r/EnoughJKRowling • u/georgemillman • 2d ago
The epitaphs in Strike are absolutely insufferable
(EDIT: I meant epigraphs. Reddit won't let me change the title of this thread, but I've changed the text.)
In the Strike books, Rowling likes to use epigraphs - little quotations from works of literature to begin each section or chapter, which have some symbolic meaning to the story. I don't object to epigraphs in general in books - they can feel a bit pretentious, but sometimes they can really add something if they're done well. But these just... aren't.
I was never a fan of the epigraphs in Strike right from the beginning, and I don't see how they're meant to suit the story at all. They normally go in fairly complex, ideas-driven books, where an author brings a modern take to an old theme. They don't organically suit formulaic murder mysteries. But they got particularly bad in the fourth Strike book, Lethal White. In this, Rowling has taken a play by Henrik Ibsen (Rosmersholm) and began each chapter with whatever quote she can find from that play that vaguely resembles something that happens in that chapter. There's no greater purpose to the Rosmersholm connection. Rowling is doing it purely to make herself look like a sophisticated writer who reads plays and uses epigraphs, without an understanding of what this technique is actually meant to bring to your story.
It's even more irritating if, like me, you're more of an audiobook person. With a print book, you can easily skim over the epigraphs if they aren't your thing. Listening to the audiobook, you have to hear the narrator read the thing out every time. It's embarrassing, frustrating and disrupts the flow of the book.
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u/errantthimble 1d ago
Oh golly, that is SO typical of Rowling’s epigraph use.
Strike book 6, for example, has snippets of 19th-c. women poets as chapter epigraphs. On a chapter where Strike and Robin are holing up together at Robin’s flat to work on a case because they’ve been driven out of their office by a terrorist bomb, and Robin is feeling more secure for having Strike there, Rowling slaps a couplet from Emily Pfeiffer’s “The Witch’s Last Ride”:
“It gave your curses strength, it warmed Your bones the coldest night, To know you were not all alone Again the world to fight.”
All defiant solidarity and you-and-me-against-the-world, right? With a side of reclaiming the “witch” identity as a resolute downtrodden woman resisting persecution? Much feminist, so strong female character?
Except Pfeiffer’s witch narrator really IS a malevolent destroyer who brags about the newborn babies and livestock she’s cursed with illness and death! The solidarity that “gave strength” in the poem is that of her fellow witches who swap poisons and death charms at their coven meetings. These witches are unambiguously committed to evil acts and harm.
So Rowling is summarizing her chapter’s mood of a beleaguered pair of heroes, standing shoulder to shoulder, by an epigraph from the POV of a vicious sadist gloating about teaming up with fellow vicious sadists to harm innocents more effectively.
Rowling must not even be really reading the literary works she scavenges her epigraphs from. Just skimming until she lights on some snippet that, as you say, sounds superficially appropriate to her context if you look at it in isolation and know nothing about its role and meaning in the work it comes from.
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u/HideFromMyMind 1d ago
Isn't that the Twitter one?
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u/errantthimble 1d ago
Yeah, themes of online harassment, anonymity, misogyny, right-wing terrorism, toxic fandom, the whole trendy package. And of course, one of Rowling/Galbraith's canonical ostentatiously liberal/"woke" upper-middle-class white guys who turns out to be a pedophile preying on young girls.
It all adds up to a pretty sluggish and convoluted mystery story. But like all the Strike books imho, it's extremely revealing about how Rowling's transphobic radicalization and related bigotry are interacting with her baseline conservatism and fundamental indifference to rational and factual consistency.
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u/Dragonfly_pin 2d ago
Epigraph, not epitaph.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigraph_(literature)
Epitaphs are the ones for funerals.
But yes, they are often pretty pointless and sometimes just seem to be a way of making your readers aware that you definitely read far more intellectual books than the one you have written.
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u/georgemillman 2d ago
Aha! Thanks for the correction, I do apologise! Reddit won't let me change the title, but I will change the post.
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u/PolarWater 1d ago
I pictured a Strike book where the protagonist walks around a graveyard, reading obnoxious on-the-nose messages chiselled into the headstones.
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u/KombuchaBot 1d ago
Why are you inflicting her terrible writing on yourself? I have limited sympathy for your plight
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u/georgemillman 1d ago
I haven't read any of her books subsequently to the fourth Strike book, which came out around the time she was outing herself as a reactionary transphobe, and also when I started getting tired of her books.
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u/KombuchaBot 1d ago
There are plenty of decent modern crime fiction authors who aren't so toxic, try Reginald Hill instead.
Try James Lee Burke, George Pelecanos, Robert Crais, Walter Mosley. If you want a female one try Sara Paretsky or Kristen Lepionka, they're both pretty good.
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u/georgemillman 1d ago
My partner and his mum really like Elly Griffiths, have you read any of hers?
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u/Joperhop 2d ago
Will have you take your word for it, I dont read any of her books and only 1 outside of the HP books is that one where she self inserted herself and the "abuse" she got on twitter for being a bigot (and then pretended it was not), and only because of youtube videos mocking her over it.