The Locked Tomb + Nona thoughts
Nov. 21st, 2022 08:02 pmI just finished (re)reading The Locked Tomb books. Once again, I really like them! They have various good Diana-Wynne-Jonesnesses which I've seen anatomised by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants, to wit, people the reader likes often dislike each other in very petty ways, you can imagine any one of the characters wandering offstage and having a really long letting-off-steam conversation with their aunt while sweeping the patio (if they had aunts or patios), and at any given time, about half the characters are somebody else.
There's a scene in Nona the Ninth where a screen is being prepared for a public broadcast. The screen is made of tesselating white hexagons. It has to be stretched onto a framework like a fitted sheet, and keeps coming loose at the corners. Because of this delay, the broadcast, an incredibly color-saturated video-call, starts halfway through - delivering vital information to the people assembled to hear it, and fairly vital information to the reader too. At the end of the speech, someone murmurs something in the speaker's ear, and they say "Oh, you have got to be kidding me," and start the speech over again from the beginning.
This scene is typical of the Locked Tomb series in three ways. First, it obfuscates information. Partly in the common s.f. way of making sure characters don't pause and define terms unless it makes diegetic sense - I read an interview where Muir cites Neil Stephenson's Anathem as a world-building inspiration, and Anathem is a book whose first few pages are intriguing yet incomprehensible because of the number of terms they don't define. But also in the mystery-box way. It would make perfect worldbuilding sense to start a broadcast at the beginning; this one starts in medias res because that's a bit juicier, a bit more destablizing. Characters in these books often don't share information when they perfectly well could - at least once per book someone is about to reveal something important when they're interrupted from offstage - and the framing makes sure the reader can't quite see, oh I don't know, the face of a certain person, or the object hanging in the sky, until it's been a question mark for at least a few pages. The danger of mystery-box stories (here, the one in the title is literal) is always that the box might be empty - and by the end of this book I still don't know whether a bunch of events in book one happened for any reason other than 'it made for a cooler plot'. But even if that's true, (and there have been hints that isn't) the climactic revelations haven't yet failed to be climactic, it's not doing the 'What's in the hatch? A countdown! What happens at the end of the countdown? I don't remember, probably there's another hatch!' thing; and also,
Second: these books evoke mundane reality really well. Setting up the broadcast is practical, annoying, and slightly odd. There isn't a lot of straight description, but necromantic vassals of incredible power eat off paper plates, the awesomely powerful god-emperor is endearingly shit at metaphors (other things he's shit at are much less endearing, 'I should be god-emperor' being the best answer to nearly zero questions); and see above re. aunts and patios (there is, in fact, at least one aunt), and the broadcasting screen is annoying in a very familiar way even though in this case it's probably powered by necromancy. (Wait, can it be powered by necromancy given [spoilery fact]? Unclear).
And third, it's very funny! When the broadcaster got to the end of the broadcast, was told it had gone wrong, and wearily started again, I laughed, and I laugh a lot in these books. Muir is very good at shifting tones, often though not always for comedy; sometimes her jokes are incredibly, immersion-breakingly obvious, sometimes they're subtle enough that I don't get them on first reading - I assume there are plenty I still haven't noticed - and sometimes they're just, yes, right, of course the broadcast didn't work, I don't know why I expect anything to work, why do I even turn up.
Leaflemming asked me the other day whether he should read these books. The above are reasons I'd generally say yes. This series is also for you if you especially like: bones, gender, heretical forms of Christ, and loyalty unto/beyond/back from/unto death. Reasons one might say no:
1. They're absolutely full of described gore, viscera, bones, teeth exploding into shards, etc. This is gleefully true of book one, yet more true of book two (because its central character knows the names of more bits of anatomy), and much less true of Nona; when there is gore in this book it's mostly described slantwise. This may not make it less disturbing.
2. They're about incredibly fucked-up and often abusive relationships and most of their major plot beats involve significant amounts of pain. This is true, again, Nona less so than the other two. Nona proves that Muir could write a book that wasn't at all fucked up if she wanted to, without particularly indicating that she'll ever want to: Nona has way more sunniness than the other two books and centres the simple goodness that human relationships can have. At the same time, a description of this book as 'the most cheerful entry in the Locked Tomb series yet!' really would not stand up to a list of the events that happen in it.
3. The alternation of tones can be completely immersion-breaking, as on the Discworld but with less buildup to get you there. To me this one turns out to actually be a selling point, but mileages vary. Characters whose relationship to our era is initially vague will use memes from the 2010s during heartfelt emotional scenes. Some characters reach for insults such as "Th'art lowlier than the toad squished at Our Lady's foot" and others are like, yo, suck it mate, I didn't know you were into toads. Portions of this have possible in-world explanations, but I feel like verisimilitude, to this series, is mainly another thing to play with. Again, less true of Nona, and I think more artfully done since Gideon (not that I thought Gideon was bad at it, but to me Gideon feels a bit like a first novel and Harrow jumps right to feeling like an umpteenth novel). Also I turn out to be fairly meme-blind, so some of them I just don't notice!
...
( Thoroughly spoilery Nona reactions below the cut, and continuing in the comments )
skygiants, to wit, people the reader likes often dislike each other in very petty ways, you can imagine any one of the characters wandering offstage and having a really long letting-off-steam conversation with their aunt while sweeping the patio (if they had aunts or patios), and at any given time, about half the characters are somebody else. There's a scene in Nona the Ninth where a screen is being prepared for a public broadcast. The screen is made of tesselating white hexagons. It has to be stretched onto a framework like a fitted sheet, and keeps coming loose at the corners. Because of this delay, the broadcast, an incredibly color-saturated video-call, starts halfway through - delivering vital information to the people assembled to hear it, and fairly vital information to the reader too. At the end of the speech, someone murmurs something in the speaker's ear, and they say "Oh, you have got to be kidding me," and start the speech over again from the beginning.
This scene is typical of the Locked Tomb series in three ways. First, it obfuscates information. Partly in the common s.f. way of making sure characters don't pause and define terms unless it makes diegetic sense - I read an interview where Muir cites Neil Stephenson's Anathem as a world-building inspiration, and Anathem is a book whose first few pages are intriguing yet incomprehensible because of the number of terms they don't define. But also in the mystery-box way. It would make perfect worldbuilding sense to start a broadcast at the beginning; this one starts in medias res because that's a bit juicier, a bit more destablizing. Characters in these books often don't share information when they perfectly well could - at least once per book someone is about to reveal something important when they're interrupted from offstage - and the framing makes sure the reader can't quite see, oh I don't know, the face of a certain person, or the object hanging in the sky, until it's been a question mark for at least a few pages. The danger of mystery-box stories (here, the one in the title is literal) is always that the box might be empty - and by the end of this book I still don't know whether a bunch of events in book one happened for any reason other than 'it made for a cooler plot'. But even if that's true, (and there have been hints that isn't) the climactic revelations haven't yet failed to be climactic, it's not doing the 'What's in the hatch? A countdown! What happens at the end of the countdown? I don't remember, probably there's another hatch!' thing; and also,
Second: these books evoke mundane reality really well. Setting up the broadcast is practical, annoying, and slightly odd. There isn't a lot of straight description, but necromantic vassals of incredible power eat off paper plates, the awesomely powerful god-emperor is endearingly shit at metaphors (other things he's shit at are much less endearing, 'I should be god-emperor' being the best answer to nearly zero questions); and see above re. aunts and patios (there is, in fact, at least one aunt), and the broadcasting screen is annoying in a very familiar way even though in this case it's probably powered by necromancy. (Wait, can it be powered by necromancy given [spoilery fact]? Unclear).
And third, it's very funny! When the broadcaster got to the end of the broadcast, was told it had gone wrong, and wearily started again, I laughed, and I laugh a lot in these books. Muir is very good at shifting tones, often though not always for comedy; sometimes her jokes are incredibly, immersion-breakingly obvious, sometimes they're subtle enough that I don't get them on first reading - I assume there are plenty I still haven't noticed - and sometimes they're just, yes, right, of course the broadcast didn't work, I don't know why I expect anything to work, why do I even turn up.
Leaflemming asked me the other day whether he should read these books. The above are reasons I'd generally say yes. This series is also for you if you especially like: bones, gender, heretical forms of Christ, and loyalty unto/beyond/back from/unto death. Reasons one might say no:
1. They're absolutely full of described gore, viscera, bones, teeth exploding into shards, etc. This is gleefully true of book one, yet more true of book two (because its central character knows the names of more bits of anatomy), and much less true of Nona; when there is gore in this book it's mostly described slantwise. This may not make it less disturbing.
2. They're about incredibly fucked-up and often abusive relationships and most of their major plot beats involve significant amounts of pain. This is true, again, Nona less so than the other two. Nona proves that Muir could write a book that wasn't at all fucked up if she wanted to, without particularly indicating that she'll ever want to: Nona has way more sunniness than the other two books and centres the simple goodness that human relationships can have. At the same time, a description of this book as 'the most cheerful entry in the Locked Tomb series yet!' really would not stand up to a list of the events that happen in it.
3. The alternation of tones can be completely immersion-breaking, as on the Discworld but with less buildup to get you there. To me this one turns out to actually be a selling point, but mileages vary. Characters whose relationship to our era is initially vague will use memes from the 2010s during heartfelt emotional scenes. Some characters reach for insults such as "Th'art lowlier than the toad squished at Our Lady's foot" and others are like, yo, suck it mate, I didn't know you were into toads. Portions of this have possible in-world explanations, but I feel like verisimilitude, to this series, is mainly another thing to play with. Again, less true of Nona, and I think more artfully done since Gideon (not that I thought Gideon was bad at it, but to me Gideon feels a bit like a first novel and Harrow jumps right to feeling like an umpteenth novel). Also I turn out to be fairly meme-blind, so some of them I just don't notice!
...
( Thoroughly spoilery Nona reactions below the cut, and continuing in the comments )
