Beatrice Groves – Secrets of the Red Room

With The Hallmarked Man on the horizon and J. K. Rowling treating us to a new Twitter Header, Beatrice Groves, Research Fellow and tutor at Trinity College, Oxford, and author of  Literary Allusion in Harry Potter, has written a Hogwarts Professor Guest Post: Secrets of the Red Room. 

Secrets of the Red Room

On 16 June 2024 Rowling updated her header to an image of the red lift in the Savoy Hotel. This lift was London’s first electric lift – it was called ‘a red “ascending room”’ and ‘nervous passengers would be handed a glass of brandy to assist with the hair-raising exercise of going up and down in the lacquer and gilt Red Lift.’

[And this is a great blog for lots more fun Savoy facts!]

Rowling has been generous with header clues for The Hallmarked Man – uniquely providing a monthly clue, starting with the Freemason’s Hall in February 2024 (see my blogs on freemasonry in Harry Potter here and here), followed by Sark later the same month, a silver neff in March, Crieff the following month, the Iron Bridge in May and now, in June, the Savoy’s red lift. I’ve blogged on the silver theme here and will be bringing out blogs on Sark literary allusions (both the confirmed and the possible) over the summer. But, for now, four things interest me about this new ‘red lift’ header. The first is that it is that it appears to be a clue about the milieu in which the crime will take place in The Hallmarked Man. When a luxury Scottish hotel Crieff Hydro appeared in the centre of the image of Crieff in the April header I did wonder if this might be a holiday rather than a clue (although of course it can be both – as Sark was! – when Rowling takes a trip scouting out a location). This new header from the Savoy Hotel, however, makes it more likely that the Crieff Hydro will likewise be a location in Hallmarked Man (and its fabulously kitsch Victorian swimming baths looks like just the kind of place likely to turn up in Strike). Two luxury hotels suggests, as befits both the title and all the silver hints, that we are headed towards another case – as with Cuckoo’s Calling, Lethal White and Running Grave – involving monied clients/victims. Primarily, however, this wealthy milieu is more evidence that (as Rowling has pretty much confirmed) Strike’s own monied background – his extremely wealthy father – will be turning up in this book. In Rowling’s recent interviews ‘On Writing’ she said that:

There was one, editor who did not like Strike having a famous father and made that point. And obviously, because I can’t break cover, I can’t say, I couldn’t say, but I know how important this will be on book eight. You can’t say that as a first-time writer, and I am ostensibly in this situation a first-time writer. You can’t say, now, look, I know a series and I know this backstory is going to work out brilliantly in book seven, eight and nine.

J. K. Rowling – On Writing

I read this as Rowling letting slip that Rokeby will be crucial to The Hallmarked Man (maybe even the central referent of the title – a witty riff on the naff birthday card he sent Strike in Troubled Blood!) and then back-tracking to cover herself and naming all of books seven, eight and nine (despite the fact that Rokeby is entirely absent from seven). If the Gillespie theory (as suggested by The Strike and Ellacott Files – I’ll be returning to this theory in a future blog!) is correct and Leda’s murder was connected with Gillespie’s embezzlement of Strike’s paternity money, then Rokeby does need to appear in either book eight or nine and provide some information before Strike solves Leda’s murder in Book ten.

Returning to this new header, however, the second thing that interests me is all that red! Rowling took a new photo to go with the new header, emphasising the red theme with a red top, lipstick and earrings. The emphasis on red – given that this lift was originally known as a ‘red “ascending room”’ – recalls the famous ‘red-room’ in Jane Eyre, a version of Harry’s cupboard under the stairs in which an orphan is locked by their cruel aunt. We don’t need to look far for Rowling’s love of the Brontës – she has cited ‘all the Brontes’ as among her favourite authors, named both her dog and her TV production company after them and used Charlotte Brontë poems for two epigraphs in Ink Black Heart. Jane Eyre certainly seems to be one of the literary orphans after whom Harry’s story is modelled, as John Granger spelt out in Bookshelf:

If Harry needed a new name, it would be ‘Jane Eyre.’

She is an orphan, beaten up regularly by her male cousin, treated horribly by her Aunt, even locked in the Red Room to isolate and punish her. Harry is an orphan, Dudley’s punching bag as a child, and he lives in a cabinet under his Aunt and Uncle’s stairs. They both are delivered from their families to an extraordinary school where they make their first friends.[1]

Jane Eyre is explicitly referenced in Lethal White (when Strike muses on ‘Rochester’s first wife’) and then, as lots of people noticed on first reading Running Grave, these connections reached an apogee in the moment of escape from Chapman Farm when Robin knew Strike was there; a moment which echoed the uncanny power of love in Jane Eyre when Jane hears Rochester calling her name. (This moment is, incidentally, a central plot point in the thoroughly-to-be-recommended Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde). The supernatural connection with her beloved, in both cases, enables to woman to free herself from incarceration in a quasi-religious cult (marriage to St. John Rivers, to which Jane almost accedes, sounds just as desperately grim as the UHC).

The all-encompassing red of the new header is not only a possible echo of Jane Eyre but an emphatic suggestion about the colour-palate of The Hallmarked Man. Strike is a series built round colour – the striking green dress that links Robin with the grass snake Strike had wanted to keep as a child; all those white swans and white horses in a novel named Lethal White; Robin’s penchant for wearing the blue that is Strike’s middle name and a whole novel suffused with an inky blackness that weaves together the Victorian gothic, the heart of the killer and the cartoon that started it all. As John Granger was the first to explore (and the author herself has subsequently confirmed) Rowling used alchemical colour symbolism as a naming and a structuring device in Harry Potter – and there have been some echoes of this in Strike (for example, both series have a clear nigredo in The Order of the Phoenix and The Ink Black Heart). In alchemical symbolism it is red that marks final stage of the alchemical journey – which is why the Philosopher’s Stone itself is traditionally depicted as red (and also, I suspect, the reason for Robin’s oft-mentioned red-gold hair). The red stage of the alchemical Great Work– the rubedo – comes after the initial black (nigredo) and subsequent white (albedo) stages and marks the moment when the Philosopher’s Stone is reached. In Harry Potter Harry has three father figures named after the three stages of the alchemical process – Sirius Black, Albus Dumbledore and Rubeus Hagrid. Hagrid is named after the final stage, the rubedo, because of his central role of supporting Harry (the true Philosopher’s Stone of the series) both psychologically, and literally: Hagrid carries Harry into the story at the opening of the series and to his final victory over Voldemort at its close. If this header is a sign that we are entering the rubedo of Strike then it would be a sign that a decisive shift towards the ultimate ending of the series will take place in this book: I think (hope!) that this will take the form of both some crucial information about Leda’s murder and a kiss. Strellacott shippers can hope!

Thirdly, in this new header Rowling has chosen an image of the lift which lines up the mirror within the lift with another (presumably on a wall opposite the lift on one of the floors) to create infinitely recurring image of reflecting mirrors. This is known as ‘Spiegel im Spiegel’ (‘mirror(s) in the mirror’) – a phrase famous from its use as a title by Arvo Pärt (listen here for an audible evocation of this visual image). ‘Spiegel im Spiegel’ is a visualisation of what is known in literary terms it as a mise en abyme (‘put into the abyss’). The self-reflecting mirrors in the new header recall the specific mise en abyme of which Rowling is fondest – the text-within-a-text. The most notable literary instance of this is Hamlet’s ‘play within the play’ – an occurrence which, I think, lies behind Rowling’s thorough-going exploration of the mise en abyme in Silkworm.

Silkworm is built around the mise en abyme – ‘the conceit of the novel within the novel.’ It is a ‘novel about novels with another novel inside it’ and Rowling even named this ‘book within the book’ Bombyx Mori – giving it the same name as the novel itself (as I’ve discussed here). The recursion embodied by the self-referential repetition of mise en abyme even occurs within the name of the murder victim himself:

Owen Quine is a brilliant name for someone who ends up sharing the fate of his fictional alter-ego because a ‘quine’ is the name of self-replicating computer program: a program that can only produce a copy of itself. (The program was named after the philosopher Willard Quine, who worked on indirect self-reference and invented Quine’s paradox: “‘Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation’ yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation”). Owen Quine’s writing appears to be deeply self-referential – “Quine was repeating himself. That’s the second thing from Hobart’s Sin he put in Bombyx Mori” (p.242) – as does his death. (And Owen Quine sounds rather like ‘own quine’ – the most self-referential name of all!)

 Literary Clues in “The Silkworm” – Part 2

Perhaps the mise en abyme which played such as central role in Silkworm (and a more understated role in Ink Black Heart) is simply in this header because Rowling enjoys the form, but it may be a clue to look out for a literary form to out for in The Hallmarked Man!

Fourthly, and finally, this header is a fun nod to the understated, but still important, role that lifts have played in the series. There is quite a bit of shenanigans about the lift in Lula’s apartment in Cuckoo’s Calling and although this is, primarily, a red-herring it does function as a kind of anti-clue as, by emphasising a means of escape, it draws implicit attention to the idea that the killer may, in fact, have stayed in the building. As a prosthetic user, Strike has a heightened awareness of ‘the inevitably out-of-order lift[s]’ (Silkworm) that are everywhere a blight on his life: ‘he was muttering and cursing as he struggled up the stairs at Wembley Stadium station—the lifts weren’t working’ (Lethal White). Crucially, of course, Strike does not get the lift that he could get mended working – the almost every-book-mentioned fact that is Strike’s version of Harry and Ron almost every-book-mentioned failure to read Hogwarts: A History:

At a quarter to nine the next morning Strike made his way slowly down the metal stairs, asking himself, not for the first time, why he did not do something about getting the birdcage lift fixed. (Silkworm)

Forty-five minutes later, Strike was tramping up the metal staircase towards his office and asking himself for the umpteenth time why he had never contacted the landlord about getting the birdcage lift fixed.  (Career of Evil)

For about the thousandth time, climbing the stairs, he wondered why he’d never contacted the landlord about getting the lift fixed. (Ink Black Heart, 25)

The carefully graded phrasing (‘not for the first,’ ‘umpteenth,’ ‘thousandth’) remind the reader that they have heard about this before. Fixing this lift is an act of self-care waiting to happen. After the eschewal of cigarettes, chips and Leda’s abusive love-languages in Running Grave, might we see Strike building on these excellent strides forward with a call to the landlord about the lift in Hallmarked Man? Here’s predicting that, after some prevaricating by the landlord, it’ll finally get fixed at the end of book 10 (if, as seems increasingly likely, they never do leave Denmark Street). It would be a fitting conclusion: the series ending with a fixing-up of something on the brokenness of which the whole series depends. Strike’s embarrassment at his unintentional and life-saving (but still awkward) grabbing of Robin’s breast after she’s walked up the stairs to his office is the reason that he takes her on. If she’d been safely ensconced in the lift, Strike would have run after Charlotte and Robin would never have been hired.

The importance of literal brokenness enabling this central relationship of the series is very fitting for the relationship itself – as Rowling has said: ‘So my feeling is that they need to do a degree of healing before they – or he – is able to have a relationship of the kind I know a lot of readers would like them to have.’ The fact that it was a broken lift that brought Strike and Robin together symbolises this, but also reminds us of the links between lifts and romance in the series – suggested by the propinquity they enforce. In Career of Evil Strike and Robin’s ride in a lift together induces a sudden self-consciousness. It seems possible, given this, that the much-commented-on lack of a lift up to their rooms in the hotel in Whitstable in Ink Black Heart might have been a sign. It was a romantic trip of two unattached people, bound together in the wake of a traumatic threat, two people are both attracted to and in love with each other – a trip which both Strike and Robin remember with the painful acuteness of what-might-have-been in Running Grave – a trip full of potential in which, nonetheless, nothing happens. This hotel has a lift ‘but not up to those particular rooms’ – a hint that, although there are no obvious barriers to their getting together at this moment, it is not destined to happen. (For more on this device of using quotidian things to symbolise the romance, which I think Rowling draws from Jane Austen, see my blog here). Most satisfyingly, once we notice the symbolism of lifts in Strike, we see them patterning out Robin’s romantic future. Robin’s new flat is mentioned as having a lift, which takes Strike easily to the second floor when his leg is paining him. But Murphy’s flat, it is noted (apparently somewhat unnecessarily), has no lift. Robin and Murphy’s relationship is going nowhere.

It is a nice little detail emphasising the way in which lifts have marked the passage of Strike and Robin’s relationship. And I’m taking this new lift header not only as promising the Savoy Hotel as a location in Strike 8 but as an indication that The Hallmarked Man will see a decisive movement forward in the detectives’ relationship. A sign that by the end of the series not only will Strike and Robin be fully, and happily, together – partners in work, love and life – but also that dratted birdcage lift will be mended.

***

[1] John Granger, Granger, Harry Potter’s Bookshelf: The Great Books Behind the Hogwarts Adventures (New York: Berkley Publishing Group, 2009), 105.

All of Dr Groves’ on line Rowling scholarship can be found in the Beatrice Groves Pillar Post.