Running Grave, Part Two: A Ring Reading

The Telling of Robin's First Week at Chapman Farm is a 17 chapter Ring Composition (and More)

It took me the better part of a week to read, chart, and write up a post about Part One of Running Grave. I confess to dreading that process for Part Two but I was able to read it, chart it, and make the legible picture for this post above in less than eight hours.

Why was it so much easier? Because it wasn’t a chapter by chapter adventure in finding parallels across the story axis, not to mention it was shorter and there were only two interview information-dumps. In Part Two, Rowling has a simplified chapter sequence; with two exceptions (chapters 25 and 34-36) after the start, we are given two chapters of Robin-at-the-farm followed by two chapters of Strike-at-work-in-London (and environs) followed by two Robin chapters, repeat to finish. If you count their time together as ‘Strike’ chapters at the start, each gets four turns in the spotlight in alternation.

Here’s how the Ring breaks down into its constituent latch, turn, and turtle-back parallel parts:

The Latch: The ‘tie’ that connects the beginning and end of Part Two is the question-answer relationship of the first three chapters, 20-22, and the Part’s last chapter, 36.

In the opening scene of chapter 20, the Agency contractors Barclay, Shah, and Midge, report on their surveillance of Chapman Farm’s perimeter and their discovery and clearance of a blind-spot in the security camera coverage. They and Strike lay out how they will leave a message for Robin-Rowena in a plastic rock and expect her reply on Thursdays, failing which, they will storm the citadel on Sunday. The closing chapter of Part Two is Robin’s successful discovery of the empty rock with Strike’s message and depositing her own.

These are also the only chapters in Part Two in which Strike and Robin are together, if only via letter exchange in 36. Fun point? Strike meets Abigail at The Forester in Ealing; Robin catches up with Strike in the forest proper.

She was interrupted in her first reading of Strike’s missive, too, by the appearance of Lin Doherty and Will Edensor. I haven’t been following the comments at the Hogwarts Professor weblog on the Deathly Hallows parallels thread, but the unlikely chance that they have chosen this specific location, the blind-spot in the external security cameras (i.e., not a place more secure than any other inside-the-wire) is a neat equivalent to the two bizarro run-ins between Potter & Company on the run and their friends (the first at the river-bank and I include the Potter Watch show on the Wizard Wireless as the second, requiring as it did Ron’s finding the right channel, saying a password that he was guessing, at the right time… and yes, the two events were Hallows turtle-back chapter parallels). Maybe in Part Eight she’ll find the axe in the hollow tree Naimh Doherty mentions, out of all the trees in the forest…

Regardless, Will Edensor is the reason for Robin’s having gone undercover, and Lin Doherty, who makes an appearance in chapter 30 (another implausible encounter given Mama Mazu’s hatred of her?) was the subject of Strike and Robin’s interview with Niamh Doherty in chapter 21. That’s a second beginning-and-end latch. Check that box!

An aside: the moderator channel at Hogwarts Professor is abuzz with the names of the yapping terrier and the absent husband in the Niamh interview: Nigel and Basil. My oldest daughter has a rescue dog named Nigel, which made me laugh when I first read the name (what are the odds?), but when the husband turns out to be a Basil I had much more to think about. Nigel Bruce and Basil Rathbone, of course, were the actors who played Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes in the movie serial adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective mysteries. This might just be a playful hat-tip at the beginning of the story proper, ‘The game is afoot, Watson!’, as Strike and Ellacott, something of a detective pair akin to the genre archetype, have their last moment together before she goes undercover. I suspect, though, that there is more to it than that because of the Christie hat-tip in the bigamist story that opened Troubled Blood; a disproportionate number of Christie mysteries involved murder by poison which was a strong pointer to the killer in Strike5. Look for a post soon — by someone who has finished the book! — about the Holmes novel that points to the killer in Running Grave or to Doyle’s spiritualist obsessions for same. I promised myself back in the day not to overlook this kind of clue again… I wish I knew more about Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur, that’s for sure!

The Turn: Part Two has seventeen chapters, which means, if it is a ring and it is perfectly centered, the turn should be in the ninth chapter from the start so it has eight chapters on either side of it. That would be chapter 28, though the three chapters to one ‘latch’ makes it unlikely that the Part Two ring is going to be a one-to-one chapter-match set across the Latch-Turn axis the way Part One was. Still, in my initial drawing of Part Two for diagramming the potential ring, I laid it out with chapter 28 as the Turn.

As you can see, using red for Robin chapters, black for Strike chapters, and green for the ones with them both, the illustration and contents of each chapter revealed how the ring worked; as discussed above, it is in the chapter sets in which each appear. The only set that does not have a match is the chapters 28 and 29 pair in which Strike interviews Abigail Glover and reflects on that meeting in his office afterward. Chapter 28 with its follow-up turns out to be the story-turn after all.

The links with the opening in the middle chapters are the the mention of Abigail as a person to contact in chapter 20 and her first contact with Strike in chapter 21. Much more important, I think, the interviews with UHC survivors Naimh Doherty and Abigail Glover are the only information dump interviews in Part Two and both are women whose family histories are intertwined miserably with the cult.

The links with Robin’s trip into the Forbidden Forest are that the first thing Strike mentions in his letter to Robin is all he learned from Abigail and the Torment Town illustrations Strike found online in chapter 29 of the Farm’s Temple, with Daiyu ghost, and a mystery reflection (yes, the “fair-haired woman” with “square glasses” reflected beneath the ghost in the five-sided black water pool has me intrigued as much as the raven that strikes the Agency window while our Peg-Legged PI surfs the net).

Having established the Glover interview and solitary debrief as Part Two’s center, I’ll come back to this in the discussion below of ‘the meaning in the middle’ and what to expect in parallel Part Eight.

The Turtle-Back Lines and Antiphonal Chapters: As mentioned, the turtleback lines in Part Two are between the chapter sets of Robin and Strike: 23-24 and 34-35 (Robin’s arrival at the Farm and her initiation in the Temple), 35 and 32-33 (Strike on surveillance and his setting up meetings and interviews, Littlejohn revelations), 26-27 and 30-31 (Robin’s 'Fire Group 1 & 2' experiences, lawyer Danny Brockles the Martyr-Mystic — what’s his chemical half-life?). If one wanted to drop the ring composition parameters, the picture of the seventeen chapters looks like two squares laid over one another at an angle, something akin to a Star of David, albeit with quadrilaterals rather than triangles.

I’ll be interested to see when charting the remaining parts of Grave if Rowling continues this back-and-forth, almost antiphonal structuring. It sure works in keeping the reader aware of each of the heroes and of the subliminal connection between them. Strike repeatedly thinks of how lost he is without Robin to contact for reassurance of his worth and she is moved to tears by his note and his signature ‘Sx’ at its conclusion. Not to mention she neglects to leave a note for Ryan Murphy within the plastic rock.

There is a ton of material and information in Part Two and the parallels often do not fall neatly on the turtle-back lines. I think especially of the Typology test given those on the retreat in the minibus that Dr Zhou uses to type each person and sort them into their respective five element groups (supposedly; Zhou is clearly a fraud who has taken a Briggs-Meyer Type Indicator self-exam, relabeled the results with Jungian names, and claimed it as his own — not to mention that the results and Farm Group sortings are obviously cued to social and educational status rather than the typology exam results). The test-taking and results reading in Zhou’s office are on the Robin square but not in a direct line, just as the effects of the ‘tincture’ he gives Rowena, on top of the fasting, chanting, histrionic talk with music and film backdrop, drive the brain-washing and voluntary immersion in the Temple are related in a top-to-bottom line rather than one across the story axis.

Similarly, Bijou texts Strike in every point of his square; points for persistence, Bimbo Belinda! Strike sees Uncle Ted at Lucy’s in chapter 28 and re-commits to a Cornwall trip in a call with Lucy in chapter 33, not a transverse but a square line connection.

There’s sufficient evidence of a ring composition, then, to claim it, but the alternation of Strike-to-Robin-back-to-Strike-again chapter sets may in the end be as meaningful or more important. In the Shakespearean psychomachian tradition in which I think Rowling is writing the Strike series, the soul-spirit dialogue these characters represent to each other is the central, cathartic symbolism; this back-and-forth structure may be the story-scaffolding that is the best medium for that transformative imaginative experience.

The Meaning in the Middle: Per the Douglas formula in Thinking in Circles, the heart of any ring text is to be found at its center. We’re obliged, I think, consequently, in our efforts to justify this exercise to explore at least those chapters lest we neglect the ‘So What?’ question we should always ask ourselves.

Abigail Glover tells Strike, often while the exact opposite, that her father Jonathan Wace almost certainly killed her mother (I think he spiked her drink with ‘tinctures’ that brought on a fit while swimming, all for a fresh start), that he and Mazu Graves murdered Daiyu in a similar fashion, this time to collect a fortune in insurance money at Alex’ death, and that the spirituality of Chapman Farm is really just stage-magic tricks that Mazu learned from Gunther Crowther. To top all those revelations off, she shares her most lurid secret, how Mazu tortured those she chose to make responsible for her daughter’s drowning — using the I Ching for a spiritually objective veneer — by making them live naked, outside, with the pigs for three days and nights.

Why Strike doesn’t send a note to Robin saying, “We’re done, get the hell out of there NOW,” after hearing these stories, well, I guess he’s afraid of her telling him that he cannot protect her, the job demands taking insane risks, whatever. The take-away, though, is clear; the UHC, for all its Humanitarian exercises, celebrity cover, and Barrister backbenches of talent, is a murderous mad lot of frauds.

If this is the core message of Part Two, it will probably mean it will be reflected in Part Eight. Given the things we learn and the questions raised from the Will-Lin dialogue in chapter 36, I wonder if they and Robin don’t find themselves being fed into the pig sty ‘Abyss,’ #29, via an I Ching reading in the penultimate chapter set of the book. Jiang and Taio Wace, given their uniform creepiness and self-important posturing throughout Part Two, would be excellent agents of discovery, outing Rowena Ellis as a private detective.

I don’t want to neglect the importance of chapter 29 given the importance of that number on the Farm (and in Troubled Blood and Ink Black Heart). Strike here researches online for information about Daiyu’s drowning, Alex Graves’ financial standing at his death, and for anything related to the “Drowned Prophet UHC.” That last search brings up frighteningly realistic but surreal images of Chapman Farm, ones we recognize at the initiation ceremony in chapter 35, from a web page called ‘Torment Town,’ a not so oblique nickname for life for the underlings in Norfolk’s spiritual retreat. The raven that crashes into Strike’s window, who gives him the Edgar Allen Poe look before flying away, and the “fair-haired woman” with “square glasses” who is the reflection of the spectral Daiyu in the most disturbing picture are our clues as to what is going on.

The raven? Check out Rowling’s twitter header from 12 January 2016.

The girl reflected in the pool where Daiyu’s image on the water should be suggests that this woman is either responsible for creating the Daiyu holographic special effect or she is the woman who is dressed up to play the part; she is the source projecting the image rather than an impossibly misplaced reflection. Either way, the drawing is spot-on picture-perfect accurate rather than a mystery.

There’s a lot to discuss in these chapters — I really want to explore the Fable of the Blind Turtle and Louise Pirbright (chapter 24), Mama Mazu reading the ‘Bubble World’ exegesis from Papa J’s book The Answer, their deployment of Plato’s Cave in a brilliantly twisted, Orwellian fashion (chapter 30), and everything about Dr Zhou, especially his take-down comments about “Big Pharma,” his thoughts on Eastern and Western medicine, alchemical ‘tinctures’ for brain-washing, and his Scientology-shaded better-than-psychology personality codings (chapter 31). But I used up all my chits for prognostication and guess-work in my post yesterday about Part One. Today, I’ll leave those subjects for future discussion when Rowling has revealed more.

Off to Part Three!