Back and forth in time

The Universal Humanitarian Church (UHC) is a repressive, regressive organisation that isolates its members from their family and friends, and leeches money from them. Chapman Farm in Norfolk, UK, where it indoctrinates its members is a hotbed of abuse and murder; life there could break the strongest of souls. When a client with a son in the clutches of the church seeks help, private detective Robin Ellacott infiltrates the cult. She and her partner Cormoran Strike, eventually bring it down but not before lots of trauma and mayhem. 
 

The Running Grave, the seventh and latest book in Robert Galbraith’s (aka J K Rowling’s) Strike series, is, like the six before it, a page-turner. The creator of Harry Potter just knows how to build a world, populate it with characters you love, hate, recognise or empathise with, in a story that keeps you gripped. Not surprisingly, soon after putting down the seventh book, I went back to the first six and read them all over again. 
 

There is something deliciously wonderful about re-reading or re-watching a thriller/ mystery/ whodunnit. For one, knowing who the murderer is or what the mystery is, totally changes the experience of reading. You see characters and situations in a new light, join the dots differently, and at times find the odd plot glitch. This is true for most (fiction) authors I have re-read— JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Rowling’s Harry Potter, Ayn Rand’s work spanning everything from The Fountainhead to Atlas Shrugged , everything that Agatha Christie has written and Keigo Higashino, who is most famous for The Devotion of Suspect X. These have been read umpteen times and enjoyed each time. There are other favourites — JD Salinger, Albert Camus, Ian McEwan, Donna Tartt — among many others. 
 

However, to make the point, let us stick to the crime, mystery, thriller kind of genre. If a book grips you as much the second or third time, there is much to be said for the writer. Almost fifty years after she died, Christie still gets a full shelf or a section in bookshops across the world. Her books may seem simple to people who like, say, the more evolved thrillers of the kind Len Deighton wrote. But the stories are unusual. The English village, where many of them are set, is in stark relief to life as we know it now. And her characters, from Ms Marple and Hercule Poirot to Captain Hastings and Ms Lemon, work. 
 

That is true for films too. James Bond (am partial to the Daniel Craig ones), Jason Bourne and Mission Impossible, Lord of the Rings, Potter, the entire Christie series from ITV and BBC, The Matrix are stories I can re-watch any number of times, in sequence without forwarding them. 
 

That brings this to the second reason why re-watching and re-reading is such a wonderful experience: Some of the best stories are also the most prescient. The Matrix, a film in which intelligent software has taken over the world, came in 1999. The trilogy was wrapped up in 2003. While machine learning was happening by then, we hadn’t reached the levels of cognitive computing or artificial intelligence (AI) that the film was set in. Now with both climate change and AI  knocking urgently on our doors – the world of the Matrix seems so real. 
 

The latest film in the Matrix franchise came in 2021. Obviously, I rewatched the trilogy and the latest film one after the other earlier this year. Its prescience surprised me, again. Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), which is set in an interstellar world or Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series, which was first published in 1951, have passed me by. But friends swear by them and those worlds don’t seem as unreal as they did 50 years ago. Take a look at George Orwell’s dystopian Nineteen Eighty Four (1984), which seemed fantastic when it was first published in 1949. Now it seems prophetic. 
 

Most popular pieces of fiction stand the test of both time and popularity, of being engaging on a second and third read/watch. They are good because the writers saw something nobody did. Their imagination connected with some deep fear, love, knowledge or emotion inside of us. It is this connect at a visceral level that is at the heart of a good story. It is also the origin, the Gangotri, of all things entertainment — books, games, films, shows or plays.

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