The Running Grave Initial Read-Through: Full Spoiler Warning: Analysis for Part 6, Chapters 78-90

 Though I have finished the book, I am intentionally staying away from podcasts and other websites that are discussing The Running Grave, because I want the opportunity to write my own first impression of the book, untainted by the opinions of others.  Hopefully I'll finish this up in a few days because I can't wait to here what the Strike and Ellacott Files ladies have to say.

This post is dominated by Harry Potter echoes, specifically connections between The Running Grave and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. 

 Spoilers in Blue

This section takes us from the darkest part of the book (Robin's near-drowning, torture in "the box" her day of care-taking for Jacob, then her threatened "spirit -bombing" with Taio) to probably the happiest, her escape from the UHC with the sure knowledge that Strike is waiting for her. Once I started reading here it was hard to stop, though I think I may have to skip the drowning and box chapters on re-reads, just as I occasionally skip the Laing POV and Robin's sacking ones in CoE. 

Some interesting things I noticed:

• I was amused that Andrew Honbold misremembered Ilsa's name as Isla, considering that was the error that drove people crazy in the original Troubled Blood audiobook. 
• The reflection in the church seems to have rubbed off on Strike; he says "Thank Christ" when Uncle Ted is found, and jokes that his team needs to expand that vocabulary when 3/4 say "Thank f*ck" at the news of Robin's rescue 
• Robin's thought of What d'you think is going to happen, ritual sacrifice? over the Manifestation is dangerously prescient.  More on that below. 
• While I don't attend to epigraphs as much as some, I really loved some of these:
• Ch. 83: In the midst of the greatest obstructions, friends come. 
• Ch. 87: Then the companion comes, and him you can trust. 
• Ch 89: A white horse comes as if on wings. He is not a robber, he will woo at the right time.
• As for the shipping, I really think the hotel room scene was perfectly written. Robin was NOT in an emotional state to respond to any sort of romantic overture and Strike was absolutely correct not to try.  
• We got a couple of things the hard-core shippers have wanted: an intentional kiss (albeit on the top of the head (can you image how much more tactile that would have been if they have shaved her bald?) and sharing a hotel bed (couldn't Strike have slept on the couch?) but no romance yet
• I love the hand-holding and "I knew you were there."  This is the most intimate thing Robin has ever said to him; it beats "The feeling is mutual."

Names

Ellacott: While this is not the first time we have encountered this name, one needs to remember for this section that it is derived from old English for "Elf-cottage." 

Felbrigg:  "bridge of planks" This is apparently an actual hotel, (and here's the suite where Strike and Robin stayed) but what I am most interested in is the pronunciation.  On the audiobook is sounds like Forgeman Lodge, which is the name name as Chapman Farm had back when Strike stayed there. However, the farm is written as "Forgeman." Is this a quirky British pronunciation or was the audiobook different? 

Harry Potter Echoes

As with my Charlotte-Voldemort parallel, these are notes for which I may expand in a longer essay later, but my initial thoughts are, Robin's escape from the cult involves three "trials": her submersion and near-drowning in the baptismal pool, her descent into the farmhouse basement and her torture in the coffin-like box, then her escape through the bathroom window and her run to the blind spot in the fence, where Strike was waiting for her. Robin endures these over a period of about 24 hours. 

In Deathly Hallows, Harry goes through three similar escapes, although over a much longer period:  his rescue from near-drowning in the Forest of Dean pool, his descent into the Malfoy basement, where he and Ron are trapped while Hermione is tortured. and finally his riding the dragon out of Gringotts.  In the book, they escape through the doors into the marble hallway, in the movie they have a more dramatic exit through the glass window on the ceiling.  Both Harry and Robin, after their "deaths" have an information-gathering session that allows them to regroup and finish their mission. 

The pool: Robin, like Harry, voluntarily steps into the pool, thinking she will simply submerge and come back up again. Harry found himself strangled by the chain of the locket Horcrux; Robin is captured by a "smooth cord" wrapping about her ankles.  Both inhale water, pass out and awake up coughing up water. 

Of course, Harry's "rescuer" is very different from Robin's. Harry is pulled out by his best mate Ron Weasley, who has magically managed to reunite with his friend in the Forest. We don't know who pulled Robin out, but safe to say, it was no friend. The repulsive Taio Wace, in demonic night-vision googles. is the one who is apparently compressing her chest to clear her lungs and quite likely pulled her from the water as well. At that moment, Robin's best mate is waiting for her in the woods, searching for her with his own night googles, but, in a world without Silver Does or Deluminators, he has no way of knowing what is happening or getting to her.

The box: Once out of the pool, Harry immediately puts on all his hand-knit Weasley sweaters, and is reconciled to the brother who had abandoned him. Robin remains in her soaking robe as Taio is ordered to take her to the farmhouse basement. There, Robin is subject to interrogation and torture, much like the Trio are in Malfoy Manor. However, poor Robin endures it all, whereas the Trio could divide up the workload, letting Harry and Ron get locked in the cellar while Hermione gets tortured upstairs Harry, of course, was reduced to a state of hopeless desperation in the cellar, grabbing the mirror shard and begging for help. This actions summons their rescuer Dobby. who saves Harry's team at the cost of his own life. 

Unlike Hermione, Robin voluntarily allows the torture, even signing a form agreeing to it. This could be seen as giving her something it common with Harry surrendering to Voldemort in the Forbidden Forest. Robin has no magical means of summoning help and no loyal house-elf willing to die for her. She, instead, is herself the house-elf; the name Ellacott actually means "elf-cottage."  She must save herself, and all she can do to escape from her torture in the Farmhouse basement is to wait for the time to run out. Her stay in the box lasts overnight, which means Strike's first opportunity to rescue her passes, and he must retreat to a hotel.

I would argue that Robin does symbolically die in the box, as Harry does in the forest, and as Hermione might well have done if Dobby had not turned up. Having entered the cult to save Will, her own will has been nearly destroyed. She emerges as close to broken as we have ever seen her:

TRG: Nothing mattered to her now except the approval of the church Principals. Terror of the box would be with her forever; all she wanted was not to be punished. She was now scared of somebody from the agency arriving to get her out, because if they did so, Robin might be shut up in the box again and hidden away...she must comply. Compliance was the only safety. 

Jacob's room = King's Cross station.  Harry's true "death" in DH occurs when he walks into the forest and chooses to let Voldemort kill him. After this. he goes to a spectral version of King's Cross station, an afterlife where he meets Dumbledore, gets his questions answered and chooses to return.  I am going to argue that his scene also has an echo in TRG. After Robin's symbolic death in the box, she is removed, given some food and allowed to shower and change. Then, she is taken back to the farmhouse, to the attic rather than the basement to care for Jacob, a severely disabled child who is being hidden away, denied medical treatment and systematically starved to death.  Jacob's appearance is not unlike that of the soul-creature Harry sees in King's Cross.

TRG: Robin stared at the occupant of the cot, horrified. Jacob was perhaps three feet long, but even though he was naked except for a nappy. he didn't look like a toddler. His face was sunken, his fine skin stretched over the bones and torso, his arms and legs were atrophied and Robin could see what looked like bruises and what she assumed to be pressure sores on his very white skin. He appeared to be sleeping, his breathing guttural. 

DH: It had the form of a small, naked child, curled on the ground, its skin raw and rough, flayed-looking, and it lay shuddering under a seat where it had been left. unwanted, stuffed out of sight, struggling for breath. 

This stay in the attic, intended to make Robin complicit in Jacob's maltreatment and ensure her future compliance, turns out to be the UHC's "flaw in the plan." Given some solitude, and a change to re-awaken her innate compassion for others, Robin is reinvigorated. In King's Cross, Harry receives a full debrief from Dumbledore and gets answers to the questions that have dogged him for the entire book. In the absence of her own dead Headmaster specter, Robin gets information from the old newspapers she finds in the room. 

TRG: The information Robin had been denied for so long, information unfiltered by Jonathan Wace's interpretation, had a peculiar effect on her. It felt as though it came from a different galaxy, making her feel her isolation even more acutely, yet at the same time, it pulled her mentally back towards the outer world. 

Like Harry, Robin must make a choice whether to return to her mission. 

TRG: Now two contradictory impulses battled inside her. The first was allied to her exhaustion; it urged caution and compliance and urged her to chant to drive everything from her mind. It recalled the dreadful hours in the box and whispered that the Waces were capable of worse than that...But the second asked her how she could return to her daily tasks knowing that a small boy was being slowly starved to death behind the farmhouse walls. It reminded her that she had managed to slip out of the dormitory by night many times without getting caught. It urged her to take the risk one more time, and escape. 

DH: "I've got to go back, haven't I?"

"That is up to you... I think," said Dumbledore, "that if you choose to return, there is a chance that [Voldemort] may be finished for good... by returning, you may ensure that fewer souls are maimed, fewer families are torn apart..." 

Harry sighed. Leaving this place would not be nearly as hard and walking through the forest had been, but it was warm and light and peaceful here, and he knew he was heading back to pain and the fear of more loss. 

While Robin might not realize it, her feelings for Strike tip the balance. The last article she reads before Emily Pirbright arrives to relieve her is the one about Charlotte Campbell's suicide. Atypically, we are not told her reaction, beyond her gasp. However, she must have realized, on some level, that the question of whether Strike still has feelings for his former fiancé is now moot. That presumably stirred something in her subconscious, even if she was not prepared to process it at that time. 

As she turns to leave, she has a near-magical revelation: 

TRG: 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. 

What we see here is true spirit-bonding between Robin and Strike, a mental and emotional closeness that is stronger than mere sexual attraction, and something very different that what happens in the Retreat Rooms 

The bathroom window: Robin turns back, and, despite the danger of keeping her escort Jiang waiting, demands the answers she needs from Emily. On the way downstairs with Jiang, she meets Papa J, agrees to "spirit bond" with Taio, but on the way to the Retreat Room she requests, and, with Jiang's help, is granted a bathroom break. Just as the Trio climb up from the Gringotts vaults to the marble entrance and force their way out the door (or in the movie, the ceiling window), Robin climbs up a dormitory bathroom sink (probably not actual marble, but close enough in a realistic book setting) to a "high mounted" window and escapes. 

TRG: Robin pushed her way onto the bathroom. Marion Huxley was bent over the sink, cleaning her teeth. In one fluid movement, Robin had stepped up onto the sink, beside Marion and, before Marion could shout in surprise, had forced the window open, heaved herself up on the high sill, swung one leg over and then...let herself fall.

Very similar language is used in both the Escape from Gringotts and the Battle of Hogwarts after Harry's "resurrection." 

DH: Harry's foot found the back of its hind leg and he pulled himself onto its back...he stretched out an arm; Hermione hoisted herself up; Ron climbed on behind them....Then at last, by the combined force of their spells and the dragon's brute strength, they had blasted their way out of the passage into the marble hallway... it took off, and, with Harry Ron and Hermione still clinging to its back, it forced its way through the metal doors, leaving them buckled and hanging from their hinges.  

DH: Harry pulled the Invisibility Cloak from inside his robes. swung it over himself and sprang to his feet, as Neville moved too. In one swift fluid motion, Neville broke free of the Body-Bind Curse upon him; the flaming hat fell off of him and he drew from its depths something silver, with a glittering, rubied handle. 

OK, so it's not quite as apparent as the Goblet of Fire/ Lethal White parallels, where we also got almost identically worded last minute rescues from the bad guy who has just raised the weapon to kill the protagonist. 

GoF:  With a great splintering and crashing, the door of Moody's office was blasted apart. 

LW: With a great splintering of wood, the door crashed open. 

Robin gets through the last half of Deathly Hallows in 24 hours, single-handedly playing the roles of Ron, Harry. Hermione, Dobby and Neville.  I would argue this is a more impressive feat than fighting off the Shacklewell Ripper or leaping onto the Tube tracks at Comicon. 

I had earlier made a connection between Taio and Peter Pettigrew, given the rat-like appearance of both. Now, I think the role of Pettigrew is shared by Jiang. the less regarded hanger-on to his more respected older brother. The small bond Robin forges with him during the hunt for the mother-of-pearl fish may have paid off here, as Jiang convinces his brother to let Robin into the dormitory for a pee, and doesn't give her away for saying earlier that she was in the loo when she was talking to Emily. This reminds me a bit of Harry's mercy to Pettigrew in PoA, and how that paid off in Malfoy Manor, when Wormtail hesitates to kill Harry and is throttled with his own silver hand. 

There is a further connection to Pettigrew in Robin's conversation with Emily, where her questioning style is much less compassionate than usual, and she reminds Emily that Emily owes her for her help in Norwich, just as Harry reminds Wormtail that Wormtail owes him for sparing his life. So, perhaps this is not so much a link to Pettigrew but a repetition of the theme that compassion shown, and alliances formed, no matter how weak, pay off. 

I must say, having Taio brained by Strike's wire cutters was a similarly satisfying act of poetic justice. I wonder if he got medical treatment or if he had to depend on Zhou's spirit healing. 

Ring Structure 

Robin is folded into a box for punishment, not unlike Margot Bamborough's body was folded and encased in the ottoman in TB.  This is another indicator that the box is a symbolic near-death experience for Robin. 

The White Horse mention in the epigraph is a nice echo to Lethal White, only the white horse is heroic, not an omen of death. 

On to part 7, next time.