Hit and Miss Predictions | Influences on The Running Grave, Part 2: The Bible

By Dr Beatrice Groves

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

By Dr Beatrice Groves