The Running Grave - review
Nov. 12th, 2023 07:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessThe Running Grave: Robert Galbraith
I basically inhaled this over four days, so I have to say ‘Galbraith’s’ can write a page-turner. Obviously, I’m invested in the partnership at the heart of this, it’s the seventh book in the series. I admired the way Robin’s undercover stint in the cult they’re investigating and the enforced separation moved on the characters’ feelings and forced Strike to face said feelings (Robin is in greater denial because her handsome boyfriend is better at sex than the Awful Matthew ever was and it was Strike’s silence that pushed her towards Murphy) as well as being plot relevant and putting her in continual danger, again, making me keep turn those pages. Strike has an unexpected link to the main case that helps one of his familial relationships, although the case puts strain on another one, and something major happens to a supporting character. Meanwhile, Robin gets some more trauma. Did I figure out the solution before the partners do? Of course not. I was suspicious about one key bit from very early on, but was still dazzled by the red herrings until the final confrontations. In my defence, there’s a cast of dozens, and a lot of them have done things that are revealed to be even worse things than you thought.
It didn’t start off auspiciously (the quotes for the eleventy billion chapters and several parts all come from ‘I Ching’), opening with a series of letters all in their own font, as if this was the late nineties/early naughties all over again and Rowling had just discovered word processing. Once you get through this, there are only a couple more letters in the rest of the book, so it’s not as physically difficult to read as ‘The Ink Black Heart’.
It is mainly set in the now, but the Universal Humanitarian Church’s main base is Chapman Farm, which used to be a commune that Leda Strike and her two children stayed at for six months. People's memories of what happened from then onwards are relevant. Strike and Robin are hired by the father of a neurodiverse undergraduate who dropped out, joined the cult and wouldn’t contact his family, even when they wrote to tell him his mother was dying of a tumour. She has subsequently died, and Patterson, a rival PI firm, botched his case. Their client wants their agency to get some dirt on the cult (notoriously lawyered up, and worse, some of the people who have left it have died violently.) Part of ‘the church’s’ beliefs revolve around some of these dead people, turning them into prophets, the most powerful of which is The Drowned Prophet, who was the daughter of the church’s founders, Mazu and Jonathan (or Papa J) Wace. Daiyu drowned very early one morning, aged seven. The church members believe that she manifests as a ghost and will come for anyone who leaves the church. That and indoctrination are presumably why their client’s son doesn’t want to leave.
Robin becomes increasingly convinced that she ought to go in undercover. Despite having a good idea of what to expect thanks to their early investigations, living through it – as we do with Robin for several parts of the book – is something else. At first, she analyses the control being exerted on her, but the undernourishment, lack of enough sleep, lack of reference points and constant control of companions, of time to think, of ways to think, as well as the threat of ‘spirit bonding’ (coercive sex) and shunning and worse (especially when you want to talk about subjects the church members don’t want to) threaten her sense of self. That is, until she starts to imagine what Strike would think of creepy Mazu, the rituals they undergo or the language they use (and she doesn’t question why she doesn’t think so much about her actual boyfriend, Ryan Murphy.)
What is revealed to her and us is pretty awful – although I figured the threat of sexual violence wouldn’t ever be carried out on Robin, because it would be too much trauma. Robin lies her way through increasing slip-ups and refuses to take advantage of the escape arrangements because she’s never got quite enough intel, not from Will the client’s son or the underage mother of his child, whose relative brightness contrasts with all the other indoctrinated children her age, not from Emily Pirbright, the ‘deviate’ sister of church higher-up Becca. Until, of course, Robin comes to Papa J’s unwanted attention, as he considers the contrasts between rich, intelligent, submissive ‘Rowena Ellis’ and the flashes of Robin’s compassion and initiative.
On the outside, Cormoran is interviewing leads, working on other cases and starting to get increasingly worried about their near-silent new hire Littlejohn. As if that wasn’t enough, ex Charlotte is calling him; the woman he had sex with (twice) despite Ilsa’s warnings she was trouble (because he really doesn’t like Robin dating Murphy) and despite her name being Bijou turned out to be Trouble; he’s learned something he never suspected about their time at Aylmerton commune; and his uncle Ted is getting increasingly forgetful. And he misses Robin, misses the lift to his spirits of being able to talk to her, while getting increasingly worried about her and her state from the notes she sends. (Which we know she self-censors.)
And then his ex Charlotte dies by suicide, after all the past attempts, after calling him three times the night before (he refused to pick up.) This leads to a bravura scene where he conjures up her spirit in his imagination in a church the morning after to say his goodbye. There’s also an excellent scene where Robin goes to visit Prudence, Strike’s therapist half-sister, and reveals her smarts (Prudence suspected the EQ) and they both realise they’re both very good at their jobs and both want to do the right thing. I also vicariously enjoyed Strike going to a UHC super service to confront the Church Principals and having fun telling them what he thinks of them (some of them abused Robin directly, all of whom abused other people.)
The book covers the build-up to the Brexit referendum and the few months that followed, but in the main the protagonists don’t engage with it, Robin can’t vote because she’s at Chapman Farm, Strike is too busy, and it’s not made clear how they’d have voted anyway. But Rowling has her fun satirising two Leaver witnesses who go out to Spain for much of the year that Strike interviews. (Was the portrait of drunken old Welsh rugby fans inconveniently singing Max Boyce songs over a recording of a conversation with an important witness because Wales voted to leave too, or am I reaching?)
The title of the book comes from a Dylan Thomas poem. Did it have to be quite so long? I didn’t feel that the investigation took too much time as I have with some of the other books in the series, and it’s pretty focused. In fact, when Vanessa turns up at a meeting with the police where Strike wants them to exert some pressure on the church, I thought, ‘Ah, Robin’s friend who she hasn’t contacted all book.’ It’s mainly plot related, with connections from a secondary case and from Cormoran’s unfortunate entanglement with Bijou proving useful for the main case, and I wouldn’t have cut any of the personal stuff. For instance, Robin finds her parents’ visit soon after she escapes the farm overbearing, with her mother’s loving solicitude reminding her of the church’s control. They blame Strike when Robin gets charged spuriously because the church is lashing out, while approving of handsome Ryan. Then there’s Robin getting tied up in knots after, tipsy and post coital, telling Ryan she loved him too and, having sobered up, wondering if she really does. More worryingly, Ryan becomes a bit like Matthew after that, jealous of Cormoran (and having reason even if Robin denies it) and…she lies to him. Setting shipping aside (maybe insincerely) that’s not a pattern it’s worth returning to.
The shipper in me adored the Cormoran/Robin of it all: ROBIN KNOWING HE WAS THERE WAITING NEAR THE BLINDSPOT WHERE SHE’D BEEN LEAVING MESSAGES FOR THE AGENCY when she needed to escape the cult; the hug; the hand-holding; his awareness of her trauma; the fact they keep getting frantic when the other is danger – because of the risks they’ll take to solve the case; the way she picked an argument – and was right about Strike’s prejudices – to ruffle up the ‘ease and comfort’ she felt with him. You could even make something of the fact that both are shedding weight at about the same time (although Strike is on the diet his health issues in the previous book precipitated, Robin, like most of the people at Chapman Farm, was underfed.) Or how the plant he gave her survived being watered by Murphy during her time undercove when other plants didn’t. And then, when the case is done and we’ve learned most of the truth, which wasn’t quite what we expected, dazzled by the more obvious evil, (and the characters we were most worried about seem to have a chance of recovery), Cormoran takes his opportunity, lives up to his belief in truth and desire to be happy and does what he now knows too well he should have in the previous book (or before that, mate, say all the shippers) and tells Robin he’s in love with her. Two pages before the end, when Ryan comes to pick Robin up for a weekend away and she’s in total shock, having learned that, for Cormoran, it was over with Charlotte in the previous book and why, and what he feels about her, when he can’t know for sure how she feels about him.
!!!
The next book had better be no more than a year away (well, it seems like Rowling won’t be distracted with working on any more Fantastic Beasts scripts.)
Looking back, there are a few things, plotwise, that Rowling has done before. I won’t specify, because one of the biggest things is about how someone was killed, but, arguably, who did it too and why Strike was slow to see it seemed repetitive too. It goes some dark, dark places, and if I listed them, they’d be spoilery, but then the whole series has. Parental love is a recurring theme – Will’s father hiring them, Lucy finding out Cormoran had a more clear-eyed view of their mother than she thought, Robin’s upbringing, despite her frustrations with her mother, helping her in a couple of ways, while the cult deliberately sought to sever all familial relationships to ensure loyalty – except where it hypocritically didn’t when it came to Mazu and Jonathan’s children. And it didn’t always manage it, anyway.
Linguistically, having so many people drop ‘What’ when they’re surprised got my nerves. I was going to whinge about all the people saying ‘Ah’ for ‘yes’ too, but I suppose that’s to emphasise the Norfolk dialect.
I basically inhaled this over four days, so I have to say ‘Galbraith’s’ can write a page-turner. Obviously, I’m invested in the partnership at the heart of this, it’s the seventh book in the series. I admired the way Robin’s undercover stint in the cult they’re investigating and the enforced separation moved on the characters’ feelings and forced Strike to face said feelings (Robin is in greater denial because her handsome boyfriend is better at sex than the Awful Matthew ever was and it was Strike’s silence that pushed her towards Murphy) as well as being plot relevant and putting her in continual danger, again, making me keep turn those pages. Strike has an unexpected link to the main case that helps one of his familial relationships, although the case puts strain on another one, and something major happens to a supporting character. Meanwhile, Robin gets some more trauma. Did I figure out the solution before the partners do? Of course not. I was suspicious about one key bit from very early on, but was still dazzled by the red herrings until the final confrontations. In my defence, there’s a cast of dozens, and a lot of them have done things that are revealed to be even worse things than you thought.
It didn’t start off auspiciously (the quotes for the eleventy billion chapters and several parts all come from ‘I Ching’), opening with a series of letters all in their own font, as if this was the late nineties/early naughties all over again and Rowling had just discovered word processing. Once you get through this, there are only a couple more letters in the rest of the book, so it’s not as physically difficult to read as ‘The Ink Black Heart’.
It is mainly set in the now, but the Universal Humanitarian Church’s main base is Chapman Farm, which used to be a commune that Leda Strike and her two children stayed at for six months. People's memories of what happened from then onwards are relevant. Strike and Robin are hired by the father of a neurodiverse undergraduate who dropped out, joined the cult and wouldn’t contact his family, even when they wrote to tell him his mother was dying of a tumour. She has subsequently died, and Patterson, a rival PI firm, botched his case. Their client wants their agency to get some dirt on the cult (notoriously lawyered up, and worse, some of the people who have left it have died violently.) Part of ‘the church’s’ beliefs revolve around some of these dead people, turning them into prophets, the most powerful of which is The Drowned Prophet, who was the daughter of the church’s founders, Mazu and Jonathan (or Papa J) Wace. Daiyu drowned very early one morning, aged seven. The church members believe that she manifests as a ghost and will come for anyone who leaves the church. That and indoctrination are presumably why their client’s son doesn’t want to leave.
Robin becomes increasingly convinced that she ought to go in undercover. Despite having a good idea of what to expect thanks to their early investigations, living through it – as we do with Robin for several parts of the book – is something else. At first, she analyses the control being exerted on her, but the undernourishment, lack of enough sleep, lack of reference points and constant control of companions, of time to think, of ways to think, as well as the threat of ‘spirit bonding’ (coercive sex) and shunning and worse (especially when you want to talk about subjects the church members don’t want to) threaten her sense of self. That is, until she starts to imagine what Strike would think of creepy Mazu, the rituals they undergo or the language they use (and she doesn’t question why she doesn’t think so much about her actual boyfriend, Ryan Murphy.)
What is revealed to her and us is pretty awful – although I figured the threat of sexual violence wouldn’t ever be carried out on Robin, because it would be too much trauma. Robin lies her way through increasing slip-ups and refuses to take advantage of the escape arrangements because she’s never got quite enough intel, not from Will the client’s son or the underage mother of his child, whose relative brightness contrasts with all the other indoctrinated children her age, not from Emily Pirbright, the ‘deviate’ sister of church higher-up Becca. Until, of course, Robin comes to Papa J’s unwanted attention, as he considers the contrasts between rich, intelligent, submissive ‘Rowena Ellis’ and the flashes of Robin’s compassion and initiative.
On the outside, Cormoran is interviewing leads, working on other cases and starting to get increasingly worried about their near-silent new hire Littlejohn. As if that wasn’t enough, ex Charlotte is calling him; the woman he had sex with (twice) despite Ilsa’s warnings she was trouble (because he really doesn’t like Robin dating Murphy) and despite her name being Bijou turned out to be Trouble; he’s learned something he never suspected about their time at Aylmerton commune; and his uncle Ted is getting increasingly forgetful. And he misses Robin, misses the lift to his spirits of being able to talk to her, while getting increasingly worried about her and her state from the notes she sends. (Which we know she self-censors.)
And then his ex Charlotte dies by suicide, after all the past attempts, after calling him three times the night before (he refused to pick up.) This leads to a bravura scene where he conjures up her spirit in his imagination in a church the morning after to say his goodbye. There’s also an excellent scene where Robin goes to visit Prudence, Strike’s therapist half-sister, and reveals her smarts (Prudence suspected the EQ) and they both realise they’re both very good at their jobs and both want to do the right thing. I also vicariously enjoyed Strike going to a UHC super service to confront the Church Principals and having fun telling them what he thinks of them (some of them abused Robin directly, all of whom abused other people.)
The book covers the build-up to the Brexit referendum and the few months that followed, but in the main the protagonists don’t engage with it, Robin can’t vote because she’s at Chapman Farm, Strike is too busy, and it’s not made clear how they’d have voted anyway. But Rowling has her fun satirising two Leaver witnesses who go out to Spain for much of the year that Strike interviews. (Was the portrait of drunken old Welsh rugby fans inconveniently singing Max Boyce songs over a recording of a conversation with an important witness because Wales voted to leave too, or am I reaching?)
The title of the book comes from a Dylan Thomas poem. Did it have to be quite so long? I didn’t feel that the investigation took too much time as I have with some of the other books in the series, and it’s pretty focused. In fact, when Vanessa turns up at a meeting with the police where Strike wants them to exert some pressure on the church, I thought, ‘Ah, Robin’s friend who she hasn’t contacted all book.’ It’s mainly plot related, with connections from a secondary case and from Cormoran’s unfortunate entanglement with Bijou proving useful for the main case, and I wouldn’t have cut any of the personal stuff. For instance, Robin finds her parents’ visit soon after she escapes the farm overbearing, with her mother’s loving solicitude reminding her of the church’s control. They blame Strike when Robin gets charged spuriously because the church is lashing out, while approving of handsome Ryan. Then there’s Robin getting tied up in knots after, tipsy and post coital, telling Ryan she loved him too and, having sobered up, wondering if she really does. More worryingly, Ryan becomes a bit like Matthew after that, jealous of Cormoran (and having reason even if Robin denies it) and…she lies to him. Setting shipping aside (maybe insincerely) that’s not a pattern it’s worth returning to.
The shipper in me adored the Cormoran/Robin of it all: ROBIN KNOWING HE WAS THERE WAITING NEAR THE BLINDSPOT WHERE SHE’D BEEN LEAVING MESSAGES FOR THE AGENCY when she needed to escape the cult; the hug; the hand-holding; his awareness of her trauma; the fact they keep getting frantic when the other is danger – because of the risks they’ll take to solve the case; the way she picked an argument – and was right about Strike’s prejudices – to ruffle up the ‘ease and comfort’ she felt with him. You could even make something of the fact that both are shedding weight at about the same time (although Strike is on the diet his health issues in the previous book precipitated, Robin, like most of the people at Chapman Farm, was underfed.) Or how the plant he gave her survived being watered by Murphy during her time undercove when other plants didn’t. And then, when the case is done and we’ve learned most of the truth, which wasn’t quite what we expected, dazzled by the more obvious evil, (and the characters we were most worried about seem to have a chance of recovery), Cormoran takes his opportunity, lives up to his belief in truth and desire to be happy and does what he now knows too well he should have in the previous book (or before that, mate, say all the shippers) and tells Robin he’s in love with her. Two pages before the end, when Ryan comes to pick Robin up for a weekend away and she’s in total shock, having learned that, for Cormoran, it was over with Charlotte in the previous book and why, and what he feels about her, when he can’t know for sure how she feels about him.
!!!
The next book had better be no more than a year away (well, it seems like Rowling won’t be distracted with working on any more Fantastic Beasts scripts.)
Looking back, there are a few things, plotwise, that Rowling has done before. I won’t specify, because one of the biggest things is about how someone was killed, but, arguably, who did it too and why Strike was slow to see it seemed repetitive too. It goes some dark, dark places, and if I listed them, they’d be spoilery, but then the whole series has. Parental love is a recurring theme – Will’s father hiring them, Lucy finding out Cormoran had a more clear-eyed view of their mother than she thought, Robin’s upbringing, despite her frustrations with her mother, helping her in a couple of ways, while the cult deliberately sought to sever all familial relationships to ensure loyalty – except where it hypocritically didn’t when it came to Mazu and Jonathan’s children. And it didn’t always manage it, anyway.
Linguistically, having so many people drop ‘What’ when they’re surprised got my nerves. I was going to whinge about all the people saying ‘Ah’ for ‘yes’ too, but I suppose that’s to emphasise the Norfolk dialect.
