Three Cheers for the sleuths at The Rowling Library!
DV, we’ll soon have the citation from the I Ching and the translation Rowling-Galbraith is using.
Until then, your thoughts? That I Ching piece is suggestive, beyond the Norfolk Commune.
Did Shanker kill Leda or promise, at least, that he wouldn’t say why she committed suicide?
Ooooh, very exciting. The first thing that came to my mind was the combination of Strike’s earlier memory of a teenage being beaten at the Norfolk commune, and his “hope” in the last book that the place no longer existed. That was a clue to me that it probably still exists, and, if so , is probably still abusing people.
Will we see another serial child abuser like Brockbank who should have been stopped back in the day but wasn’t? Some of my earlier posts speculated that Rokeby was somehow involved, behind the scenes, in getting his kid away from the commune; could Strike possibly discover that he knew of more serious criminal activity going on, but did nothing once his own needs were taken care of? Namely, to get his own offspring out before “Jonny Rokeby’s son trapped in satanic cult” headlines could appear.
As always, this makes me wonder if the commune Brittany Brockbank was in will be one of the changes the TV show makes to streamline the story.
Brilliant, Louise. Do you think the ‘Ink Black Heart’ behavior of Jago Ross with his children and Charlotte’s indifference to their fate when she divorces him (and how it appalls Strike and breaks his final connection to her) was foreshadowing of Strike’s discovery in ‘Running Grave’ that his biological father saved him from the Commune but left the place intact to avoid linkage?
I doubt Rokeby will be commissioning him to investigate that — except post mortem in his will maybe?
What connection can we make with Leda’s death? I think more and more that Strike7 will, as with ‘Deathly Hallows,’ be the closer of the series as designed, though The Presence may have follow-ups planned. If this is the case, there will have to be a connection between the Norfolk Commune experience and her ‘suicide,’ which I am thinking more and more actually was a suicide, albeit a sacrificial death, less Lula’s leap than the death of the ‘Rosmersholm’ lovers.
Rowling used the Richard Wilhelm & Cary Baynes translation. The Yijing epigraph is from the comment of Wenyan Zhuan (文言傳, “Commentary on the Words”) on Hexagram 2 (坤 kūn, “Field”):
“其所由来者渐矣。由辨之不早辨也。”
Well, now I’ve found that Richard Wilhelm & Cary Baynes interpreted Kun as “The Receptive”.
By the way, the translation by Legge is:
The causes of it have gradually accumulated,–through the absence of early discrimination.
La clave de la saga va ser Swhitch Whittaker.
Curiously, the Wenyan Zhuan, the so called Seventh Wing of the Yijing, and not part of the core text of the Zhouyi but part of Han Dynasty exegesis added when it was canonized as one of the five Confucian Classics to become the “Yijing” (易經), only extends to the first two hexagrams in the received, and so called, King Wen sequence. The commentary goes on at length for the first hexagram but it is much shorter for the second, 坤, translated as The Receptive by Wilhelm/Baynes. In particular, the quote used, refers to the portion dedicated to comment the first line of H2 and translated as “When there is hoarfrost underfoot, solid ice is not far off.” Using that as reference, you can see why the comment talks about events that should have been dealt with in time but have run out of their control by neglecting to do so.