on bones
horrible lemongrab woman writes about the locked tomb, a lot
This post owes the favour of the chain to Kim and Roan, for reading this over before it was published; to everyone I’ve talked about The Locked Tomb with over the past however many months, particularly Jessie, Louis, and Rosemary; and to the discord, the source of innumerable useful observations and immeasurable quantities of fanart.
Many apologies that there hasn’t been a new post in quite some time. There’s been a bunch of reasons — finishing up my dissertation, looking for jobs and houses, and a brain made of soup have all played their part — but one of the main things is that I’ve fallen into one of the deepest special interests that I can, honestly, remember. (Previous special interests — Adventure Time, say — haven’t felt quite as all-consuming as this one, though I’m maybe only saying this because hindsight diminishes intensity.) Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb series (Gideon the Ninth, which I’ve already written about, and Harrow the Ninth) has, as basically anyone who’s spoken to me for the past couple months can confirm, taken up a frankly wretched percentage of my brain’s processing power.
Special interests are, admittedly, frequently lovely. They have the benefit, if nothing else, of giving you something to occupy your mind when there’s not much going on, like a cookie clicker game you can run in the background to get free occasional dopamine. Yet they have a kind of gravitational pull on your thinking, and you start to see the special interest in unrelated places while discarding other, perfectly interesting and normal topics. There’s a quote in Harrow the Ninth about this, actually:
true love is acquisitive. You keep anything … strands of hair … an envelope they might’ve licked … a note saying, Good morning, simply because they wrote it to you. Love is a revenant, [redacted], and it accumulates love-stuff to itself, because it is homeless otherwise.
Now, this isn’t a very good approach to love, if you ask me, but it’s the one special interests encourage. For this reason, if nothing else, I find them painfully embarrassing. Sure, these books are most of what I think about, and absolutely I have so many stupid thoughts about them knocking around in my otherwise empty skull that I sometimes feel close to bursting. It’s true, too, that part of the experience of special interests is the desire to share in the obsession, to find someone who will reciprocate your enthusiasm as you point out the various possible implications of this one throwaway line for the true nature of whatever. In this sense, special interests are pretty much designed for posting, but really it’s basically impossible to transform that kind of monomaniacal focus into something socially palatable. I’m cringing just writing this.
So that’s why I haven’t written anything. I have no interesting thoughts about other things at the moment, but every time I’ve started to write about The Locked Tomb it’s become excruciating because I’m totally unable to express anything like the entirety of why I love these books without feeling like I’ve invited a bunch of guests over only to ambush them with an 869 slide powerpoint about why this objectively awful fictional character is Hot, Actually, and also my friend.
But, whatever, sincerity is cool and embarrassment is cringe, and in both the absence of anything else to write about and the hope that actually writing and posting something about these books will act as some kind of exorcism, let’s talk about The Locked Tomb. I promise I will try to stay normal about it; what follows has spoilers, but I’ve kept them as non-specific as I possibly can, and tried not to undermine any major twists.
Let’s start with worldbuilding, which is one of the things I’m most unhinged about, both in these books and in general, but which I know is something a lot of people struggle with in speculative fiction. So, first, a caveat: I think many readers view worldbuilding as something to be tolerated (or not) so you can get to the good bits — you know, narrative, character, things like that. But I just always find it fun on its own terms, because I am if nothing else an insufferable dork who spent too much time creating settings for D&D campaigns at a formative age. I can’t really explain why I think it’s compelling beyond just saying that you’re building a world! Inventing all these interestingly different places and languages and characters and perspectives is never not cool to me, and if you’re not sold, consider that Muir approaches these problems in genuinely new ways to create something fascinating in its own right. As well as that, though, her deployment of this worldbuilding — how it actually shows up in the books themselves — is often just as novel.
The characters of The Locked Tomb come, with a few exceptions, from a vast spacefaring empire known as the Houses; more specifically, they come from the empire’s core, the Second through Ninth Houses, each of which is on its own planet. The Houses each have a distinctive culture, really almost a personality of their own, and, although the Houses collectively are defined by their use of necromancy, each House has a specific school or technique in which they specialise. The Ninth does a lot of magic using skeletons, for example, while the Second’s necromancy involves boosting their non-magical warriors using energy generated by their dying foes. This results in some satisfyingly gruesome uses of magic, but it’s all clearly in service of a wider whole. Muir has said that, although ‘obviously a lot of the necromantic applications are “what is cool,”’ necromancy was designed around its ‘endpoint,’ a specific achievement which provides a framework and a set of limitations, and to which the Houses’ differing skills all have to contribute.
At the same time, these magical specialisms themselves inform the Houses’ cultures, so that the powerful combat applications of the Second House’s necromancy mean that it’s also the military centre of the Houses. Yet the Houses are more complex than this, because their cultures are informed by a number of other factors, most notably arising from character. In Harrow, we are introduced to the lyctors, a set of essentially-immortal necromancers who either founded the Houses or were born in their very early days. Each lyctor is associated with a specific House, and their personalities clearly substantially informed the directions in which their Houses’ cultures developed. This is an unusually direct example of a really important element of good worldbuilding: it’s informed by characters and the story, so that it doesn’t just provide a context for the narrative but is deeply interconnected with it.
Another way in which this system is extremely useful for the books, meanwhile, is how it enables economy of information, which is to say that it reduces the amount that Muir needs to tell us directly. Because there’s a significant turnover in cast between the two books, the House system allows us to learn about the new characters almost immediately just on the basis of the Houses they’re associated with and our knowledge of characters from the first book. Mercymorn, the lyctor who founded the Eighth House, is in many ways very different from Silas, the necromancer representing the Eighth in Gideon, but they’re both obsessed with cleanliness and the aesthetics of devotion and moral purity. When we meet Mercy, we already kind of know her; at the same time, her description of her habit of ‘worship without adoration’ also retroactively teaches us something about Silas.
The Houses are further informed by an intricate connection of various referents, including the planets they’re on. Throughout the series, it becomes increasingly clear that the series is set in our solar system, ten thousand years after an apocalyptic event wiped out modern society. (The warlike Second, therefore, is obviously on Mars; the Eighth, who are arseholes, are on Uranus.) Yet this fact isn’t as interesting to me as how it’s communicated to us, and while Muir uses several different approaches to do so, the most notable one is cultural references. Only a single character has survived from our time, and we know that he was alive in the early part of this century because he won’t stop referring to memes and quotes that no one else in the setting understands (but which cause psychic damage to readers, as an added benefit). When he’s told that ‘Someone’s crying, Lord,’ for instance, we’re told that ‘he just made a nonsense sound beneath his breath, a mumbled word that you didn’t recognise.’ He says ‘kumbaya’. Elsewhere, he quotes The Little Mermaid (‘Why have we not an immortal soul?’) and ‘Annabel Lee’ (‘for the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams…’), and also makes a joke based on the ‘none pizza with left beef’ meme.
This is, if nothing else, a compellingly original — if morally unsound — technique for telling us important information about your setting and a character, and Muir should probably get bonus points for the fact that the Andersen and Poe quotations also have profoundly troubling implications about wider themes and plot points. At the same time, though, it’s worth noting that, while Muir does use the unavailability of these and many other references to most of her characters as a thematic tool, she doesn’t let this get in her way when it’s unhelpful. There are a couple direct quotations from the Bible from characters whose lack of knowledge of Christianity is, in other places, extremely important. The characters’ names are frequently references to specific texts which are obviously unavailable in the Houses. While it’s very possible to overthink this — trust me, I have — and try to work out what the specific names and quotations which get inherited and garbled says about the cultural development of the Houses, or whatever, realistically it’s just a matter of telling a good story. Sometimes consistent worldbuilding has to come second.
All of this gets us onto the second thing I want to talk about: narrative voice. There are only two perspective characters for the vast majority of both Gideon and Harrow — take a wild guess who — and Muir uses these extremely distinctive voices to enormous effect. In the first book, we get this tight third person voice which is, I think, pretty handily illustrated in this passage from early in the book, as Gideon watches the representatives of the Third House emerge from their shuttle:
Gideon was hugely interested to see three figures emerge. The first was a rather sulky young man with an air of hair gel and filigree, an ornate rapier at the belt of his buttoned coat. The cavalier. The other two were young women, both blond, though the similarity ended there: one girl was tall and statuesque, with a star-white grin and masses of bright gold curls. The other girl seemed smaller, insubstantial, with a sheet of hair the anaemic colour of canned butter and an equally bloodless smirk. They were actually the same height, Gideon realised; her brain had just deemed that proposition too stupid to credit on first pass. It was as though the second girl were the starved shadow of the first, or the first an illuminated reflection. The boy just looked a bit of a dick.
I talked about how observant Gideon is in a footnote the last time I wrote about the book, but the essential point is that she’s always looking, picking out these tiny but revealing details even while she also frequently misses details which don’t fit with her assumptions or prior knowledge. She’s also just very funny, and the details she picks out about Naberius — the ‘sulky young man’ — perfectly sum him up: not only his ‘air of hair gel and filigree’, but also how ‘ornate’ his sword is and the fact he’s bothered to button up his coat. Yet this voice isn’t just Gideon’s, and the third person lets Muir combine Gideon’s typical ‘low’ style (‘a bit of a dick’) with some stylistic flourishes.
In Harrow, meanwhile, we get two distinct voices. One is a second person with no obvious subject, although as you start to pay attention to its style it becomes relatively obvious who’s talking.1 Throwing the identity of the narrator into doubt, however, is a fascinating decision, and the second person opens up a ton of possibilities. Most notably, it enables occasional slips into first person as the book progresses, but it also creates a balance between the intimacy of a conversation and the detached pity of an outside observer.
The other voice is clearly Harrow’s, and, although third person is frequently almost a default in a lot of speculative fiction, its use here — in a kind of dream narrative which runs parallel to the book’s main action — is genuinely creative and specific. These sections are characterised by a kind of dissociative, self-critical, anxious narration:
Abigail Pent had not seemed the type of woman to articulate phwoar. She said it very boyishly. On any other day Harrowhark would have been pushed beyond measure hearing phwoar after bone-related jokes and made her exit. But she was aware that priggishness was not a virtue. She was also aware that winnowing the secrets of Canaan House was going to take more than the skeletons she could construct and the diary she was documenting. She was very tired. She was being offered something. Wary of offering herself in return, she took it.
It makes a huge amount of sense, I think, that this is how Harrow thinks: detached and a little overwhelmed, but trying to hold onto her critical, practical thinking; never quite fully inside her own head, but simultaneously somehow isolated from those around her. When you first start reading Harrow, you think that the second person must be her addressing herself, and that does make a certain amount of sense when the book appears to be about the breaking down of her own subjectivity. Really, though, third person hits the mark much better for these purposes.
The voices Muir inhabits in Gideon and Harrow make interesting contrasts with the narrators of the two Locked Tomb short stories she's released so far, 'The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex' and 'As Yet Unsent' (part of the bonus content for the paperback edition of Harrow). One of the most interesting distinctions, I think, is in how these narrators, Camilla Hect and Judith Deuteros, look at the world around them. In the former story, Camilla’s narration is defined by the systematic and rigorous way she seems to mentally catalogue everything in front of her. Her attempt at setting the scene as she and Palamades, her necromancer, sit and read on her bed early in the narrative is a good example. She tells us that Palamades ‘couldn’t sit up straight on the bed because his head kept grazing the ceiling of the shuck above,’ and then decides to give us its dimensions (‘one meter by two meters and eighty centimeters high, one and a half bodies by Imperial mez, and he was already one meter sixty’) — just for the record.
At the same time, however, it’s clear that she’s not particularly interested in telling us everything. In the very next line, for instance, she says that she ‘was rereading a letter. I’ll reproduce as much of the letter as I care to.’ These omissions are typically about concealing her own emotions, most visibly in a running joke about her and Palamades’ refusal to laugh at the name ‘Doctor Sex’ until the very end of the text, which she only ever glosses with ‘we decided not to.’ Her commitment to effacing her own affective role in the narrative is legible in more than her refusal to own up to finding ‘Doctor Sex’ funny, though, and her practical-minded approach to description ends up being a crutch she uses to try to obscure her own subjectivity. It ends up making the story genuinely crushing once she finally, partially admits her own heartbreak.
Judith, meanwhile, is distinguished by just how relentlessly unobservant she is. Her issue, both in Gideon and in ‘As Yet Unsent’, is that her total deference to a sense of duty means she frequently fails to properly understand what’s happening right in front of her, and this is reflected in how few visual descriptions she gives. The story appears as her attempt to produce a report for her military superiors while held as a prisoner of war, and she therefore tries to keep her narration to strictly relevant information, as in her description of her location:
I have not been privy to enough geoinformation to compile any useful positional data. The area surrounding the enemy encampment is temperate with two dominant layers of green foliage. There are animals. Birds cry at night. When I am taken out to look at the sky there is a large ringed planet visible from daylight to dusk, but my attempts to measure its angular diameter are at best imprecise.
This contains a lot of information, but very little which actually gives you a sense of the space. Later, she describes the base’s commander, ‘We Suffer’, but says ‘I can give no identifying description of We Suffer; I still haven't seen any of the ranking officials unmasked.’ She doesn’t, though, offer any further description of what these masks look like or their purpose, or anything else which might tell us more about We Suffer.
Sometimes, however, emotion — and visual description — does peak through. When she’s describing her arguments with another prisoner, Coronabeth, she notes that ‘the tips of her ears go pink when she is genuinely impassioned,’ only to follow this up with a ‘note to self’ to ‘rewrite this,’ because ‘the sedatives are making you discursive and worse.’ She is, clearly, attracted to Corona, but Judith’s lifetime of military service has led to her repressing her desire in favour of duty, and she’s unable to really understand her feelings as anything other than embarrassing and dangerous. This is why she’s so bad at actually seeing what’s going on around her, and spends a lot of time making entirely unforced errors because of it.
What this comes down to, I think, is how observant Muir is as a writer, especially when it comes to characters and their desires. She spent a lot of time writing fanfic before she started The Locked Tomb, and you can really see fanfic’s commitment to character and relationships as really the fundamental elements of storytelling coming through in her narrative voices and in her worldbuilding.2 She allows details of how characters relate to one another to inform the fundamentals of her story, from narration to the setting itself, and within this pays attention even to the smallest things which might tell you something about the people who make up her world. Gideon is a great narrator because of the tiny things she notices, but it takes a great writer to see them, too.
This is part of why the characters in The Locked Tomb remain enormously compelling. To skirt around the truly embarrassing (if undeniably true) fact that I just want to be friends with at least several of them, what makes them effective is their brokenness. Muir’s characters are built around wounds, and therefore also around desires: a pain they hope to heal, something they wish to achieve, or someone they want or have lost. Characters really only become interesting if they have a desire like this to provide their drive and their texture. Of course, desire rarely proceeds straightforwardly and is never really resolved, and these books rarely shy away from its difficulty and complexity, even for relatively secondary and honestly unpleasant characters.
Two of the lyctors we meet in Harrow — Mercy and Augustine — spend most of their time being both difficult and cruel to almost everyone who has to deal with them, including one another. Yet as soon as we meet them, we also know that they’ve experienced crushing loss in their pasts, and we quickly learn that their hatred for each other is inseparable from their mutual devotion. When describing his fantasy of being buried next to Mercy in an unmarked grave, Augustine says that ‘we’ll still hate each other, my dear, we have hated each other too long and too passionately to stop … but my bones will rest easy next to your bones.’ The fundamental genius of these books is that the awful devotion of these terrible geriatrics just unavoidably, regrettably, and deeply fucks me up, every time.
It’s that investment in character which is, I think, at the heart of why I love these books, but it also raises some wider issues about how we think about and analyse literature. Character gets a bad rep when it comes to literary analysis, as we’re trained to think of things like style, form, and themes as really the only appropriate venues for criticism. Yet what The Locked Tomb helps show, I think, is that paying attention to character doesn’t have to be at the expense of engaging with what texts are doing and saying in a more strictly literary sense. It’s important to ask questions about character, like: how do texts connect with their readers through character as a kind of structuring force, not just through their plots and their narrative techniques? How do those connections happen, and what defines them? What roles can character play in defining and driving other aspects of texts, from their style to their structure and their setting? The Locked Tomb’s fascinating approach to character-first writing helps point towards some of those answers.
(Spoilers:) Lines describing Harrow like ‘you poor brokenhearted sad sack’ or ‘you bereft idiot’ carry a blend of irreverence and sympathy that can only come from Gideon Nav. That she’s in a position to narrate is itself an important detail, meaning that this stylistic choice also has a genuine role in the plot. It also means that Muir’s able to retain a lot of what’s great about Gideon as a narrator, although her voice has notably changed between books; I sometimes wonder if that’s because it’s been filtered through Harrow’s subjectivity. (When Gideon properly returns, her first person is also hysterically funny in its affective combination of distant screaming, embarrassed contrition, and profound frustration.)
Another notable influence of fanfic is in the books’ approach to genre, playing with multiple different sets of rules and conventions and switching between various affective and stylistic registers. This kind of genre promiscuity is kind of essential for fanfic, and I think the books’ savviness with genre owes a lot to that background.