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POST NAMER TBC-- work harder, meme!

Welcome back, anyway! Chat fandom, media, creative things, weirdness from around the net, funny stuff, anything! Meme awaits!

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From: (Anonymous)

:D I must be a hungry hungry caterpillar because I swear they have had approximately 9000 meals since I last posted! Including some kind of red wine beef stew, steak and chips, roast lamb, and multiple breakfast muffins... and Strike has a habit of eating all the biscuits. I'm trying to eat healthily as a January thing, which oddly is helping me to resist the pull, because the books are listing things I can't eat for the moment anyway. The hypnotic crunchy pull of these books toward ALL OF FOOD is harder to fight when there are no rules between you and the biscuits...

Anyway! On this reread, I'm noticing just what an asset Barclay is to the team. On page 706, he agrees to pretend to be an adult baby for the sake of a case. Now that's professionalism.

From: (Anonymous)

(So I suppose I ought to be willing to overlook him being there as Rowling's mouthpiece on the topic of Scottish independence. Stuck out just as much on this read as on the last one. I enjoy the character when he's not playing mouthpiece... which is often true of the characters in this. On the one hand, I'd've preferred more showing and less telling on various politics. Otoh, this book would be 3 times the weight, and I'm already using it for gentle weight-training.)

From: (Anonymous)

Though, something odd, where I'm not sure whether it's a plot-hole, something I'm not grasping, or setting the scene for a plot in a future book: Barclay comes into the office in the evening, to 'deliver the good news in person' about a case. But why would he? He goes to the dark office and turns the light on. He might think Strike is upstairs, in his flat-- but then why go into the office? He'd just go up the stairs and knock on the door (which would also be a weird af thing to do, but would be consistent). Instead, Barclay goes into what he must believe is an empty office, to... deliver some information to Strike? What? This is after a few phonecalls to Strike that Strike doesn't answer. And wouldn't Barclay be able to see that the lights are off in the office, from the street outside?

So, to me, this is consistent with Barclay thinking Strike is out and busy and going into the office for reasons of his own, then quickly covering it up. Especially since it's used to interrupt a scene that the reader would be paying attention to (potential romance stuff). Would be a good place to put a plot-important detail.

But otoh, could be massively overthinking it. Maybe Barclay just expects Strike to be working late. Maybe the office windows don't face out onto the street; I don't remember. Plus the 'main' story of each of these books sometimes isn't told in a way I'd consider 'fair', with all the clues on the page before the characters work them out; sometimes Rowling narrates a scene, without including the clue, then 600 pages later, a character will remember the scene, with a new detail that contains the clue, and then work it out from that. Often feels 'cheaty'. So I'm not sure any overarching plot will have clues placed carefully, like this. I enjoy the books more for the vibes than the puzzling. But it'll be interesting to see if this goes anywhere. If I were picking a character to be treacherous, Barclay would be a good one.

Nearly at the end of this book, anyway. After this, they're ones I haven't read!