure, the reader is watching the two grow closer in their separation, like strands in a rope. Strike’s secret hope that Robin undercover would dissipate or strain her relationship with Murphy seems to be coming true, albeit at a terrific cost to her sanity.

The Meaning in the Middle: Perhaps the most easily overlooked portion of the Strike chapters is the prominent place that Dev Shah plays in almost every piece. With the exception of chapter 51, Shah is in every one of the Strike sets and nowhere more importantly and prominently than when he shares the Private Eye article about Humbold QC, Bijou, and Strike in chapter 43, the story-turn’s first half. Without this notice, Strike would not have taken the pre-emptive action that he does to confront his “displacement fuck” outside Lavington Court Chambers and gain her assurance that she will deny any relationship with him.

Strike has his doubts that he has heard or seen the last of Bijou and her attempts to use him to get her married lover to leave his wife. Rowling’s placement of their conversation in the dead center of Part Three suggests this concern is well placed. I more than half-expect that Belinda (and baby?) will make a re-appearance in Part Seven. That or Shah will save him with information he needs to know once again.

The Developing Story Pieces: Having noted Dev Shah’s multiple appearances and his growth in stature and character-dimensions as Running Grave progresses in Part Three, there are several other story strands that appear and are developed in these fifteen chapters that deserve at least a mention, though they have no in-your-face structural importance. I ask your indulgence, if you have finished the story, for reviewing what Rowling has shown us so far, so inventively, drip by drip.

Jacob Messenger: We first hear of Jacob in a Farm dining room aside, chapter 39, an aside heard just after seeing Dr Zhou scurry across campus to help someone. Penny talks about Jacob, Dr. Zhou, and hints that, whoever Jacob is, Zhou is his “savior” and he would be euthanized if in the hands of the NHS. Ryan Murphy then shares with Strike at the Part Thre close the name and story of Jacob Messenger, a man who joined the NHS to “burnish his reputation.” I expect we’ll learn much more of his story in Parts Five or Seven. [And, yes, “messenger” is the English word for “angel.”]

Carrie Makepeace: Strike learns the real name of Cherrie Gittins, the young woman who was the last to see Daiyu Wace alive, that is, before her ascendancy to Drowned Prophet status, at the Graves estate in chapter 38. He with Shah’s help pursues his search for her in almost every Strike-installment of Part Three; in Cornwall, online via Mumsnet and Facebook, and he wonders if she is not behind a pig’s mask in the pornographic pictures Robin found in a barn animal-cracker tin. This progression of slow-reveals promises more in the coming Parts, of course.

Charlotte Campbell-Ross: I have always despised Strike’s ex, Milady Bezerko, and never more so than after the revelations of her maternal love (well, the lack of it) in Ink Black Heart. I have predicted in the past and recently that, because she is the Venus figure in the Cupid and Psyche backdrop to the Strike novels, she will be sending Robin to Hades on an impossible mission or that she will intentionally blow Robin’s cover at the Farm. Readers are meant to hate the A-list trust funder with the room-stopping beauty and I’ve been totally on board with that.

Now? After her encounter with Strike at the Grenadier in Part One and their phone conversation in Part Three (chapter 48), I’m almost Team Charlotte. He did everything he could at The Grenadier to toss a grenade into her mind and explode what little grip on self-worth or reality that she has. In the face of news that she has breast cancer, he all but spat on her with a cruel brush-off along the lines of “I wish you all the best, but stay out of my life.”

She calls him in Part Three to relay how she answered the inquiries of reporters from The Mail who wanted to use the Private Eye revelations to suggest he sleeps with clients; she had his back, for once, and did the right thing. His response to her request that they be friends? “We were never fucking friends.” Not a thank you or a shred of sympathy for a woman in a hard position trying to make the best of a relationship she has acknowledged she busted.

Rowling is setting me up for something to happen to Charlotte where I will feel bad for her when, before Running Grave, I would have gladly lit her funeral pyre. I am feeling the angst I feel before a theory I have worked hard to put together disintegrates in the heat of story revelations (think Heroin Dark Lord 2.0). Oh, well!

The Pirbrights: Running Grave’s murder, if we have to have one for this to be a murder mystery, is the execution of Kevin Pirbright. We get a bundle of new Pirbright backstory and drama in Part Three, most notably the appearance of his sister Emily, a UHC member very much on the outs with the in-crowd, much like her mother Louise (both have shaved heads, the mark of women out of favor with the cult Principals). In the out of left field Barry Saxon conversation, Baz tells Strike that Abigail Glover told him that her father just had someone murdered for getting on his bad side. Strike naturally, given the source, thinks she is just saying that to frighten an idiot who is harassing her, though he does follow up on the guns-on-campus information with Murphy.

It looks like, if we look between the lines, that Emily blames her mother Louise for Kevin’s death (or is it because she made them give statements that Kevin molested his sisters? or just for raising them in a cult?) but she cannot leave lest she be killed as he was. Louise resents this, whence her dumping hot noodles in Emily’s lap at the mention of Kevin. And Becca? Wow, who knows? She’s either playing a brilliant long game as cult leader protege or she really has swallowed the Kool-Aid about family connections being False-Self delusion.

Regardless, the solution to Kevin’s murder will as likely as not come through things learned from his mom or sisters. Look for Robin to explore this soon.

Will and Qing: Without a playbill, it is hard by Part Three to keep all the family tragedies straight in the Universal Humanitarian Church historical drama. There are the Waces, for starters, with mad Mama Mazu and the psycho-sons she had with Jonathan, and her Drowned Prophet daughter Daiyu, daughter of Alex Graves. The Pirbrights as noted are right up there in cultish nuttery and nightmares. And the Doherty clan has suffered in and out of the UHC for two generations, soon to be three.

Rowling’s choice of the surname ‘Doherty’ is interesting because of its meaning and its relevance to the Strike novels, especially Cuckoo’s Calling. It’s derived from the Gaelic words for “hard-hearted,” which given Rowling’s use of the word ‘heart’ as a symbol for human spiritual capacity is no small thing. It also will make British readers think of Pete Doherty, the most likely model for Evan Duffield in Cuckoo and whose life story has several Leda Strike parallels (see here, here, and here for Doherty story-lines). If Mick Jagger were not such a great model for Jonny Rokeby, aka the Rockin’ Prune, Pete Doherty would make a decent stand-in.

We get to know the Dohertys best in the Part Two interview Cormoran and Robin have with Niamh (‘bright, radiant’), whose father took his family to Chapman Farm but left his wife behind when he escaped with his children. Jonathan Wace supposedly had raped Mrs Doherty, a story Kevin Pirbright overheard as a young man, a sexual assault that meant the end of the Doherty marriage and the mother being left behind to bear her bastard child on the Farm. Lin was the fruit of that union, if memory serves — and she seems, if her testimony to Will at the end of Part Two is any measure, her mother’s ‘spit image’ across the generations. She's had an illegitimate child, Qing, and doesn’t want to be separated from her.

Robin sees Will, the likely father of Qing, trying to help the child in chapter 41 but being reprimanded for it; she confronts him quite boldly in the vegetable garden scene of chapter 50 to make him realize the future his daughter will have if he stays in the UHC. This is Ellacott at her sharpest and finest, frankly, frightened as she is by the prospect of the Retreat Rooms and spirit bonding and weakened as she has been by sleep and nutrient deprivation. If Will has any hope of escaping his smug Answer proof texting, Robin is it.

Death of Daiyu: So much of Running Grave turns on the mystery of the drowning death of Daiyu Graves-Wace and her advent as the Drowned Prophet spectre that haunts Chapman Farm and anyone who leaves it. Part Three provides a host of new information about it as Rowling extends her slow reveal of the pre-dawn death at the beach.

The big data drop takes place at Garveston, the Graves family estate, where Strike learns everything the private investigator hired at the time discovered about Mazu and her family — and how much the UHC stood to profit by the death of the Drowned Prophet and what may have motivated the Waces to kill her (no DNA paternity test!).

Strike spends much of Part Three trying to find Carrie Makepeace, the real name of Cherrie Gittins, that he learned at the Graves mansion and he looks for some contact with the Torment Town illustrator who has drawn Daiyu in great detail. It’s not until the almost inexpressibly unlikely appearance of Barry Saxon, though, that Strike learns a story of what happened at the farm after Daiyu’s death, beyond, that is, the three days and nights naked in a pig sty. Saxon’s second-hand story sounds like what may have happened to Paul Draper, the simple boy and negligent pig keeper who was also blamed in part for Daiyu’s death.

Does everything come down to how Daiyu and Abigail’s mother died at Cromier pier? If Kevin Pirbright’s murder is the ‘murder mystery’ of the surface narrative, the Drowned Prophet’s drowning or seeming drowning must be the foundation of all the other murders. She is, after all, the patron goddess or hologram of the UHC faith.

Mysterious Threats: Okay, how about the red herrings or possible essential clues dropped along the way? Is it a waste of time to pause for a moment to note, “Hey, this looks like a Rowling hint we’re not meant to catch on our hurried first reading!”?

Nicholas Delaunay “accident” Strike asks for a photograph of Allie at the Graves’ home and is passed a family picture from his brief time of recovery before he met Mazu. Nicholas’ arm is in a sling in the picture and he asks the former Royal Marine if he was hurt in an exercise. No, “that was just a stupid accident.”

I don’t know why but all my Rowling Red Flags went up. I had already bought in to the pushes Rowling gives her readers to despise the Delaunays, husband and wife, before this aside and their snobbery in the parking lot. This “stupid accident” note, though, especially after the lecture they give Strike as he is getting into his car, made me think, “They killed Allie, maybe even Daiyu.” Ridiculous, I know.

Murphy going North: Strike writes to Robin in chapter 46 that Ryan hadn’t written because he “had to go up north.” Like most Serious Strikers, I am not a fan of Ryan ‘Matt with a Badge’ Murphy, Robin’s very own “displacement fuck,” so this unexplained trip caused my suspicions to go into hyper-drive. “Norfolk is north of London; is Ryan a UHC graduate dry-drunk who serves the cult’s interests the way Giles Harmon and Noli Seymour do, as links to the outside world? Egad, has he exposed Rowena’s cover?”

Okay, that’s silly unlikely. But what was he doing that he couldn’t take the time to drop a note for his long-suffering love in Norfolk? Maybe this is just a marker of his selfishness. Still, Wardle’s Murphy story and warning in Part One is a bit of a Chekov’s Gun. I’ll be looking for the explanation of this trip.

Pat and Littlejohn: Cormoran seems to have figured out that Paterson has planted Littlejohn in the Strike and Ellacott Detective Agency to mess up their cases (a snake through the mail slot!) and to keep tabs on everything they’re doing. Shanker and Company have been deployed as the Denmark Street Irregulars — Basil and Nigel, remember? — to track Littlejohn and catch him in the act of scaring clients or reporting to his real boss.

What Strike for some reason is not exploring is why Pat is so protective of Littlejohn, a real head-scratcher, and why she has reverted to her passive-aggressive hostility to him. After the bomb blast and fruit cake in Ink Black Heart, these two seemed like best buddies. Something’s going on here and it can’t be good.

My first guesses? Littlejohn caught Pat doing something she shouldn’t have been doing and is now blackmailing her to share Agency secrets or else. Worse, he knows Robin’s location and has told Pat if he is exposed for being an undercover agent for Paterson that she will be, too. Or maybe he came to the office on Easter Monday not to dig through the office files, etc. (Strike lives upstairs!), but to meet Pat for a date; she and he are an item! Yes, I’m completely off the rails…

Whatever, her turn against Strike and for Littlejohn is a big red flag.

Dickens Moment: I’m reading Running Grave like a serialized Dickens novel. Dickens novels are notorious for their non-credible coincidences and plot twists; reading Strike7 as a series of nine book-parts didn’t prepare me, however, for this kind of event, a Dickens moment.

I had to laugh out loud at the scene in Part Three where Rowena, on her way back to the dormitory from the Forbidden Forest, is doing all she can to escape the people searching for Bo. She ducks into a barn through some loose siding (right…) and finds herself in the Room of Hidden Things within the Room of Requirement! There is a pile of all the clothing and possessions of everyone who has ever lived at Chapman Farm and fled the premises with just the clothes on her back. In the decades since Aylmerton Commune, no one has ever taken out this trash or sorted through it or just, y’know, given it to the poor. No one in all the rebuilding and updating of Farm buildings cleaned this place up or weatherized the siding. Really.

Best of all, though, Robin sees a cookie tin atop the heap and cannot walk away from this piece of trash on the pile — and finds within it polaroid pictures of piggie pornography. She hides these pictures in her bra, which given the size and thickness of polaroid shots from the 80’s must have given her a remarkable look. “I’m not hiding anything but this porcupine in my underwear….”

I haven’t been reading all the entries on the Deathly Hallows Parallels thread at the HogwartsProfessor.com weblog, but I hope somebody has checked off the Room of Requirement visit.

There is a way, though, that this isn’t a laughably absurd plot point, namely, ghosts. Charlie Bristow, Freddie Chiswell, and Margot Bamborough have haunted previous Strike novels. It would be especially apt if the faux spiritualists in the UHC, who dupe those they have starved and drugged into believing their stage-magic tricks are the dead returning to the physical realm, are overthrown by the influence of the psychic remnants of those they have murdered. Kevin Pirbright? Deidre Doherty” The real Daiyu Graves? Her father Alex? That would be both credible and consistent with Rowling’s previous work. Keep an eye out for the dead who never leave Chapman Farm. (And don’t forget dead Leda!)

Conclusions: Y’know, I’m having a lot of fun reading Running Grave this slowly. I hope, if you’ve read this far, that you are, too. There is no little pleasure in reading a book’s parts carefully enough to chart it on the first trip through rather than page-turning headlong for the finish. Strike7 is a complicated book that is masterfully intricate. I have little idea, frankly, of where Rowling is taking all this and I know from experience that it is extremely unlikely I will guess whodunnit before I get to Part Nine.

But I’m really enjoying the ride.

I’m reminded of a Marine friend of mine who ran the Okinawa City Marathon in 1994. He finished in just under four hours. I ran in that race, too, and finished 58th out of some 15,000 runners with a time of 2:58. I beat my Green Gun Club buddy by just about an hour. His conclusion about our comparative performance?

He got at least 33% more value for his entry fee than I did by running the course as slowly as he did. His appreciation had to have been much greater than my own because I was in such a rush and felt so broken afterwards.

That was good for a laugh at the time but I am seeing the touch of wisdom in his observations.

On to Part Four!