Month: December 2023

Hit and Miss Predictions: influences on The Running Grave

Part 2: The Bible

Prior to the publication of Running Grave I tweeted some predictions (in response to Rowling’s request for guesses) and made seven predictions here. One of these predictions dealt with the I Ching which Rowling had told us, months prior to publication, would be the epigraph text. I guessed that it would play a double role and create a link with Strike’s life (with Prudence or the commune) but this guess proved a dud, and indeed the I Ching’s appearances within the plot seemed to be linked with red herrings. The emphasis on ‘the pig acts in the abysmal,’ (Hexagram 29) for example, suggested that Mazu’s sadism was going to be part of the answer to ‘pigs’ – but it wasn’t. Reaney’s tattoo of The Wanderer (Hexagram 56) marked him out as important, but the interpretations of this hexagram have an almost painfully ironic relevance to Reaney’s story: ‘If he is obliging towards others, he wins success… Prisons ought to be places where people are lodged only temporarily, as guests are. They must not become dwelling places’ (I Ching, trans. Richard Wilhelm). 

My other predications that went AWOL were Rokeby’s death, a musical clue and (sadly!) the kiss. As I’m marking my own homework, I’ll say that these all felt like quite near misses: Charlotte’s death was a good substitute for Rokeby’s (they are twinned as the two major figures from Strike’s past who act as over-arching but largely absent antagonists for him in the plot), there was no musical clue (but music did play a major role in the story via Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ and the chanting) and while there was no kiss, the book ended on a comparable step-of-no-return which (if lacking in the reciprocity of a kiss) was an even more irrevocable step on Strike’s side – a declaration for love from which there is no retreat. Another semi-hit was my suggestion we might be seeing Felbrigg Hall feature – no luck there, but Chapter 89, one of the most important and intimate scenes in the novel, takes place in Felbrigg Lodge: ‘Robin stirred, and groped in the darkness for his hand. Finding it, she squeezed. ‘I knew you were there,’ she murmured drowsily, half-asleep. ‘I knew you were there.’ 

Another near miss was that Strike’s joke would be on the money. Strike’s joke doesn’t inadvertently finger the murderer as it does in books one and six, but he does make a quasi-joke which deflects the reader’s attention from clues about the murderer:  

‘Ah, righ’, you fallen for the act as well, ’ave ya?’ said Saxon with a sneer. ‘Got you twisted round ’er little finger? You ain’ never seen ’er pissed an’ angry. Little church girl? She’s got a scary fuckin’ temper on ’er—’

‘If that was a crime, I’d be inside myself,’ said Strike.  

Abigail’s strength and bravery seem very appealing when we first meet her. Her choice to take on that most heroic of jobs, a fire fighter, on her escape from her abusive childhood forms an obvious parallel to Strike’s choice, after freeing himself from the same location, to become a detective. Abigail is carving a niche for herself in a male world, and many a reader will be rooting for Strike here as he squashes down the entitlement of a man who mistakes his own desire for Abigail as a right to control her actions. Rowling cleverly uses Barry Saxon to hide some home truths about Abigail in a source that none of us will trust. Accurate information (including a nightmare that turns out to be a murder confession – ‘Cut it up smaller, cut it up smaller’) is concealed by virtue of coming from an unlikeable and unreliable man who is out for revenge: ‘An she killed someone ‘erself, when she was in there!’

I found Abigail an attractive character on first meeting her and I suspect Strike did too. His awareness of her beauty, toughness and vulnerability reminded me of how much I had disapproved of him sleeping with a suspect in this novel’s pair – Cuckoo’s Calling – and when Abigail offered, I was pleased that Strike had (finally!) learned this lesson. It never occurred to me that Abigail, unlike Ciara, might be a serious suspect but (given his foolishness with Bijou) this should have been a hint that encouraged me to wonder if there was a deeper reason that the author was not allowing him to become entangled here!

Alongside these definite misses and quasi-hits, two of my predictions unequivocally found their mark. The first was that Running Grave would include allusions to the mythic landscape of Aylmerton. I guessed that local ghost stories would influence the plot and we not only had wraiths of Charlotte and Strike ghosting Bijou but a whole cult based on the visitations of the Drowned Prophet. The ghostly aspect came true beyond my expectation and, in addition, there was another link with Norfolk’s ritual past in the ring of wooden posts (twice likened to Stonehenge) which connect to Norfolk’s most important archaeological find – a 4000-year-old timber circle popularly known as ‘seahenge’ (I’ve written this up here).

The other prediction that hit the nail on the head was the ‘pull of the spiritual.’ I predicted that, just as it was ‘only in the seventh Harry Potter novel – Deathly Hallows – that we first see a church bringing a sense of the numinous into the story… [So] St John the Baptist Church… will counterbalance the false church with a genuine spiritual pull.’ This came true with the scene in Aylmerton Church – the most important spiritual moment in the novel, and my favourite scene of the whole of Strike (I’ve written it up here). But the pull of the spiritual was also visible in other ways in the novel. For example, SwanFan17 – a listener to The Strike & Ellacott Files – convincingly suggests that Will’s story recalls the parable of the Prodigal Son:

And he said, A certain man had two sons:

¹² And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living.

¹³ And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.

¹⁴ And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want.

¹⁵ And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine.

¹⁶ And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him.

¹⁷ And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!

¹⁸ I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee,

¹⁹ And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.

²⁰ And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.

²¹ And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.

²² But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet:

²³ And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry:

²⁴ For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.

²⁵ Now his elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard musick and dancing.

²⁶ And he called one of the servants, and asked what these things meant.

²⁷ And he said unto him, Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound.

²⁸ And he was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out, and intreated him.

²⁹ And he answering said to his father, Lo, these many yes do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment: and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends:

³⁰ But as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf.

³¹ And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.

³² It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.  (Luke 15.11-32)

When this was mentioned on the podcast, I was immediately interested because the Prodigal Son is such an important structuring story throughout literature – particularly in Shakespeare. 

It is a story Shakespeare mentions in a third of his plays and it would have been very well known to his audience – a nice example of this is how popular it was in domestic decoration in the early modern period. In Thomas Middleton’s play A Mad World My Masters a dwelling place is decorated with it: ‘the curtains indeed were wrought in Venice, with the story of the prodigal child in silk and gold; only the swine are left out, my lord, for spoiling the curtains.’ When similar curtains are mentioned in Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays – Falstaff suggests ‘the story of the Prodigal’ as a good choice for a wall-hanging – it carries a hint for the importance of this story to the plot. For the Prodigal Son is crucial to Shakespeare’s Henry IV part 1 in shaping the narrative Hal wishes to project about himself – the narrative of a son who was lost but is found (and this is play which may well have influenced Harry Potter, as I’ve argued before).  As SwanFan17 notes the famous biblical parable has lots of parallels with Will’s story – both errant sons drain their trust funds, get very hungry and feed pigs. And when the son returns he meets with a striking generosity of forgiveness from his father, but rather less enthusiasm from his brother. This story was so well-known in Shakespeare’s time that Falstaff merely saying ‘What, will you make a younker [younger] of me?’ is an allusion to it – to be a ‘younger [son]’ is to be the Prodigal Son. Will is the younger son, likewise, and the Prodigal parallels (in drawing attention to the most famously grumpy elder brother in literary and religious culture) draw attention likewise to the disgruntled sibling motif of the novel. Sibling rivalry is not only crucial to the murder plot, it forms connections with the murders of books 1 and 4 – strengthening the 1-4-7 story axis in Strike (the story axis around which the Harry Potter stories are structured).

I also like this idea of Will’s overarching storyline as a carrier of biblical allusion because Will – like Strike in St John the Baptist’s Church – is another character seeking after spiritual truth in this novel. While the UHC claims to be a syncretist religion which studies the revelations of other major faiths, the only ‘holy book’ regularly consulted is Jonathan Wace’s own. But when Will reads the bible, it gets through to him: ‘I was reading it yesterday. John, chapter one, verse 4:1: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world”.’ Will is an intelligent young man with a Strike-like desire for finding out the truth. Although in his case it has led to him almost setting fire to a chapel and the bin-fire that is the UHC – rather than, Strike-like burning that cult to the ground – this bible-verse awakens something in him. Wace calls for unquestioning obedience, and for all his cant about honest sceptics intellectual enquiry is deeply frowned upon – which means that Wace’s claim to be a true prophet is inherently suspect. Will’s drive for the truth not only saves himself and his daughter, but also unwittingly saves Robin too. In trying to find out who she really is, and whether what she says about his mother is true, Will goes to the crucial blind-spot by the fence and – by finding and moving the rock – alerts the agency to Robin’s danger, enabling her escape.

The blind-spot by the barbed wire is a ghostly spot – it is near where Daiyu’s luminous figure runs, near to locations said to be haunted by local spirits: the White Lady of the Shrieking Pits and the Grey Spirit of Beeston Priory. This blind-spot is likewise the place Robin begins to feel that being subsumed by the cult is to have entered an Other World: ‘separated from her colleague by only ten yards, she felt like a ghost who had no business conversing with the living.’ This haunting episode is alchemically transformed when the most supernatural moment of the series so far occurs in precisely the same spot. This one spot, a place that the cult overlooks, the literal barrier between the UHC and the ‘Bubble World’ becomes a form of ‘thin place’ – a connecting place between this world and the Other World. When Robin’s connection to Strike enables her to break free from the cult, it does so through a supernatural knowledge focussed on this place, the very spot where she had once felt herself shut out from reality: 

Robin stood up and had taken a couple of steps towards the door when something strange happened.

She suddenly knew – didn’t guess, or hope, but knew – that Strike had just arrived beside the blind spot at the perimeter fence. The conviction was so strong that it stopped her in her tracks.

The cult’s ‘blind spot’ becomes the place where Robin sees with her inner eye – her love for Strike opening her perception to a truth unknowable through natural means.

Robin’s moment of spiritual insight is the companion moment to Strike’s scene within St John the Baptist’s Church and both (along with the importance of the bible – literally and figuratively – to Will’s story) fulfilled the prediction that we would get the pull of spiritual and a sense of the numinous in a new way in Running Grave.

Strike’s moment of spiritual insight is the recognition of the truth of his own nature as he sits inside a church. Suitably for a novel which introduces a psychologist into the plot, Rowling plays some clever tricks with Strike’s psychology at this point, as he replays in St John the Baptist a much earlier passage in the novel:

These thoughts of Leda led inevitably to thoughts of Charlotte Campbell, because he knew that plenty of armchair psychologists, including close friends and family members, thought he’d been so irreparably damaged by Leda’s parenting, he’d been inevitably drawn to a similarly chaotic and unstable woman. This had always irritated Strike, and it irritated him now as he sat with his whisky, staring out of his attic window, because it so happened that there’d been profound differences between his ex-fiancée and his late mother. (Chap 12)

Armchair psychologists can be annoying even (or especially) when they are right, and the narration cunningly has Strike bat away their insight with a plausible but specious line of argument: ‘because it so happened that there’d been profound differences between his ex-fiancée and his late mother.’ Yes, absolutely. Does that invalidate the previous point? Absolutely not. We’re back with the Johari window: this is something that everyone else knows about Strike, but it won’t do him any good until he knows about it himself, something that won’t happen until he enters the church at Aylmerton. But when he finally comes to true self-realisation it leads to the Johari window opening onto the kairos moment: his full self-understanding leads to full self-disclosure. A decision that he comes to as he sits psychologically held within the church walls, supported by its ‘forms and structures’ will change his life forever (and for better): he will finally make a declaration to Robin from which there is no going back.

 

By @beatricegroves1 author of Literary Allusion in Harry Potter

‘Joyous is the lake:’ influences on The Running Grave

Part 1: The I Ching

 

The Joyous is the lake… it is a sorceress.

The I Ching; Epigraph 26 in Running Grave

In the last ten years, Rowling has only given occasional interviews and among these there are two stand-out moments, both which speak to the influence of the unconscious on her craft. The first was the revelation (in the 2017 BBC documentary ‘Harry Potter: A History of Magic’) that the Masonic symbol from the 1975 Sean Connery and Michael Caine film The Man who Would be King was an unconscious influence on the creation of the Deathly Hallows symbol (I’ve written this up in a piece for this month’s Rowling Library Magazine). The second was the startling, and wonderful, answer she gave in 2019 in a BBC4 radio programme ‘The Museum of Curiosity’ when she suddenly decided to be open about the metaphors that guide her creativity:

Well, I’ve never said this before because I always think it sounds so bonkers, and, although it’s something I think about a lot, I’ve always been a bit wary about articulating it to anyone else.

But I envisage my process thus: I feel as though I go through a lot of trees which are my day to day concerns, what we all deal with all the time, and those I see as trees inside my head and then I get to a place which is my work place where there is a lake and there’s a shed. And this is my process.

I feel as though the inspiration is the thing that lives in the lake that’s very mysterious, that I never see. But it hands me stuff. And then I have to take this unformed stuff – sometimes it can be reasonably formed, sometimes it’s very blobby like molten glass or something, and then I have to take it into the shed and there I have to work on it.

And because I’ve had this metaphor in my head for many many years, when I read something that I’ve written I have a sort of shorthand that I say to myself, “too much lake, not enough shed.” When I go back over something – I should have spent longer in the shed.

And then there are some bits you think, “Oh that’s too sheddy. I’m not sure you added a lot out of the lake that day.” And in a dream world, obviously, the lake gives you something good, but then you work on it properly in the shed and you turn out the finished product. And I even apply this to other writers. I’ll read something and I’ll think “This is pure shed.”

Rowling’s ‘Lake’ seems to be related to the pools in C.S. Lewis’s Wood between the Worlds (which Rowling has spoken of before) – it is noticeable, for example, that she has to push through trees to reach her lake. But since reading Running Grave, I’ve also wondered if it might be related to the ‘Lake’ of the I Ching. ‘Tui, The Joyous, Lake’ is a trigram as well as a hexagram so it appears frequently throughout the I Ching and even on a casual flick-through it is a name that might stand out. 

In the October 2023 Q&A for Running Grave Rowling told us that it is possible that the copy of the I Ching she used for every chapter epigraph in this book had been sitting on her bookshelves for thirty years, awaiting this moment. In an explicitly I-Chingian example of randomness, Rowling caught sight of the book when mulling over epigraph texts and suddenly realised how perfectly it would ‘express some of the obliqueness but the simplicity of the Universal Humanitarian Church’s ethos.’ But Rowling provided far more information in her preceding Twitter exchanges on this topic at the end of September when @IrisD1981 ’s question ‘Why did you choose to link this story to the I Ching?’ elicited this answer:

One of the key hallmarks of a fascistic/totalitarian movement, as defined in a brilliant essay by Umberto Eco on ‘Ur-Fascism’, is that it’s syncretistic, which means it combines different forms of belief that may be contradictory. That artificial fusion enables the ideology/religion to claim it possesses an all-encompassing world view, a one-stop-shop for truth. I wanted the UHC to have incorporated religious practices from all over the world and to have appropriated aspects of other cultures, to give itself an attractive gloss of multiculturalism and diversity. I had an old copy of the I Ching on one of my bookshelves that I bought second hand years ago, and I don’t think I’d ever opened until I was creating the UHC. One morning I walked past the book case and thought ‘that could be interesting.’ I immediately knew I wanted to use it, because the I Ching is in so many ways absolutely antithetical to the UHC, containing bits of philosophy and comments on human nature, sometimes oblique but occasionally quite direct, that contradict everything the UHC – and particularly Mazu – stands for. It seemed to me that the I Ching’s conception of the ‘superior man’ – or person – as an individual of quiet strength, independent thought and wisdom couldn’t be further from the UHC’s determination to turn adherents into mindless automata fit only to parrot its talking points, effectively forbidding intellectual enquiry. I also liked the idea of Mazu posing as something she emphatically is not – biracial – and taking the I Ching as her own personal device of judgement and punishment, when it is anything but that. To tell you the truth, I became fascinated by the I Ching while writing the novel, and learned how to count out the yarrow stalks in the traditional way so I knew exactly how it worked (and when I say ‘worked’, I don’t claim it’s a divination device, but I do think it’s a very interesting tool for meditation and reflection).

Frankly this answer alone has reconciled me to Twitter Blue – it is a gift that Rowling is able to answer at length when she wants to! – and Pools followed it up with a question that elicited my favourite ever epigraph response. Pools wrote that she has ‘started using it [the I Ching] as a writing tool, to explore possibilities for characters and worlds, and to help spark ideas when I’m stuck’ and Rowling responded: ‘The Faerie Queen worked like that for me, too.’  I love this answer because it implicitly lifts The Faerie Queene above all her other epigraph texts but also because it suggests that once she has found the right epigraph text, that text begins to influence her own writing. Echoing Pools’ words here means that Rowling implies that Spenser’s poem sparked ideas for her in Troubled Blood and helped her ‘explore possibilities for characters and worlds’ – it suggests that the poetry, plots and character arcs of The Faerie Queene (which I’ve explored here, here and here) are even stronger sources for Troubled Blood than we may have realised.

Something particularly satisfying about Rowling’s twitter discussion about the I Ching is the way in which she describes her epigraph text as embodying a moral code that is oppositional to that of characters in her novel. 

I immediately knew I wanted to use it, because the I Ching is in so many ways absolutely antiethical [sic] to the UHC, containing bits of philosophy and comments on human nature, sometimes oblique but occasionally quite direct, that contradict everything the UHC – and particularly Mazu – stands for.

Rowling means ‘antithetical’ – but her misspelling of it as ‘antiethical’ works brilliantly given the context of the way in which it is the ethics of the UHC which are at odds with the I Ching. We’ve seen her making meaningful spelling mistakes on Twitter before and in addition to the insights they provide into her thought processes, they are interesting for suggesting that even long posts like this are not precomposed and copied into twitter but written out unmediated, unpremeditated.

Rowling’s description of choosing her epigraph text for Running Grave because it is antithetical to the ethos of the UHC is fascinating for the wider insight it provides into her use of epigraph texts. The ethos of The Running Grave, like that of the I Ching, is deeply at odds with the UHC – so Rowling has chosen an epigraph text that rejects the morality of the novel’s antagonists and aligns itself with that of the novel and its heroes. As I’ve argued before I think this is how the is how the Victorian women poets in Ink Black Heart work too. Rowling’s real-world celebration of these (often forgotten) female poets acts in opposition to Anomie (and other antagonists in the novel) who through misogyny and even femicide attempt to undermine female creativity. Anomie attempts to erase a woman from her own creation while the epigraphs celebrate often overlooked female creativity. And the rarified air of fairyland in Spenser’s Faerie Queene works this way too. Rowling’s choice of a chivalric romance creates a framework which throws the misogynistic horror of Creed’s evil into even sharper relief. 

We do not know far in advance of writing a novel Rowling begins scoping out its epigraphs, except in the case of Deathly Hallows, which she chose nine years before the novel came out: ‘I’d known it was going to be those two passages since Chamber was published.’ It is not beyond the bounds of possibility, therefore, that Rowling’s original flicking through the I Ching had already occurred prior to her evocative description of her creative process as the Lake and the Shed (recorded summer 2019) and certainly other Chinese texts were influencing her at this time. She had spoken the year before of the importance of the Shan Hai Jing (or strange creatures from the guideways through mountains and seas) for the Fantastic Beasts franchise and put an image of it up on her website.

 

 

(For more on the influence of this and other Chinese texts on Fantastic Beasts see here and my essay ‘The Snake Woman in Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts’). Another classic Chinese text – The Art of War – was visible in her 2020 bookshelf video on Twitter  (thank you, as ever, to Nick Jeffrey who spotted it!). Maybe in 2018, when Rowling was becoming interested in classic Chinese texts such as the Shan Hai Jing , she likewise felt drawn to take a look through the I Ching and think about the Chinese influences the UHC was going to spuriously claim for itself. 

Whenever she read it, I think it likely that she would have been caught by its use of natural images such as the mountain and the lake for deep mental states and found it resonated with her own understanding of her own creativity as a lake: ‘Knowledge should be a refreshing and vitalizing force… it harbors the quiet security of a heart fortified within itself’ (Hexagram 58, The Joyous, Lake, I Ching)