Slade House

Jonah Grayer is the secondary antagonist of the novel and Norah’s twin brother. He is characterized as an arrogant and impulsive psychic who prides himself on the craft of the illusions he builds in Slade House. However, Jonah’s arrogance masks a deep insecurity about his flaws, fully revealed in the closing chapter of the novel, in which Marinus is able to exploit that trait during her confrontation with the Grayer twins. This is ironic, considering that the twins’ orisons are all built to exploit the weaknesses and insecurities of their victims. The novel also implies that of the twins, Jonah is the weaker psychic, especially since his mentor, the Albino Sayyid of Aït Arif, spoke disparagingly of Jonah’s capabilities when Marinus defeated him.

Although the Grayer twins have thrived in obscurity, Jonah’s arrogance develops into a desire to make his actions known to the world. This results in his orison in Chapter 4, in which he tells his and Norah’s life story to Freya Timms. Because Jonah has very little to look forward to apart from the next feeding cycle, and, like a con artist, can never reveal his ingenious creations, he chooses to share his life story in order to look back and frame Slade House as the culminating point of his life. Jonah does not realize how his life story, which is archived on Freya’s digital recorder, will become the reason for his undoing at the hands of Marinus. In this way, Jonah’s arrogance becomes his fatal flaw.

Over several decades, Jonah’s arrogance also drives him to refuse Norah’s advice to improve their craft. In his eyes, the operandi is perfect and flawless, leaving him vulnerable to the intervention of Sal Timms’ residual spirit. When she stabs him, he is critically wounded and unable to leave the lacuna for the nine years before Marinus’s arrival. This turns him contemplative enough to admit that he was wrong about failing to heed Norah’s advice earlier on. However, this newfound humility also causes Jonah to act resentfully when Norah tells him to open the aperture for her and Marinus, revealing it to be a shallow and undeveloped impulse and Jonah to be a static character who doesn’t change over the course of the novel.

Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby, simply called “Marinus,” is one of the novel’s protagonists. Although she defeats both of the Grayer twins at the end of the novel, resolving the conflict, she is not wholly responsible for their downfall. Rather, she is the last in a series of protagonists who deal the final blow that overcomes the antagonists.

Marinus is a major recurring character in Mitchell’s body of work, appearing also in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, The Bone Clocks, and Utopia Avenue. This owes to the fact that her character is an Atemporal, a person whose soul travels from one body to another after death. The persona of Dr. Iris Fenby also appears in one section of The Bone Clocks, situating this novel into the larger canon of Mitchell’s work. Dr. Iris Fenby is a Black Canadian psychiatrist with a special interest in abduction psychoses. This brings the case of Fred Pink to her attention, though Marinus implies that she was already aware of the Grayer twins at an earlier point, having obtained Freya Timms’s digital recorder at some point before meeting Norah. 

Marinus belongs to an Atemporal sect known as Horology. Unlike the Grayer twins or the Shaded Way, Horologists live to preserve the sanctity of the ordinary human soul. Marinus’s perspective that these souls are worth saving and living for provides a counterpoint to Norah’s point of view. Where Norah believes she is entitled to prey on the Engifted by virtue of her instinct and ability to survive, which she sees as superiority, Marinus believes that immortality is overrated, even calling it a “sentence” during her debate with Norah. The roots of their immortality are different: Norah’s requires propagation and Marinus’s is implicit and inescapable, highlighting a class difference between them, which is also explored through their differing views on the philanthropy of helping humans. To Marinus, helping humans offers purpose—if she were to live according to Norah’s principles, she would lose her sense of purpose and, in her perspective, become something other or less than human. Living for those who do not experience immortality drives Marinus’ sense of meaning. She believes in a world where the temporal human soul can be seen as beautiful.

Sal Timms is one of the novel’s several protagonists, as well as the narrator of Chapter 3. She is characterized as a university student with an inferiority complex. She is insecure about her body and physical appearance, especially in comparison to her older sister, Freya. According to Sal’s backstory, this insecurity was exacerbated by her family’s move to Singapore early on in her life. Being in a foreign environment forced her to compete with her sister to stand out. Because she failed to achieve a sense of distinction, Sal experienced a mental health crisis that forced her family to send her back to the United Kingdom to attend school in Worcestershire. This did not resolve issues, however, as Sal was regularly bullied by her schoolmates, who taunted her for her weight.

The Grayers exploit Sal’s insecurities even as she attempts to move beyond them by joining the Paranormal Society at university to meet Todd Cosgrove, her crush and the society vice president. Sal remains with the society to get close to Todd, which is how she ends up at Slade House on the night that the Grayer twins are meant to recharge their lacuna. The Grayers take advantage of Sal’s insecurity to inform their orison, capitalizing on the tension between her past as a survivor of bullying and her efforts to find intimacy with Todd. This is why Sal stumbles upon a Miss Piggy mask at the party, directly echoing the nickname her school bullies gave her. When Sal watches the news report about her disappearance, the Lance who is interviewed speaks as well to Sal’s troubled character, which provokes her anxiety. To push her into the lacuna, Jonah disguises himself as Todd and convinces her that they are engaging in a fantastical getaway from Slade House.

Sal is the last proper victim of the Grayer twins; she breaks the cycle of their operandi, leaving them in an extended drought for nine years. By using Rita Bishop’s hairpin to attack Jonah, she not only traps him in the lacuna to recover during this drought but she also saves the life of Freya and vindicates Nathan and Gordon, her predecessors. With these moves, Sal shows an active willingness to fight for her survival and protect her sister, making her a dynamic character who has moved past her insecurities and sense of inferiority to her sister.