The Rook Chapter 4 – Meet Gestalt
Heading in to chapter 4 of The Rook by Daniel O’Malley, we’ve been given a purple folder view on our counterpart, Rook Gestalt, and I’m not sure I’d feel very comfortable meeting him. Not only is this basically the first day on the job but Myfanwy is meeting a bunch of super-powered coworkers, one or more of which is responsible for erasing her memories. I’d be pretty freaked out.
Our heroine seems to be a bit anxious as well. But meeting someone who has 4 bodies? This is a fairly unique situation among the many books I’ve read and considering this being might be the one who secretly wants to kill you…I’d ask Ingrid to stick around for the meeting or something. At least have someone semi-familiar in the room when I have to deal with this thing. Too bad Myfanwy doesn’t have that option as in this chapter we get to meet Gestalt first hand and all by ourselves.
Inchoate Thoughts
So far we know someone is out to get Myfanwy but they haven’t been able to kill her yet. Instead they were able to wipe her memory and while she escaped, she was left without even knowing she had superpowers. Fortunately her prior self, who she calls Thomas, knew ahead of time that this was gonna happen so she laid out clues as to how to impersonate herself. These clues also included a purple folder that contained information about a secret organization called The Checquy Group who work for the British government dealing with supernatural threats to the country. A key player in this Checquy Group is Rook Gestalt. He’s a strange being in that his consciousness is spread out among 4 different bodies – 3 men and a woman – and he is her counterpart in the Checquy leadership, with the difference being he likes to get his hands dirty playing at special agent while Myfanwy is pretty much a superpowered accountant.
Rook Gestalt
For Myfanwy, it’s one thing to read a file about a being who has 4 bodies…it’s another to actually meet 2 of those bodies and hold a 3-way conversation with them. It’s also nerve wracking that these two ‘people’ know Thomas better than Myfanwy does. How is she supposed to impersonate Thomas when these guys work with her on a daily basis? On top of that how do you remember that these 2 people are using the same mind to converse with you? If one asks a question and the other answers, they’re actually talking to itself, thinking out loud maybe or are they actually tactically probing you for information? It’s so confusing and then to have them freeze as they link up with another of their bodies in another part of the country.
Headquarters of the Antler Cult
Listening in while one of Gestalt’s absent bodies conducts a raid on a bunch of cultists was pretty informative. These guys (this guy) know how to fight and how to run an operation. They’re good at what they do and that’s not a good thing if they were involved in the attack on Thomas. The one good thing I think we learn about Gestalt during this raid is that all of the bodies exert themselves when one of them is in an engagement. That can prove important if they are in fact part of the conspiracy against Myfanwy – perhaps incapacitating one will take down them all?
Purple Folder – The Rooks
In any case, it’s a good thing Thomas left the purple folder for Myfanwy to study since it contains some important information about the Checquy and how things run in her supernatural organisation. It turns out the Rooks began as the military generals of the Checquy. Obviously things changed since Thomas was anything but tactically inclined. It seems she did everything she could to stay away from fighting and from being ‘in the field’. Gestalt on the other hand loved getting into things. While originally overseeing the fighting force of the Checquy the current Rooks were typically more involved with administration and domestic affairs and while Gestalt likes fighting he/she/it had to have some level of competence in executive decision making rather than just punching things. I wonder who is in charge of the fighting now that the Rooks aren’t.
Heading to the Interrogation
While Gestalt was a bit run down from the Antler Cult engagement and they cut their meeting short, that never meant that Myfanwy was gonna catch a respite. Instead, getting called in for the emergency interrogation sounded pretty ominous until Myfanwy asks…
If it wasn’t clear to Ingrid that something was up before now, this line and the fact that Myfanwy invited her to the questioning probably gave her the idea that something was different with her boss. I wonder how long it’ll take before all these hints are gonna add up for someone, particularly someone who used to interact with Thomas on an everyday basis.
Retrospective
In this fourth chapter we meet the second member of the Court…Gestalt. As a fellow Rook, he’s got quite a bit of power in the organization and considering he’s got 4 bodies that can be in separate places all over the world, he’s got some impressive superpowers as well. Hopefully he’s not involved in the attack that erased Thomas’ memories…at least he doesn’t seem to have the ability to mind wipe someone in addition to his multiple bodies.
Regardless, heading into an interrogation I wonder if whoever is gonna be questioned might have some involvement in the attack.