Our rule was, nobody knowingly left behind…
The third book is out in Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb trilogy…which is, surprise, no longer a trilogy! Midway through writing the final book in the series the author realized that she now had a character who needed an entire book devoted to her story.
Book Two ended with the soul of Harrowhark curling up in a tomb – location unknown – leaving her body behind so her dead cavalier Gideon could occupy it in her place.
Meanwhile Gideon in Harrow’s body is rescued from the crushing weight of the in-between world of the River, but dies anyway.
And then it’s several months later and we’re experiencing the universe through Nona, who’s as different from the grieving Reverend Daughter Harrow or the bitterly smart-aleck sword-fighter Gideon as anyone can be. Nona’s memories only go back six months, and she’s a unique kind of Unreliable Narrator. She sees everything perfectly clearly: the overheated planet where the sunlight can kill in a matter of hours, filled with refugees, too many refugees, entire planets of refugees who are despairing and angry and looking for someone to blame. She knows she and her caretakers have to hide who they are since everyone else on the planet sees necromancers as monsters. She’s perfectly aware of how little food and water they have to live on, how hard it is to scrape together more supplies, how they don’t have any escape and how she’s only able to attend a daily school for refugee children because the teachers think she’s a mentally-challenged nineteen-year-old who’s possibly being pimped out by her caretakers.
But the thing is, Nona loves all of this.
She’s soothed by the burned concrete and car exhaust smell of the outside, by her occasional nighttime swims in the nearby beach that’s filled with pollutants and stinging jellyfish. She treasures her cheap t-shirts with garish logos and the luxury of having her hair done up in more than two braids. She adores the teachers at her school, the elderly six-legged dog one of her teachers lets her walk occasionally, the ragtag collection of refugee classmates who discuss robbery gigs and drug deals while squabbling about which person is promised Nona’s fruit snack (Nona doesn’t like eating, besides the occasional ice cube or chewing a pencil to splinters). Nona has a crush on the dazzlingly beautiful former companion who’s now working with the rebel group Blood of Eden, a faction of which tends to set necromancers on fire. She especially loves her caretakers, the former male Lyctor who’s now possessed by soul of his female cavalier, and the cavalier who’s hosting the soul of her dead necromancer. Oh, and there’s a Resurrection Beast – the soul of a murdered planet – poking just enough of its body into this universe to show a evil glowing orb in the sky, and secretly Nona is really in love with that.
I mentioned in my review of Book 2 that you really really shouldn’t read any of these books out of order. The above paragraph will probably give you an idea of how insane and surreal and really complicated this series is. It’s a gothic fever dream, and a post-apocalypse adventure, with kick-ass battle scenes and truly horrible images of what it looks like when someone can heal as fast as pieces are getting ripped off, and snappy, snarky dialog that would occasionally startle me into laughing.
“You want the Sixth House Back,” said Camilla.
“Not I,” said Ianthe. “I’ve read Sixth House juvenile moral novels about very smart children who save the day with logic, and I think you can all go drown.”
This is book that’s told in two parts. Part one takes place over the course of five days as Nona and her housemates attempt to survive while trying to figure out who Nona is. (Everyone’s fairly sure she’s in the body of Harrowhark. Who the soul is that’s piloting it is anyone’s guess.) The other part is a long-awaited explanation for what exactly the Resurrection was, and how John Gaius first became the Emperor Undying. This could have been an overwhelming amount of into, but it’s all conveyed by John as he wanders the ruins of a decayed city on a dead planet with someone who’s identity we’re not sure of (John calls her Harrow several times but what the hell kind of sense does that make?), speaking mostly to himself as he rehashes the story, probably not for the first time, of how all of this could have possibly happened.
It’s probably one of my favorite ways of doing exposition and backstory – get the popcorn, someone’s telling a story – and John’s history is so much more epic and convoluted than I’d imagined. And at the same time it’s so believably mundane and grounded in reality, like, of course people would act like that. Of course people would lie and betray and use limitless resources for their own benefit because they’re scared, never mind who suffers because of it. And of course John would take all of it personally and ends-justify-the-means himself into atrocities while nurturing a grudge that would last ten thousand years.
She said, “I don’t remember.”
He said, “I can’t forget.”
Tamsyn Muir keeps taking all of this towering, universe-spanning story and bringing it right down to the individual characters and their improbable, sometimes impossible relationships. Nona and her gang of refugee classmates. Pyrrha, still tied in knots over the woman her necromancer was sent to assassinate. Camilla and Palamedes, good God, those two. I knew they had something special in Book one when Gideon lied that the last thing Palamedes did before dying was to say he loved Camilla. (Camilla: “What? No, he didn’t.”), but it was devastatingly touching to have the two of them here, sharing one body, taking turns being in control and communicating in handwritten notes and tape-recorded conversations.
The Emperor Undying is as capable of love as any human, even if love from him is completely useless, if not actively toxic, but Muir has beautiful things to say about the rest of humanity’s capacity for love even when it may not last past the next few seconds.
“My necromancer and I always liked you…and hey, what’s like except a love that hasn’t been invited indoors.”
I absolutely adore this series, in spite of (or maybe because) I spend so much of the series entirely in over my head. Necromancers’ ability to possess other bodies made things baffling, the motivations of the Blood of Eden factions are difficult to parse, Captain Judith is out of her head and shouting very important-sounding things that make no sense, and I wasn’t sure what was going on with the Sixth House for most of the book. And yet as incomprehensible as it feels sometimes, Muir feeds just enough information to keep the reader intrigued, always just on the edge of another “oh, so that’s what’s going on” moment. It makes each of these incredibly re-readable, and since we have until 2023 to find out what happened after yet another cliffhanger, that leaves plenty of time to re-read the whole series. Again. Maybe this time I’ll finally understand just how the heck the River is supposed to work.
If you need an in-depth summary of this book with ALL the spoilers, check out this comment by Redditer thedarkfourth.