Chamber of Secrets-Troubled Blood Linkages, Part 3: Floods, hearts and visits to the past.

Todays segment covers three chapters of Chamber of Secrets: "The Very Secret Diary" "Cornelius Fudge" and "Aragog" and Chapters 31-48 of Troubled Blood, which takes us to the end of Part 5, and from Strike's post-Christmas visit to Cornwall to Joan's funeral. My start-and stopping points are a bit arbitrary, but I like that the Harry Potter segment is bracketed by Moaning Myrtle, and the Strike segment by Aunt Joan. 

Here are the main events of CoS:

• Moaning Myrtle floods the bathroom; Harry and Ron discover the diary after crossing "a great flood" to get to it. 
• Lockhart decides to sponsor a Valentine's Day "morale booster" with card- and song-delivering dwarves. Everyone hates it, especially Harry, who is attacked by a surly dwarf who sings him Ginny's embarrassing song, indirectly causing an ink spill all over the diary. 
• Harry discovers the diary repels ink. That night, Harry tries writing in the diary and Tom Riddle "writes" back. 
• Harry journeys into the diary, where Riddle shows himself "catching" Hagrid opening the Chamber. 
• The mandrakes continue to mature, and the Trio chooses their electives for the next year. 
• Harry's dorm is ransacked and Riddle's diary stolen. 
• On the day of the second Quidditch match, Harry hears the mysterious voice again and Hermione rushes off to the library. The match is cancelled when Hermione and Penelope Clearwater are attacked and petrified. 
• Despite new restrictions, Ron and Harry, in the Invisibility Cloak, sneak down to Hagrid's hut to ask him about the Chamber of Secrets. They arrive to find Cornelius Fudge there to arrest Hagrid, over Dumbledore's objections. 
• Lucius Malfoy arrives with an order of suspension for Dumbledore, who departs for Azkaban after advising the hidden Harry and Ron to "follow the spiders." 
• In Herbology, Harry and Ron see spiders heading towards the Forbidden Forest. At night, they head into the forest with Fang. They encounter first the Weasley car, which has gone wild in the forest. Then, spiders arrive and carry them to Aragog's lair. 
• Aragog tells them that he is not the monster, and that Hagrid protected him and that Hagrid  never knew how to open the Chamber or what the monsters were. As Harry and Ron try to leave, Aragog's children attack, but they are rescued by the car. 
• Once back in the dormitory, Harry puts several clues together and realizes that Moaning Myrtle was the victim of Slytherin's monster 50 years ago. 

And, in TB, we see: 

• Strike's very touching post-Christmas visit with Joan, including the discussion about her final wishes and her advice on Rokeby. 
• Strike and Robin's catch-up phone call on Bamborough, while Robin tails Elinore Dean to the grocery. 
• Robin's elimination of the speeding van as Creed's, her continued reading of The Demon of Paradise Park and her celebration with Max of his new job. 
• Strike returns and gets a second message from Prudence and again declines the invitation to Rokeby's party. He tells Al the same thing when he calls. 
• Strike and Robin drive to Hampton Court; on the way he tells her about the snuff film, and worries about her emotional response. 
• They interview Cynthia Phipps at Hampton Court, then the full Phipps family at their home. The interview winds up as a healing experience for the Phipps family. 
• Strike cannot get to Ted and Joan due to flooding. He goes to a cafe in Clerkenwell, very stressed and spies Samhain Athorn on the street, follows him home and meets him and Deborah. 
• Valentine's Day, including the Dinner Party from Hell and subsequent fight and apology.
• Strike and Lucy's drive to St. Mawes during the flood and reach Joan before she dies. 
• Robin's trip to Leamington Spa and interview with Paul Satchwell. She looks through the notebook, discovers who "Schmidt" is and is able to re-interpret part of the record with this information. 
• Joan's funeral in St. Mawes. 

There are certainly more connections in these sections of the book than in the last.  For example:

Terrible Valentine's Day. No one wants to celebrate Valentine's Day, especially Lockhart style.  Even the decor is described in an unappealing manner:  "lurid" flowers on the wall of the Great Hall and confetti falling into people's breakfasts. In Strike's world, we have Strike noticing the garish red and pink decor in store windows, Robin hearing a TV announcer calling the holiday "an exercise in commercial cynicism," slimy Saul Morris kissing up to Pat with flowers and Nick and Ilsa's "Valentine sh*t" getting called off in the wake of Ilsa's miscarriage. I'm not even counting the Hell of the dinner party itself,  since that wasn't specifically related to the holiday. 

Crossing floodwaters:  Harry and Ron wade across the flooded bathroom to get to Moaning Myrtle and the diary. Lucy and Strike wade through multiple flooded plains to get to Joan and Ted.

Not-fully-truthful journey to the past: Robin's interview with Satchwell reminds me a bit of Harry's journey into the diary. Both occasions you have the protagonist getting filled in on the past by someone who was there. These are one-on-one "interviews," as opposed to most of the rest of the interviews, where Strike and Robin are either together or interviewing a group. In both cases, the protagonist gives a mixture of true and false. Riddle leads Harry to believe that Hagrid opened the chamber; Satchwell lies about meeting Margot a second time. 

Next time, I'll finish up with both books.