Katabasis

Peter Murdoch is a secondary protagonist who first seems to be Alice’s rival, and then becomes her ally and love interest. Peter has “bird’s-nest hair, scarecrow limbs” and “looked like he’d never tried at anything in his life” (3). Alice, who does not come from an academic family, notices how Peter is “a magician born to a physicist and a biologist, which meant he’d been steeped in the ivory tower’s unspoken rules since before he could walk” (5). Peter has institutional privilege, coming from a family already versed in the hierarchies and rules of academia. Peter is also white and a male, neither of which Alice are and both of which are privileged by university hierarchies.

Unlike many men in academia, Peter is “unfailingly nice” (5), helping people with problems and taking a genuine interest in their lives. Alice interprets this niceness as “guilelessly better than” which “made everyone feel so much worse” (5). Alice feels like her guilt over being annoyed at Peter’s privileges would be alleviated if he had actively done something to earn her annoyance. On the other hand, Peter seems ignorant of the privileges his upbringing affords him and never mentions the different challenges he and Alice have to navigate because of their different identities. This dynamic animates Peter and Alice’s rivalry, though as Elspeth points out, their rivalry was also a symptom of their romantic interest in one another.

While the attributes that make the academy inaccessible to Alice—her race and gender—are apparent, Peter struggles with different accessibility issues. He has Crohn’s disease, which often hospitalizes him or severely disables him. Crohn’s is an invisible illness, meaning it is not readily apparent to others but nevertheless greatly affects Peter’s life. Grimes romanticizes Peter’s illness, listing famous inventors with disabilities, saying that their disabilities were a “liberation” because their “mind transcended to pure abstraction” (349). He does not understand the disabling features caused by Crohn’s, or the toll they take on Peter’s body and mind. 

When Peter is hospitalized for his colectomy, Grimes steals Peter’s work and calls him “lazy” (352) for disappearing. Peter doesn’t tell anyone about his disease because he doesn’t want to be seen as weak or vulnerable. In this way, his relationship with his disease invokes the themes of Academia as an Infernal Structure and Ambition as Self-Damnation: The hierarchy of academia demands perfection to ascend within it, and Peter’s ambition to climb this hierarchy inadvertently leads to his own injury.

Peter’s ostracization by the machinations of the academy comments on the fact that the current hierarchies ultimately serve no one, as even the most privileged classes can struggle within the system. This, in turn, supports the idea that overturning a system of inequity benefits everyone, not just those most obviously disenfranchised. At the end of the novel, Peter and Alice realize how the system of academia has forced them into competition with one another. Their recognition of their romantic interest represents their rejection of further participation in these ostracizing modes of systemic organization.

For much of the novel, Grimes is characterized by the tremendous influence he wields over Alice and Peter, even when absent. The main plot of the novel is their journey to Hell to retrieve his soul. Most of what the reader initially knows about him comes from Peter and Alice’s unreliable testimonies: They fear, hate, and idolize Grimes in equal measure. He is occasionally seen in flashbacks, which gradually reveal more about his actions. Though this picture is initially one of an abusive antagonist, it takes until the end of the novel before Alice herself sees him as a petty, power-hungry, ordinary man.

The initial picture of Grimes is that of an academic genius resting on his laurels. Since Grimes is “devoted to profound, deep thinking,” Alice figures, “he was far above kneeling over tracing lines of chalk, straining his eyes, straining his back” (9)—she uses this logic to excuse his overwork of graduate students and refusal to do the more monotonous but necessary tasks of magick.

The first unambiguously immoral thing the reader learns Grimes did is scar Alice to prove “that pentagrams etched in living human skin might keep their charge for a lifetime” (150). Grimes uses Alice as a human experiment and then leverages his influence over her future to keep her from telling anyone. Deeply enthralled by Grimes’s influence, Alice does not see the power disparity he wields over her and continuously insists, “I wanted to […] I let him” (150). This violation of Alice’s body and autonomy foreshadows more of Grimes’s abuses.

Grimes also stokes competition between Alice and Peter, telling her the “only thought in your head these next five years should be whether you are keeping pace with him” (184). She learns later that he did the same to Peter. This coercive control and emotional manipulation is intended to prime Alice and Peter to distrust one another, and to be willing to do whatever he asks them to under the guise of their competition.

Grimes’s abuses escalate to sexual violence and harassment, forcing Alice to watch him have sex with a department staff member, and then later sexually assaulting Alice. Grimes uses the power he has over Alice to try to compel her into having sex with him, and when she refuses him, he retaliates against her by removing her professional opportunities. Leveraging retaliatory actions such as this is an abuse tactic, and in academic contexts, it is seen as a Title IX violation—in addition to the primary violations of the abusive acts themselves.

While all of this positions Grimes to be the novel’s central antagonist, when Alice faces him in Lord Yama’s court, he is now impotent and pathetic. She realizes he is “an ordinary man, puffing himself up […] Cruel, callous” (524). Alice is able to vanquish Grimes with Peter’s organic exchange spell with little fanfare. This shows that Grimes’s power and importance were an empty charade, with the institution protecting him in spite of his abusive behavior.

Elspeth is one of Grimes’s previous doctoral students, who died by suicide 10 years before Peter and Alice started at Cambridge. Though Alice will eventually convince Peter to betray Elspeth, she initially acts as their guide, in the same manner that Virgil was for Dante in Inferno, or the Sibyl was for Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid. 

Alice meets Elspeth before she has come to terms with the reality of Grimes’s abuse. She still idolizes Grimes and sees Elspeth as her competition rather than her ally. She notes that “Elspeth looked like her […] Brittle brunettes, sad girl smokers” (249). When they first meet, Alice tries to concoct reasons that distinguish her from Elspeth. Since it “made the rest easier to stomach,” she decides that Elspeth “lacked talent”: “For Alice was not talentless, so the same thing couldn’t possibly happen to her. Suicidal depression was just an extreme form of failure, which was a symptom of inadequacy” (250). Alice formulates this stigmatizing view of mental health and death by suicide as a form of self-protection.

When Elspeth tries to create solidarity with Alice about the obstacles they face as women in male-dominated academic fields, Alice thinks that her outreach is a “delirium of shared suffering” (254). Alice continues to believe that she is uniquely talented, and Elspeth is one of a greater mass of untalented women, essentially shifting the blame for their suffering onto them. Only after Alice meets Elspeth again, after Peter is murdered by the Kripkes, do they truly become allies. Even though Alice betrayed Elspeth, Elspeth sees something valuable in helping Alice escape Hell. Elspeth gives Alice her Dialetheia so Alice can barter with Lord Yama. Though Elspeth originally wanted to barter for her old life back, Elspeth now wants to leave Hell and be reincarnated the intended way.

Elspeth is characterized by the symbol of the butterfly; she prides herself on being able to turn into butterflies if she concentrates. When she learns that Alice is trying to find Grimes, she becomes furious and is shielded “by a horde of butterflies, which swirled agitated around her, whipping up winds, whirling faster and faster until the force of the gale seemed about to rip the ship apart” (286). In mental health circles, butterfly imagery is often used by people with various mental diagnoses or histories of self-harm to symbolize hope, forward growth, and transformation. Elspeth’s butterflies, symbolizing her healing journey, converge around her to protect her from the violence Alice wants to bring on her. Later, when Alice is about to leave Hell with Peter, butterflies cover the exit back to the surface, perhaps as a reminder to Alice to pursue her own healing. Alice recognizes this message and says, “Thanks Elspeth […] I know” (539).

The Kripkes—Nick and Magnolia, and their 10-year-old son Theophrastus—initially seem like antagonists. Their fate complicates this: while they have certainly committed antagonistic actions, it positions them as victims of the same hierarchies that structure the theme of Academia as an Infernal Structure and Ambition as Self-Damnation.

In life, Nick and Magnolia were “anathema to English academia” (228) because they were American and because they appealed to non-academics. The academy believes that research and magical intelligence are rarified, elite, and inaccessible; though the Kripkes “sold out a headliner tour across North America,” they were denied tenure in the same year for “[i]nsufficient contributions to the field” (228). This lack of recognition of their talents seems to have stoked their ambition, as they return to the public eye years later to perform a stunt: They kill each other on stage and poison their son, to descend to Hell and then reemerge by using a True Contradiction. Rather than atoning for their behavior, they commit murders throughout Hell—including Peter’s—to gather blood to perform magic and accomplish this task.

The ambition that drives them on this journey robs them of their human attributes. This is literalized in how they drink the Lethe. Elspeth says she saw them taking small sips of the water because it “hurts to be human” and it’s easier “to erase yourself bit by bit, until you are only what you need in the present moment” (271). Though the novel never explicitly states what it takes for a Shade to successfully get through Hell, it seems to be a true recognition of the beauty of being material and human. Due to the institutional pressure to intellectually perform, the Kripkes strip this humanity away from themselves.

The traces of humanity the Kripkes exhibit at the end show that—though they still commit violent acts—in a way they are victims of academic “Hell,” like Alice. Alice remembers how in life, Nick “laughed at all [Magnolia’s] jokes; he nodded appreciatively whenever she unpacked a particularly tricky theoretical knot” (491). Unlike most professional academic men Alice meets, Nick doesn’t carry bias toward Magnolia for being a woman, wife, and mother. In turn, Magnolia was “vibrant and magnificent,” and as she dies, Alice thinks, “You were the best of us” (492). While this initially seems like a strange thought for Alice to have about Peter’s murderers, it shows that in the Kripkes’ final moments, Alice recognizes how they were played by the same systems she was.

Gradus is a mysterious Shade that Alice meets in the final Court of Hell. He has a “slippery face, features lapsing and shifting, as if he couldn’t decide himself what he looked like” (396). Despite his immateriality, Gradus “seemed more human than any of [the other Shades]” (396). Gradus represents the endpoint of a Shade’s journey to self-discovery and acceptance. His shifting features represent how he has let go of preconceived notions of his earthly identity; yet Alice’s perception that he seems more human than the other Shades despite this invokes the question of what it means to be human. “Human” is not a designator attached to things like status, appearance, or other earthly designators of station and authority. 

Gradus’s humanity is also reflected in the type of knowledge Gradus is interested in hearing from Alice. He is uninterested in hearing about “political or historical developments” (398). Instead, he wants to hear about the skylines of cities, what new fashion and music are like, or what Alice ate before entering Hell. These questions show that Gradus’s understanding of what it means to be human is not in how other people perceive you, but in how you experience and appreciate and find joy in the world.

Like Elspeth, Gradus is Alice’s guide and example in Hell. Alice’s identification with Elspeth initially prevents her from learning from her, but Gradus is a character out of time: Alice doesn’t know when he is from, where he is from, what he did in life, or what he looks like. This prevents her from having the type of emotional reaction toward Gradus that she has toward Elspeth. The name he gives, John Gradus, “seemed an obvious lie” (398). It is a reference to the Latin saying gradus ad Parnassum: Steps to Parnassus, or less literally, steps toward mastery. The phrase was used from the classical period onward in instructional books that offer a step-by-step guide to lead their reader toward excellence in a subject through diligent hard work. 

This phrase represents Gradus’s journey, and the example he sets for Alice and other Shades, like Elspeth. After helping Alice defeat the Kripkes, Gradus has fulfilled his role in Hell. He is welcomed aboard a ship by a “being clothed all in white, shining so bright against the dark horizon that it hurt Alice’s eyes to look” (493), and allowed to drink the distilled Lethe to be reincarnated in his next life.