Slade House

“Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic F if anyone ever writes ‘I woke up and it was all a dream’ at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer, that it’s a cop-out, it’s the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But every single morning we really do wake up and it really was all a dream. It’s a shame Jonah’s not real, though.”

Mitchell deploys metafictional commentary in this passage to hint at the true nature of Nathan’s father’s house in Zimbabwe. By pointing to the unsatisfying cliché of the narrative being a dream all along, Mitchell implies that the more satisfying outcome would be Nathan’s discovery that Jonah and Slade House were real, despite the surreal and horrifying experiences he had there. This drives a tension between the unsatisfying reality of Nathan’s father’s house and the satisfying uncanniness that defines Slade House.

“‘Every time I come back to my body,’ she says, ‘it feels less of a homecoming, and more like entering an alien shell. A more enfeebled one. Do you know, I want to be free of it?’”

Where the earlier passage hinted at Jonah’s craving for more life, this passage hints at Norah’s alienation from it. The defamiliarization of her body speaks to the routine nature of the Grayers’ feeding cycle, meaning that Norah has gradually become sick of it. By articulating that she wants to free herself from the routine, Norah does not realize that she is foreshadowing the end of the novel, when Marinus finally frees her from her tether by destroying her birth-body.

“Well, if she did exist, and did live around here, she’d probably live in Slade House—our house. Mine, that is. But Stuart and I bought the house from people called Pitt, not Grayer, and they’d lived here for years.”

Disguised as Chloe, Norah provides an alternate history to the ownership of Slade House, one that contradicts what the reader has learned in the previous chapter. This drives some dramatic irony as the novel relies on the reader to see the holes in Chloe’s explanation. Gordon, on the other hand, is inclined to trust her because he is attracted to her and has no real interest in the Bishops’ case.

“My theory is that they’re ordinary children, living in their own time, doing their thing, whom I overhear. Like the telephone lines of our times have crossed. The wall between our ‘now’ and their ‘now’ is thin.”

This passage lends Chloe’s alibi some credibility by making her perspective relatable to Gordon. However, with the understanding that Chloe is merely Norah in disguise, the same passage can be read as a reflexive self-commentary on her life with Jonah. Norah compares herself and Jonah to children who have brought their antiquated perspective of the world to modern times, making them people who can never quite fit into the world around them. She uses the metaphor of crossed telephone wires to communicate her alienation and her desire to break free from her life.

“Too many provideds, Jonah. Yes, our luck’s held so far. It can’t hold forever, and it won’t.”

Norah warns Jonah that their operandi is too circumstantial, relying on things that are out of their control to ensure their success. This foreshadows the later chapters of the novel, in which these circumstances, including the relay of Rita Bishop’s hairpin and Freya’s refusal to consume the banjax offered to her, directly interfere with the operandi.

“‘What does “deserve” have to do with anything?’ Norah Grayer lifts her sharp eyebrows. ‘Did the pig whose smoked flesh you ate at breakfast “deserve” her fate? The question’s irrelevant. You desired bacon and she couldn’t escape the abbatoir. We desire your soul to power our operandi, and you can’t escape our lacuna. That’s it.’”

Norah criticizes the moralization of their operandi by framing it within their survivalist perspective. She compares Gordon to a pig to dehumanize him, signaling that she and Jonah see themselves as being above humankind. Ironically, the comparison relies on Norah to imagine herself as a human to justify her decision to consume Gordon’s soul.

“All the research suggests that Freyas go way farther in life than Sallys. Name me one famous Sally. Go on. You can’t, can you? My sister won every medal going at school; picked up good Mandarin in Singapore, fluent French in Geneva; graduated in journalism from Imperial College this June; moved in with her boyfriend in Brooklyn, who is of course a hotshot Chinese American documentary maker; and got a job with a photo agency on Bleecker Street. Not an internship, an actual paid job. All within a fortnight of touching down at JFK. That’s so Freya. If I sound jealous, I am.”

This passage exposes Sal’s inferiority complex, which she ties to her endless self-comparison to her older sister, Freya. It also doubles as early exposition for the character of Freya, who narrates the fourth chapter, and illuminates their dynamic. Freya’s busy life makes little room for Sal, who is both jealous of her sister and covetous of the attention that other parts of Freya’s life demand from her. The inaccessibility of Freya’s attention exacerbates Sal’s low self-esteem, as does her notion that Freya’s successes have been easily won.

“If I could just see a ghost, just once—a Roman centurion or a headless horseman or, or Nathan and Rita Bishop, I’m not fussy…Just one ghost, so I know that death’s not game over, but a door. A door with Jonny on the other side. Christ, Sally, I’d give anything to know he didn’t just…stop, that stupid afternoon. Anything. Seriously.”

Fern’s monologue about the afterlife speaks to the limitations that a purely materialist view of the world holds for her. A world without souls is an anticlimactic world, one where unresolved tension becomes a condition of the human experience. Because the novel leans deep into the speculative aspects of Mitchell’s über-novel, there is the implication that Fern may get some closure, especially as each of the protagonists comes to the point of Recognizing the Beauty of the Human Soul.

“‘I…found…a…wea…pon…in…the…cracks.’

[…] First I recoil in case it’s a threat, but actually he’s offering it to me, like a gift. The nonspiky end’s decorated with a fox’s head, silver, small but chunky, with jeweled eyes.”

The reappearance of Rita Bishop’s fox-head hairpin in this passage reveals it to be a Chekhov’s gun, specifically introduced early in the novel to make a crucial contribution to the plot later. For the novel to satisfy the reader, Mitchell must ensure that the hairpin is used as a weapon before the conflict is over. It satisfies its function in Chapter 4 when the remnant of Sal’s spirit intervenes to save Freya’s soul.

“I hoped Todd wasn’t angry at me for interacting with Fake Fern and catching the mirror. Was that a fatal mistake, like Orpheus looking back? A dirty trick, if so. My hands just acted on reflex to save my mirror. But legends and stories are as full of dirty tricks as life is, and however much time has gone by nothing has changed, and all I have are memories—the brightest of them all being Todd’s hurried kiss—to keep me company and to keep me sane in the starless, bodiless, painless, timeless blackness.”

The allusion to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in this passage underscores the idea that all of human experience fits into repeated patterns, connecting stories across different contexts like time and place. Mitchell applies this idea to the structure of the novel, showing how each of the characters, who live nine years apart from one another, can relate to each other by having the same experience. The memories of these patterns grant some consolation in a meaningless world, just as Sal’s memory of Todd’s kiss consoles her.

“‘We’re demigods in thrall to no one. Can we please keep it that way?’

‘We’re in thrall to this risible pantomime every nine years,’ replies Norah acidly. ‘We’re in thrall to these’—she indicates her body with disgust—‘birth-bodies to anchor our souls in the world of day. We’re in thrall to luck ensuring that nothing goes wrong.’”

The contrast between Jonah and Norah Grayer is heightened in this passage as they debate over the conditions of their immortality. Jonah argues that they are free because they live only for themselves and serve no creed nor master. Norah argues that the maintenance of their bodies is imprisonment in its own right, forcing them to serve the needs of their bodies or die otherwise.

“Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable hemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.”

In this passage, Freya expresses how painful it can be to hope for someone’s well-being, using the metaphor of amputation to communicate the experience of grief. She complicates this metaphor with the idea that it is like hemophilia (a rare disorder that stops blood from clotting), communicating that the damage is ongoing. Where grief relies on the certainty that Sal is dead, Freya cannot assure herself that this is the case because she desperately wants Sal to live. In this way, pain becomes a sign of The Importance of Living for Others because it speaks to Freya’s enduring love for her sister, even as the novel has revealed that Sal is dead.

“No, the Grayer twins’ séances weren’t real; but yes, the hope they gave was. Isn’t the yes better than the no?”

This passage directly resonates with Freya’s sentiments in the previous passage. In a way, Freya’s decision to meet with Fred Pink functions much like the spiritualist séances that the Grayers conducted in the previous century, a desperate attempt at hope. Disguised as Fred Pink, Jonah is appealing to Freya’s hope, only so that he can take advantage of her.

“Death’s life’s only guarantee, yes? We all know it, yet we’re hardwired to dread it. That dread’s our survival instinct and it serves us well enough when we’re young, but it’s a curse when you’re older.”

This passage speaks to the motivations that mark many of the novel’s characters, including the Grayer twins. Most of the characters who do not believe in the soul are driven to desperation because they fear death as a hard end to life. Despite their reliance on the existence of souls to extend their lives, the Grayers also fear death as the force that motivates their exploitation of Engifted souls. Even though the Grayers see ordinary humans as below them, they cannot help but fear death the way ordinary humans do, a “curse” that is especially potent given their age. Mitchell stresses the beauty of the human soul as a counterpoint to the Grayers’ cynical perspective.

“Men are dogs, Miss Timms; you know that. Give it twenty, thirty, fifty years, there’d be thirty, forty, a hundred billion human beings eating up our godforsaken world. We’d be drowning in our own shit even as we fought each other for the last Pot Noodle in the last supermarket. See? Either way you lose. If you’re smart enough to discover immortality, you’re smart enough to ensure your own supply and keep very very very shtum indeed.”

This passage drives the novel’s political subtext, exploring how the fear of death forces people to disadvantage one another in the fight for limited resources. Later, Jonah will describe war as “ends justifying means” (179), suggesting that the world leaders who wage war to control land and resources are no different from the Grayer twins, who prey on the souls of those who have less power than them. Throughout the novel, Jonah and Norah employ a number of rationalizations to justify their actions, in this case, seeing themselves as smart survivors rather than murderers.

“‘One day your flippancy will kill you.’

‘If you say so, sister.’

‘And on that day I will save myself if I can, and abandon you if I must.’”

Mitchell returns to the contrast between Norah and Jonah to lay the groundwork for the novel’s resolution. This passage also underscores Jonah’s arrogance as his fatal character flaw. His failure to take Norah’s advice seriously contributes to his impulsive behavior in the confrontation with Marinus, which directly results in his death when he tries to attack her.

“My body is dead but my soul is saved. My rescuer’s pendant swings through my soul, lit deep-sea green by the last of the starry atoms. Eternity, jade, it’s Maori, I chose it, I wrapped it, I sent it once to someone I love.”

This passage speaks to the importance of living for others by giving Freya a glimmer of hope that resolves the ambiguity of Sal’s death. Sal’s spirit intervenes to stop Freya from suffering her fate. Although Freya does not initially recognize Sal, she comes to recognize her by the pendant she wears, which Freya gave her as a sign of her love for her sister. That sign returns to her in the last moment of her life, allowing her to die with assurance that Sal’s disappearance was not the end of her soul.

“In all the tales, the myths, the rule is, if you eat or drink anything—pomegranate seeds, faerie wine, whatever—the place has a hold on you.”

Like the earlier allusion to Orpheus, this passage uses an allusion to fairy tales to highlight the wisdom they continue to offer the modern reader. In this context, Marinus is using the wisdom of fairy tales for practical purposes: She finds herself in a fairy-tale setting, so she feels the need to abide by fairy-tale logic, demonstrating her smart and open-minded approach to the interaction, as well as her understanding that it is taking place outside the typical human world.

“You invited me here today to get my soul sucked out—and for accepting your invitation I’m now a trespasser? Not nice.”

Marinus criticizes the Grayers for exploiting their guests in ways that undermine their benevolence and expose their true agenda. Applied to a broader context, the critique shows how hospitality can function as a form of entrapment. Hosts leverage their benevolence to manipulate guests to do their bidding, putting them in an uneven power dynamic.

“When I open my eyes, instead of Jonah opening his eyes, I will see Grief. Grief and I exchanged words in Ely many years ago after Mother died, poor wretch, coughing her lungs up, telling me to take care of Jonah, to protect him, because I was the sensible one…And for over a century I honored that promise, and protected my brother more assiduously than poor Nellie Grayer meant or dreamed, and during these years Grief was only a face in a crowd. Now, however, Grief intends to make up for lost time.”

Norah’s grief over the loss of Jonah speaks to her fear of death and the way it has been the dominant motivating force of her life. By personifying grief, she points to her intimate relationship with it as well as her sense that it is both thoughtful and active, making decisions. Norah alludes to her backstory, showing how much her fear of death stems from the early loss of her mother. She has managed to insulate herself against the pain of grief by keeping few emotional connections in her life, save for the one she had to Jonah.

“Survival is also an ally against Grief: if I buckle now, I won’t survive.”

Jonah’s death galvanizes Norah to action, indicated by her personification of Survival, whom she sees as an active “ally against Grief.” By refusing to resign herself to death and committing to Survival, Norah believes that she can overcome the pain that grief has brought her. This implies that Norah’s efforts towards immortality also functioned as a coping mechanism for the grief she experienced very early on in her childhood.

“We serve the sanctity of life, Miss Grayer. Not our own lives, but other people’s. The knowledge that those future innocents whom you would have killed to fuel your addiction to longevity—people as guiltless as the Timms sisters, as Gordon Edmonds, as the Bishops—will now survive: that’s our higher purpose. What’s a metalife without a mission? It’s mere feeding.”

Marinus’s critique of Norah’s lifestyle also comes with an expression of her personal mission statement as a Horologist: Immortality corrupts the soul and forces people to live according to their indulgences, which makes their life empty and instinctive, reduced to feeding. She argues that by living for those who do not have access to immortal life, she gives her immortality shape and purpose, developing the importance of living for others as a theme.

“‘[F]rom such an array of vultures,’ the woman’s saying, and I wish she’d speak up, ‘from feudal lords to slave traders to oligarchs to neocons to predators like you. All of you strangle your consciences, and ethically you strike yourselves dumb.’”

Once again, Mitchell extends Marinus’s critique of Norah Grayer with political subtext, showing how the Grayer twins can be interpreted as metaphors for power that directs itself to the exploitation of others. By comparing the Grayers to feudal lords and enslavers, Mitchell stresses the corruptive power of wealth as a theme.