There are several unwritten priorities at HogwartsProfessor that serve as something like policies here. We are not only not adverse, for example, to Christian readings of popular texts, we begin there, at least if the author is a professed believer. Similarly, we do not accept as our default critical view the neo-Marxist and pseudo-scientific one that every text is an object of political and social justice issues to deconstruct in order to reveal the racist, sexist, homophobic, and fascist content the clueless author has woven unconsciously into her or his work. We assume, in contrast, that the author is a deliberate artist who is both aware of such issues and even writing about them deliberately (as often as not laughing at the pin-headed self-importance and virtue signaling of the critical community).

We rarely interpret books, for much the same reason, as fictional re-writings of the writer’s autobiography, as wish-fulfillment fantasies in which an author writes his or her self as ‘Mary Sue‘ or ‘Marty Stu’ into the story to ‘work out’ psychologically the issues and events of the artist’s ‘real life.’ It is something of a rule in academia today to begin at this biographical point of reference with many authors, hence the oversized body of work on C. S. Lewis’ issues with mom and dad as keys to the perspective on women in his fiction and on J. R. R. Tolkien’s WWI experiences as a blueprint for Frodo’s adventures in The Lord of the Rings. HogwartsProfessor ‘goes there’ only with hesitation, lest we start out, as the neo-Marxists do, with the upside down view of the author-as-unconscious-idiot rather than self-aware and mature artist.

Having said that, I am obliged to note, being the pseudonym for a human being, that Robert Galbraith’s work incorporates significant elements that seem to be taken directly from the life of Joanne Rowling Murray, whose primary pen name is ‘J. K. Rowling.’ Lethal White has several autobiographical parts, which, if not as in-your-face as the ones in Casual Vacancy that rather overwhelm what I assume was her first novel, one re-written post-Potter, are important for a full appreciation of the artistry involved. Galbraith is less a literary narcissist and auto-projection unit in the Rowling life-story references he includes in the Cormoran Strike mysteries than a self-aware, deliberate author sharing with his readers in story what he has learned from reflection upon Rowling’s life.

As ‘for instances’ of this, here are three examples of fairly obvious echoes of Rowling’s life in Lethal White with explanation of how this repetition in story of life-events is not the end of interpreting or understanding it — “Oh, that’s why she writes about this!” — but only the beginning.

[Read more…]

Lethal White, if as suspected it is the ‘story turn’ or pivot in the CormoranStrike series as Goblet of Fire was to the Hogwarts saga, must include a crisis that points to the action of the next several books and especially to the finale in Strike7. Evan Willis has given a credible explanation of what this might look like in his ‘Mythic Context’ post, namely that those characters who have lost their beloveds to Cormoran and Robin, Matt Cunliffe and Charlotte Campbell-Ross respectively, will be going to war to exact revenge.

It’s not hard to imagine this scenario; Charlotte has clearly ‘weaponized’ Jago Ross to hate Cormoran via the Strike case internet searches she let him find and her ‘dinner date’ with Strike while hubbie was Stateside and Matt will have lost his house, his job, his self-respect and his ability to go home to Massham when Robin divorces him. It won’t take much for Charlotte to turn him into a guided missile. It’s a far cry from the re-incarnation of the Dark Lord in a Black Mass at Little Hangleton graveyard (please note the ‘hanging’ element there and the graveyard aspect of the Dell scene in White…) but we have been told sufficient times in the first four Strike mysteries that Charlotte is an animal who lives for revenge that it seems almost a promise.

Having said that, how are Cormoran and Robin vulnerable to investigation and exposure via Mitch Patterson and whomever Ross might hire or Cunliffe may enlist? Is there some secret that the C. B. Strike Detective Agency has that could mean their ruin and the end of Robin and Cormoran’s seemingly destined marriage in the finale? Was it shared in Lethal White? Yes, yes, and yes, I think so. I explain after the jump. [Read more…]