The thing that nobody tells you about trauma is that it’s hilarious.
Oh, not at the time. Not usually. But afterward? Afterward, you’ll be talking to someone who was there with you and cackling about it, knowing that if anyone overheard you they’d think you were insane. Or worse, they’d pity you. Because there just isn’t a good way to make people understand.
T. Kingfisher makes people understand. One of the reasons she’s (finally!) begun to get the acclaim she so richly deserves is that she understands that humor and horror are twins.
Theodor Adorno understood that laughter was complex: “Laughter, whether reconciled or terrible,” he wrote, “always accompanies the moment when a fear is ended. It indicates a release, whether from physical danger or from the grip of logic.” [1] Some laughter reinforces power, makes you punch down, or just makes you forget that you’re enmeshed in a system that is slowly destroying you. That amnesia might mean you do nothing about that system. But some laughter, ah. Some laughter is subversive. It punches up, it accompanies the escape from danger, the mad triumph of individual life over oppressive systems.
With that in mind: Nettle and Bone is a book about abuse. It is also funny and heartfelt. And awful. And delightful. I could keep going around and around, and that’s the genius of it. It holds everything in tension and never lets the complexity collapse into something trite or grim.
Marra is the third royal daughter of a very small kingdom. Both she and her land live in the shadow of larger powers: to both north and south are empires that want the little kingdom’s resources, and so Marra’s parents and sisters have learned to play politics very, very well. Marra, though, is terrible at it. She lacks both the natural capacity and the desire to learn, but fortunately she can be given to a nunnery instead of a prince.
Fortunately for her, that is. It’s less fortunate for her older sisters, who are married, one after the other, to a sadistic brute protected not only by his royal status but by powerful magic conferred by his line’s godmother. One dies of the abuse, whether directly or from the attendant despair. The other, Kania, clings grimly on, knowing that her endurance protects her kingdom and her sister, since Marra would only have to take her place. She also knows, with the bleak determination of the hopeless, that no help can come. The abuse is an open secret. Even her own mother knows, knows and does nothing because she believes nothing can be done.
Is Marra’s mother also abusive? In some ways, yes. She enables abuse, if nothing else. But the fate of an entire nation rests on her, thousands and thousands of lives, and she doesn’t know and can’t imagine another solution than utilitarianism. She makes the least bad choice she can see, because what is one woman’s suffering—even if it’s her daughter’s—against a nation’s?
Kania doesn’t disagree with this calculation. It’s not just for her survival that she stays, although she does point out that she would be hunted if she were to try to escape. She, too, feels the obligation to protect others. Marra likewise wants to protect the ones she loves, but she refuses to accept the utilitarian bargain. She has the luxury—and yes, it is a form of privilege—of dealing with life on an individual level; but put another way, she has the bravery and imagination necessary to see beyond obligations of sacrifice. Marra can skive off on an adventure because she doesn’t have a sadistically jealous husband or a thousand royal duties; but she also chooses to endure challenges just as terrifying and painful for the sake of others.
Marra’s first challenges come from the dust-wife, a woman who tends to the souls of the dead out beyond the borders of civilization. The tasks are cruel foreshadows of what’s to come: Marra must endure immense pain and can only comfort herself with hope, because she knows too little of what’s possible and barely has a plan. She’s not particularly clever, or beautiful, or talented at anything except textile arts. But she cares. She cares beyond her own endurance, and that’s enough to convince the dust-wife to help her. It’s also enough to defy a tooth-collecting fairy (think Marathon Man rather than elementary school) to rescue the enslaved Fenris and enough to demand help from her godmother Agnes, whose blessings have been somewhere between uneven and disastrous. You might laugh to see these odd individuals with odd, asymmetric powers on the way to save a princess and maybe a whole kingdom. But it’s much better to laugh with them as they contemplate the absurd odds and still keep going.
In this context, a funny—and this is funny-odd, not really funny-haha—thing happens when Marra tangles these people’s fates together. Even with this little band, Marra finds herself in an impossible position: she has to choose between letting Fenris be tortured or letting him and possibly everyone else she loves be killed. Her godmother Agnes, too, has to choose between bad and worse blessings, because no magic is powerful enough to force a happy ending on domestic violence. If these are the kind of calculations that these characters have to make in even such a small group, then Kingfisher implies gently that maybe we can understand the kinds of calculations Marra’s mother and sister have been making, too. A hero who has never made compromises is probably very young or very dead.
This isn’t the first book that Kingfisher has used to explore generational obligation and trauma. A Minor Mage (2019) and A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking (2020) both asked why we love young Chosen heroes, since asking children to fight your battles implies very bad things about how adults have screwed up the systems they were supposed to steward. Marra isn’t a child—she’s refreshingly in her mid-thirties—but she does share that same incredulity that the adults don’t have everything under control.
In fairness to her, some adults do have a lot under control. The dust-wife is supremely confident in her abilities, and she routinely proves that there are still people worthy of our trust and reliance. But like Marra, she is largely a free agent who doesn’t depend on others and dislikes others depending on her. Marra’s mother and the godmothers, however, all struggle with the power they’ve inherited. Their power traps them as surely as history does, and they must either control it or else be controlled by it.
After all, they know exactly what it means to be controlled once they see Miss Margaret, a woman possessed by her childhood puppet. Miss Margaret’s boardinghouse offers refuge of a sort for Marra and her weary band, but they can’t get too comfortable under the unliving eyes of this malicious little god, who was long ago animated by Margaret’s childhood love and imagination. The puppet sits on her shoulder with its strings around her neck and chokes her at the slightest hint of disloyalty, real or imagined. Her throat has callouses over its scars from the frequency of these attacks. Miss Margaret is trapped by this vicious little tyrant, but that’s not even the worst part. The very worst part is that, when given a chance to be freed, she refuses. She chooses her own oppression.
More than gore and serial killers, that’s horror. So what exactly, you’re asking, about generational trauma and gender-based violence could possibly be funny? Well. Let’s start with the possessed chicken.
Yes, one of the characters is a demon-possessed hen. Kingfisher routinely features animal companions in her stories, one of only a few still doing so. They used to be ubiquitous; hardly a fantasy story made it to the bookstore shelf without the help of a snarky cat or a wisecracking magic beast. But whether we’ve lost our right to the natural world in the wake of climate destruction or we’ve only grown tired of the trope, Kingfisher is now one of a much smaller cohort making use of it. I’m so glad she does. The animals aren’t just comic relief for its own sake, but an important philosophical counterpoint. In a book about the dark side of possession—from abusive marriage to outright slavery—they point the way forward.
If you’ve spent time around chickens, you know that demon possession is less of a tragedy and more of a terrifying marriage of equals. That chicken chose chaos. And Bonedog, the dog Marra created from remains in a charnel pit, chose to come to life, chose to return again and again to Marra. It’s crazy to keep coming back. It’s absurd.
It’s not just devil-hens and bone-dogs. All the tragic oddballs, human and animal, get to decide to keep on living and keep on trying to make things better, insane as that might seem. And if that sounds trite, let me note another cultural theorist, this one from within the SFF community. As Ursula K. Le Guin said, “The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.” [2] Evil, and the abetting of evil, is the most ordinary thing in the world in Nettle and Bone. Misery and cruelty are ubiquitous; to think that you can defy them is absurd. It’s laughable. So laugh! says Kingfisher. Do the crazy thing, because only the crazy thing can save you. And even if it doesn’t, hey, at least you went out with a smile.
Endnotes
[1] Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 112. [return]
[2] Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (New York: Perennial, 2004), p. 276. [return]