Merry Christmas, Rowling Readers!

I’m not a big fan of Ian Spence, who writes Jungian interpretations of pop culture at medium.com; see, for example his borderline wing-nut character assassination pieces on ‘Rowling the Christian Fundamentalist Transphobe’ here and here. If you have trouble thinking of Rowling as the advocate of “her own patriarchal, superstitious Christian movement,” you can skip over those Spence pieces.

But even when he’s over-the-top with his disgust for all things Christian, he sometimes comes up with a treasure.

Case in point? The hidden rabbits in Troubled Blood. I don’t think his interpretation of these hares and bunnies holds water and he doesn’t talk about them all (he misses the stuffed rabbits dressed as hunters in the bar where Robin interviews SB’s PA); but did you connect the “buck teeth” of Oonaugh Kennedy — who loves “carrot cake,” right? — with the Athorns’ extraordinarily “long ears” and Anna Phipps’ “pajama case shaped like a rabbit” in which she kept photographs of her mother clandestinely? I sure didn’t.

Spence discusses these finds and his interpretation of them in ‘The Rabbit as Psychopomp: Darkness and light in J.K. Rowling’s Troubled Blood.’ Enjoy!

One of Cormoran and Robin’s ‘to do’ items at the beginning of Troubled Blood is to re-negotiate an extension to the Agency’s lease with the new owners of the Denmark Street property.

In addition to the five open cases still on the agency’s books, he and Robin were juggling increased management demands made by the expanded workforce, and negotiating a year’s extension on the office lease with the developer who’d bought their building.

That task is never checked off their list. In fact, it is never mentioned again. Which means, I’m willing to bet, that this “no extension on the lease” item will come to a crisis early on in Strike6 and the C. B. Strike Detective Agency will need new quarters, fast.

The good news? There is a beautiful property in London available, even standing by, waiting for Strike to move in, Strike has the money to buy or to put up a down payment on it, heck, the owners might just give it to him.

Louise Freeman suggested it first: the Joe North Artists Studio house that was the scene of the Owen-Quine-North literary life back in the day and of Owen Quine’s murder in The Silworm.

North’s will had the provision that both Michael Fancourt and Owen Quine had to agree on the new owner and that the property had to be sold to an artist of some kind. Quine and Fancourt were feuding with such intensity that they never could agree on a sale (meaning “Fancourt refused to approve any sale or rental, money which would have really helped the down on their luck Quines, in retaliation for the suicide of his first wife which he mistakenly believes Quine inspired”). After Owen Quine’s death — in the house — I assume Leanora Quine inherited the family half-interest and veto power. I’d bet, too, that, though she and Orlando could use the money, she has turned down every one of Fancourt’s suggested buyers both to spite him and to preserve the place where her husband was murdered as kind of a shrine.

I wrote Nick Jeffery about the idea and, of course, learned a lot. The North house turns out to be a good and very real possibility.

Troubled Blood‘s epigraphs are with one exception all from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen. He was a late 16^th Century poet writing intentionally Medieval (and even in his time what seemed anachronistic) drama about the importance of acquiring virtue for a successful end in the human spiritual journey. Spenser, as he writes to Raleigh and in Faerie Queen, is “delighting” readers with his story and poem but “instructing” them in virtue as well. His principal means to that end is writing an engaging allegory or Morality Play of the soul’s path to salvation — or to perdition.

My working thesis in writing three posts on this subject is that Rowling is pursuing the same “instructing while delighting” ends in Strike5 as the author of Faerie Queen and writing an intentionally Spenserian spiritual allegory to get there.  Troubled Blood‘s embedded story, in brief, is the three-fold allegory of the life and after-life of Margot Bamborough, which Rowling uses to illustrate “changes in the history of feminism” as well as to instruct about “morality” and “mortality,” her “obsession.”

• The 1974 story is an allegorical drama after Spenser about the evils and failings of the Institutional Church, here Roman Catholicism, in which Margot, ‘the Pearl,’ or Christ-seeking soul, falls to the delusions of Art, Science, and Power, i.e., ‘the World,’ on her pilgrimage through life, and is judged by God and sentenced to death for her misdeeds and poor choices.
• The meanings of Margot’s last name, of the names of the three Bayliss sisters, and of ‘Dennis Creed’ extend the Buntan-esque allegory of a soul’s journey to a critique of Steinem era and contemporary feminism, an extension I will explore in a second post on reading Strike5 as allegory.
• The post 1974 story, especially the 2014 investigation of her disappearance by Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, is the Morality Play of the Repentant Sinner spirit, Margot’s ghost, who, after her death, labors – by dreams, via occult openings to the psychic realm, and by inspiring thoughts in those sensitive to her influence — to reveal her fate and her murderer and to draw attention to the sins she committed and to help and protect those she misled or left behind.

The Margot Bamborough case starts in Cornwall and Falmouth with pointers to the Medieval Morality Play to come. Check out the first description of Anna Phipps:

The dark woman was slighter in build. Her large gray eyes shone palely in her long face. She had an air of intensity, even of fanaticism, about her in the half-light, like a medieval martyr. (15)

Note, too, her disappointment that Strike at their Falmouth meeting was not going to swear a knightly oath to find her mother or die in the attempt:

Strike’s stump protested at being asked to support his weight again so soon after sitting down, but there seemed little more to discuss, especially as Anna had regressed into a tearful silence. Slightly regretting the untouched plate of biscuits, the detective shook Anna’s cool hand.

“Thanks, anyway,” she said, and he had the feeling that he had disappointed her, that she’d hoped he would make her a promise of the truth, that he would swear upon his honor to do what everyone else had failed to do. (52) 

A Medieval martyr charges her anointed knight to go into the perilous quest…

As we’ll see in this first Spenser-inspired reading, though, it is not hints like these but the names and behaviors of the characters playing allegorical roles in Rowling-Galbraith’s interior spiritual drama of a soul’s fall from grace and redemption in the next world that are the give-aways to their second meaning, characters named King, Queen, Sin, Moon, Prudence, Peace, Janus, Glory, Pearl, Una, Cross, Creed, Law, and, of course, God. I won’t decipher all that in today and the next two allegory posts but I am hopeful about making a compelling case that (1) a Spenserian allegory, simultaneously spiritual and political, is the story-within-the-story of Troubled Blood and (2) that Rowling once again is making the case for leading a virtuous life in remembrance of death and the life to come.

We’ll start with the star of the show, Margot Bamborough, review her life on earth for its allegorical qualities and meaning, and then discuss the evidence that her ghost haunts and directs much of the action in Troubled Blood. Join me after the jump for the first part of three allegorical readings of Strike5. [Read more…]

Twelve hours ago, I posted a longish essay in which I reviewed the cases against the five principal suspects in the “Who Killed Leda Strike?” murder mystery. My conclusion was that Dave Polworth did it.

Before I open my email and have to read your thoughts on just how bone-headed an idea this is, especially in relation to the theories that Lucy Fantoni or Whittaker’s elder relations did the job, I want to clarify one thing: I really don’t believe Dave Polworth did it.

In fact, I’m pretty sure he didn’t do it. Frankly, I’d almost be disappointed for my prediction to be proven right in the end.

Why, then, did I go to the trouble of surveying the evidence for and against Leda, Jonny, Jeff, Ted, and Dave as potential killers? To understand that, we have to be clear about the point  and value of interpretive speculation that Rowling’s serial works invite. Join me after the jump for that discussion. [Read more…]