Continuing our series of Hogwarts Professor staff posts ranking the Strike books, I’ll be adding my thoughts to the mix. (After which, I will be interestedly reading through everybody else’s posts, eager to hear what they thought and how they evaluated the texts!)
My method here will be informed by my general tendencies when reading. I struggle with texts if they are considered by themselves alone, independent of other texts. The more I can practice what Mortimer Adler called Syntopical reading, reading texts together in each other’s light, the better I will enjoy and gain from any given book. I will, therefore, tend to rank texts higher when they play a pivotal role narratively in a series, or when the motifs or structure of a text is well illumined by or illuminating of other texts, or most generally when they reward Syntopical reading. The degree to which a book is fundamentally about how one reads, as in the common text-within-a-text of Rowling’s writing, also act favorably in my evaluation. This is not the only standard applied, of course, but in evaluating these books this aspect came up most frequently. In no small part, what follows is just the degree of enjoyment I had while reading each of them, such that the justifications below might not be as airtight as they could be. Ranking follows after the jump, starting from last place and continuing to first.
Strike books has had its primary villain secretly indicated by a hidden reference to various Hermes-related figures, what may alliteratively be called “Mercury Markers”. This, aside from its predictive value, seems to be, on the face of it, a very strange thing to expect an author to do. I wish to make the claim that a move of this type is common for any author like Rowling who writes within Hermetic or Alchemical traditions. The central motif of the Hermetic tradition is this: a hidden word or sign, that will make itself readily apparent only to the “initiated” who have been informed to expect the word or sign, brightly highlights a Deeply Important Something that is going on “behind the scenes.” Below, I plan to track the main places I see similar effects being used and provide a more detailed account of where I see this being used in the Strike novels.
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