The Center of the Nine Parts, the Story Turn of Strike7?

It’s been more than a week since Running Grave was published and we’ve reached the half-way point in my reading of Strike7 as a serialized Dickens novel of nine individual Parts. To my surprise (and delight), I still have not been spoiled, which is to say ‘I don’t know the ending,’ and each of the first four Parts I’ve read as well as the Prologue have conformed for the most part with traditional writing; each has had an identifiable latch of beginning and end chapters, a story-turn that echoes beginning and points to the end, and chapters or chapter bundles that mirror one another across the axis of turn and latch. I have been reading one Part each night after I finish writing up the previous Part’s ring notes and stray thoughts, then charting the Part I’ve just read, then taking a look at it to see if the ring pieces are visible. With a ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ on that I go to bed with the prayer that the structure will be obvious in the morning.

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The Center Ring within the Ring? Murder Revealed at Heart of Celtic Cross?

What a challenge Running Grave, Part Four, is to a Ring Reader!

I was delighted at the start because this Part is the shortest of the opening Parts; I looked forward to getting to bed before 3 AM (or 6 AM…). I did manage to read and chart it and get to bed before 1 AM (just), but the plot points of the fourth Part and its structure left me wondering and really hoping that its structure and meaning would present themselves all-sorted after a good morning’s sleep. 

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Four More Weeks at Chapman Farm in Circles and Squares

This is the third in a nine part series of posts in which I will be reading Rowling-Galbraith’s seventh Cormoran Strike novel, Running Grave, as if each of its nine Parts or chapter sets were books themselves. I’m doing this because Rowling has in previous books, most notably Troubled Blood, written the Parts of her novels in the same structural form that she does the book as a whole and the series of books taken in a set, a traditional story scaffolding called ring composition (see the first post in this series for an introduction to that).

The idea, in a nutshell, is to read Running Grave as if it were a Dickens novel, a super-long book best read as nine, serialized, semi-stand-alone parts.

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The Telling of Robin’s First Week at Chapman Farm is a 17 chapter Ring Composition (and More)

It took me the better part of a week to read, chart, and write up a post about Part One of Running Grave. I confess to dreading that process for Part Two but I was able to read it, chart it, and make the legible picture for this post above in less than eight hours.

Why was it so much easier? Because it wasn’t a chapter by chapter adventure in finding parallels across the story axis, not to mention it was shorter and there were only two interview information-dumps. In Part Two, Rowling has a simplified chapter sequence; with two exceptions (chapters 25 and 34-36) after the start, we are given two chapters of Robin-at-the-farm followed by two chapters of Strike-at-work-in-London (and environs) followed by two Robin chapters, repeat to finish. If you count their time together as ‘Strike’ chapters at the start, each gets four turns in the spotlight in alternation.

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