Thoughts On How the Locked Tomb #2 Does Grief So Well

As a writer, I love how Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth (Locked Tomb Trilogy #2) is a genius masterclass in writing stories with heavy elements of grief.

(There were a lot of other things I love about that book/series, of course, but that’s not what I’m rambling about today.)

(no specific spoilers for Harrow the Ninth in what follows –I won’t tell you who is grieving or why. However, I will give you enough vague context to understand my point whether or not you’ve read the series. For example, “A character does their best to face their grief head-on, and we see scene after scene of forcing themselves to confront all their missing loved one’s friends.”)

I couldn’t stop marvelling at how Harrow the Ninth‘s grieving character manages to capture that feeling of soul-ripping loss that expands to affect every facet of life and feels like it’s never going to dull, let alone go away, but especially at how Muir does this without losing the forward momentum of the narrative. The reader gets to share the character’s feeling that life–the story–has stopped while at the same very much feeling that the story is still going on, sometimes even overwhelmingly fast for the characters caught up in it.

I can’t really dissect how she achieves this without spoiling the book, but, as I think about what made this portrayal of grief so effective for me–and why similar scenes of loss and its aftermath haven’t affected me the same way–I can identify three common issues with fictional grief that she avoids:

1. You don’t feel the loss of the person/thing being grieved.

For quite some time, I played with the idea of a theatrical piece based on familiar stories in which a main character dies. I thought it would be really cool to have the same performer play different characters in the same story roles as they explored the connections between the death and post-death scenes, while at the same time telling a subtler story about the performers’ reactions to real-life loss. And I really loved the idea of connecting the protagonist characters’ refusal to accept the death by having that performer stay apart from the story, leave their characters’ signifying costume pieces or props on the table, and let the other characters grind out stagnant, circular scene after scene that could go nowhere without the protagonists. I wanted the audience to feel how all the stories needed the protagonist characters and performer to face their feelings through the structure as well as the content.

I wanted that because often in stories about characters dying or disappearing or going missing, we don’t feel their absence viscerally. We’re outsiders looking in, watching Juliet wail over Romeo. We’re voyeurs, not participants, in grief.

Obviously, writers don’t want to literally traumatize readers with depictions of grief–nobody reads a book to feel exactly as irreparably gutted as they would if they lost a loved one. But just as obviously, the voyeuristic model of grief doesn’t offer the wonderful vivid despair and relief: safe because it isn’t real and cathartic because in the important ways, it feels like it is. In the worst case, disconnect between grieving character and reader can make the former’s gnashing of teeth feel annoying and tedious.

In Harrow the Ninth, Muir uses structure to help the reader viscerally feel the gap left by the missing object of grief. The narration and structure of the first book in the series, Gideon the Ninth, builds the necessary basis for this by leaning heavily on that object’s presence. If you enjoyed the first book, the tone and narrative structure of the second is a sharp shock (though it makes total in-universe sense after, um, ~much is revealed~ at the end). You, the reader, start to miss what the grieving character misses because you, too, participate in their sense of their world as emptier and duller and wronger.

This works especially well because Muir sets up a structure and plot that don’t allow the grieving character to wallow in their grief. We readers don’t get told how the character feels: instead, we see and feel it almost in their place. We don’t have a chance to shift from participants back to voyeurs because if we were just voyeurs, there’d be nothing to look at. We have to collaborate with the text* to make this world make emotional sense.

2. Death/being gone doesn’t feel like that big a deal.

This can happen for two reasons. Either death doesn’t feel permanent, or the missing character/object doesn’t feel all that important.

For example, Gillian Anderson is an amazing performer, and her Scully falling to pieces when Mulder was found dead during season 8 of The X Files was beautifully acted. But the grief just doesn’t hit home because this is, what, the third time Mulder has died? We all know he’s probably coming back. This flippin’ series paid for ridiculously detailed CGI showing a character’s entire head burning off from skin to skull… and then brought the character back, alive, with minor scarring. After the precedents the show has set, there is literally nothing they can do to convince audience members that a character is dead, no take-backsies (and that’s before we get into ghosts existing in this world).

When this minimization of death/disappearance happens, we readers aren’t watching Juliet wail over Romeo’s body. We’re watching Romeo wail over Juliet when we know she’s actually just pretending with the Friar’s magic death-mimicking-potion-for-all-your-death-mimicking-needs. We can’t and don’t feel his grief: the story works because the gap between Romeo’s grief and our outside knowledge creates the tension between what we know needs to happen for a good outcome for the protagonists and every mistake Romeo makes, from killing Paris to taking his own life.

Similarly, when a perpetually absent mentor figure dies (or “dies”)–Gandalf or Merlin or whoever–we the readers kinda knew they couldn’t be around to dispense wise-yet-obnoxiously-cryptic words of wisdom forever. Part of a typical Western story is the protagonist having to do stuff for themselves, so when a mentor bites it, their death is a continuation of, not a deviation from, the story status quo. We feel sad that the protagonist feels sad, but we recognize the death as a necessary step in the forward progression of the plot.

You’d think that Harrow the Ninth would fall prey to the first of these interlinked issues: the series is about necromancers with a dark gothic history. It’s established in the first chapters of the first book that dualist-type body-independent souls one-hundred-percent exist, including some that hang around after death in a variety of plot-developing ways. Meanwhile, long-lost inanimate objects are still there thousands of years later waiting for the right person to find them–preserved who knows how?

But grief and death still feel serious in the series because the author allows the consequences to be serious and permanent. If a character dies–even if we see that character again because, you know, necromancy–they are still gone in important ways. The important thing isn’t that a character must literally be dead or an object literally destroyed. What’s important for portraying this kind of grief in storytelling is that everything changes irreparably. Although the plot may continue to develop, perhaps even in positive ways that could end up making the grieving character(s) happy, everything has changed, and there can be neither a return to the “normal” that started the story nor simple progress to the “obvious” happy ending a naïve reader opening the book for the first time might predict.

This is something I’ve struggled with in my own writing, not the least because I am shit at having the courage to extend tension. In my first… and second… and third drafts, characters get in big, blow-up fights or say the Unforgiveable Thing or appear to sacrifice their lives–and then I resolve it the next scene because I am an impatient reader who wants All the Feelings in as short a time as possible and it feels good to write the resolution as fast as I can. Again, mostly because I have zero chill, but also a little bit because I’m afraid of falling for the third fictional grief pitfall…

3. The plot stops dead (no pun intended?).

Isn’t that always the way? The protagonist is grieving their lover/best friend/dog/dog’s best friend, and you’re grieving the point when this story actually used to be good.

I’m not saying that developing a character’s emotions in detail is in and of itself a bad thing. “Angst” is a popular fanfiction category for a reason: so many of us readers love to ratchet up our own feelings (and/or anticipation of emotional resolution) by exploring those of a fictional character in detail. Our fascination with characters in pain is why, at least in conventional Western stories, things get worse and worse for the protagonist(s) until finally at the end they get better (or not).

But as much as we all may love angsty songfics, their emotional impact can’t exist without the other stuff storytellers do to make us care about these characters in the first place. For the most part–though of course there are exceptions–plot is the engine that moves us through the story and the characters through their feelings. Even if all you care about is the angst, you still want plot so that the characters can have new and even more dire things to be angsty about. Stasis, eventually, gets boring.

No matter how serious the loss feels or whether the reader feels the grief of it along with the characters, if it goes on for long enough without any change, we get accustomed to it. Sure, you made me feel something at first, but what have you done for me lately?

(As friends have pointed out (thanks, Amanda!), this can be particularly frustrating if the grief/loss is the foreseeable result of an action the grieving character chose to take, knowing doing so would make them sad. I won’t name titles, but, damn, it’s annoying watching characters whine about the predicted consequences of doing something they didn’t actually have to do.)

It’s difficult to discuss the effective way that Harrow the Ninth handles this without spoiling the book, but, in essence, Muir builds a semi-epistemological** mystery. From textual clues, starting all the way in the dramatis personae, she lets us know that something is very wrong. It doesn’t take long to suspect that between the events of this book and the last, the grieving character must have made a very bad decision in response to their grief, and the tension grows from the mysteries of 1) just what exactly that bad decision was; 2) whether the character can survive (physically and mentally) the consequences of said mystery bad decision; and 3) how all the confusing observations and actions that seem to stem from that bad decision and are filtered through a new POV that might be (but also might not be) related to said decision resolve out into the parts of the story we already know from Book 1.

The POV and unconventional narrative structure work together to build both stakes and tension: we know from the start that the grieving character’s survival is at risk. Because we’ve read the previous book in the series, we know better than they do that this world, the way they’re seeing it, isn’t quite right, and, in everything they notice and do, we’re primed to pick up clues as to what’s “really” going on. The character might not be making much progress on their actual goals, desperately but futilely trying to attain the skills they need to survive and navigate a mire of toxic interpersonal relationships, but because of the structure, we readers get to make progress. We know, even if the character doesn’t, that we’re getting closer to figuring out what’s going on, even if the character doesn’t seem to be making headway toward overcoming the situation we learned about in Chapter 1.

I really like the way this strategy has its cake and eats it too: on one hand, we feel the paralysis of grief, the way it feels like the world has just… stopped. But on the other, we get that conventional sense of narrative progress. By separating the character’s progress from the reader’s progress, the author finds a way to let grief take over the story without taking over the plot.

(All this, of course, wouldn’t work if the character’s progress and the reader’s progress didn’t finally come together in a series of climactic scenes, but they do, so, hooray.)

I can’t in good conscience recommend The Locked Tomb series to you until the end of the year, because the last volume of the trilogy won’t be out until at least 2022, and, Internet stranger, I like you too much to extend your Lisa-Simpson-style-one-of-your-book-characters-having-difficulties torment that long. But I enjoyed it very much, and, bonus for me, because I’m working on (re-working on…) some writing that involves characters in various stages of grieving, I’m really inspired to think about why scenes aren’t working out the way I want them to and what elements I really need to produce the effect I’m going for.

* YES OK I am an academic in the humanities is that a crime????
** ^ .… okay, fine, maybe it should be a crime