As we work towards the end of the Horus Heresy project, I have a couple larger essays underway in the background. This wasn’t meant to be one of them; I was doing some research over the weekend, just looking back over some details from the books, and a review caught my eye. It was a small blogger going through and reviewing each book in turn. They were talking about how one of these titles has outstanding prose, but the example they picked just wasn’t very compelling. “The dizziness rose up over him like a smothering blanket, and he felt himself fall away.” It’s – you know, that’s fine. It’s functional, but there’s nothing remarkable about it. There’s often a bit of a gap with these books between their stylistic merits and their chosen literary forebears. They reach for references that they aren’t really big enough to fill. We’re all familiar with Homer’s Odyssey, for instance – one of the great texts of the literary canon, it’s invoked in turn by James Joyce’s Ulysses, the 1922 novel that stands probably at the head of literary modernism. Ulysses takes the Odyssey as a structuring motif, translating the ancient epic of a man lost at sea into a man wandering aimlessly around the streets of Dublin. There’s an episode that runs parallel to the Sirens, or to Scylla and Charybdis – Ulysses is very deliberately modelled on the classical text, staking its own claim, similarly, to be one of the great works. The Odyssey is also the main point of reference for Deathfire, the thirty-second book in the Horus Heresy series, where a bunch of fire-type Space Marines fly through the warp and get accosted by siren monsters. We talked about this book before, in the context of classical allusion in the Heresy – just noting how the series uses allusion as a form of fatalism, often pre-writing the history and arc of different characters through their naming. What we didn’t say, what probably shouldn’t remain unsaid, is that there’s obviously also a bit of a gap between the quality of the writing and the text being invoked. Deathfire is not the second Ulysses. We’re not dealing with the heir to literary modernism – it’s pulpy genre fiction for nerds.

I know that sounds like a harsh assessment – really all I’m trying to say is that these books are not high art. That’s not a bad thing, it’s not a criticism, I’m not saying they’re inferior products – they’re just not high art. That said, they do regularly reach for prestigious literary references, in a manner that typically is intended to elevate the material by association. That is, when Ulysses references and models itself on the Odyssey, it’s looking to establish itself as a key literary text, as a cornerstone of modern literary culture. The Horus Heresy reaches for the same texts, but not for the same reasons. It’s not trying to be high art. Sometimes you catch fans talking about the Heresy like it’s high art, I think possibly because of the aesthetic of all these literary references, and I just think that’s slightly missing the point. This is not an elevated form. It’s not bad or inferior for being pulp fiction, but it’s pulp fiction. It’s pulp that quotes a bunch of Shakespeare. To me, it’s actually that mixed status that makes the Heresy so interesting. It’s a tie-in novelisation of an existing game franchise, like the Assassin’s Creed comic books or the DOOM novels, but it really clearly builds itself around these classical cultural elements. The Heresy is a Lucifer tale. Horus is the Emperor’s favoured son, foremost among the angels, fallen from grace. These are deep, primal stories. At different points you find the series reaching for the Odyssey, for the Bible, for Shakespeare. In ‘Warmaster’, a short story in Legacies of Betrayal, Horus monologues about the state of affairs to the skull of Ferrus Manus, in an extended Hamlet and Yorick reference. Similarly, the anthology Heralds of the Siege takes its name from a Macbeth quote, offered in the short story ‘The Board is Set’. “What’s the business, that such a hideous trumpet calls to parley the sleepers of the house? Speak, speak!” In Macbeth, this line belongs to Lady Macbeth, after the murder of King Duncan is discovered. In Heralds of the Siege, the trumpets are cries from the warp as the traitors move close to Terra – literally heralds of the forthcoming siege. Somewhere in that area is the heart of the Heresy’s style. It’s a series of wargaming novels that quote Shakespeare.

‘The Board is Set’ is actually probably one of the more reflective, self-consciously literary stories of the series as a whole. Malcador, the Emperor’s Regent, sits and plays psychic tarot chess with the Emperor in the moments before invasion. Chess pieces and tarot cards reflect events from across the series. Malcador, playing as Horus, uses the piece ‘Perfection’ to strike down the ‘Iron General’, referencing Fulgrim beheading Ferrus Manus at the start of the series. “The opposing piece tumbled, the head crowned with sunbeams rolling across the board.” That’s how Horus ended up talking to a skull. At the same time, I think ‘Board’ also exposes the limits of this sort of style. Blunt or unsubtle writing here is magnified. Things you might forgive in the more earthy, trench warfare-type books become glaring issues. For instance, the Emperor, throughout this whole story, is called ‘Revelation’, which is such a stupid beat-you-over-the-head-with-symbolism name. He’s Revelation because he is the divine, the Allfather, the God-Emperor. He reveals himself to Malcador – his insecurities, his shortcomings, the things he doesn’t know. ‘Board’ is also the last story in Heralds of the Siege – it ends with Horus’s forces entering into the Solar System. It is metaphorically the last book of the Bible, the opening of the final phase. Sure, we get it, but it’s not elegant. Compare it to the naming of a character like Abaddon. Named well before the Heresy books were started, Abaddon is a core figure to the Chaos forces. He is Horus’s lieutenant during the Heresy and eventually inherits the mantle of Warmaster. Biblically, Abaddon is the angel of the bottomless pit, released by the fifth angel of the Apocalypse in Revelation 9. Locusts pour from the pit, with crowns of gold and the faces of men, “and they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions.” And the king over the locusts “is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.” It’s a comparatively subtle reference: it’s fitting, and entirely classical, but without the sledgehammer bluntness of Revelation (which really is only one step removed from Lost‘s Christian Shephard).

Other elements of the writing impersonate that elevated King James style without quite meeting the mark. It comes out as this affected, awkward high fantasy tone. “‘Like the cards, they are all the same,’ remarked Revelation. ‘It does not matter which you pick.'” It’s meant to be grandiose by way of archaic – it’s overformal, stylised. But it just sounds forced. ‘Remarked’ as a verb choice comes from the wrong period – it’s too mannered, too 1900s. It’s something you hear in The Great Gatsby: “‘Why not let her alone, old sport?’ remarked Gatsby.” Or even in Oscar Wilde – something like The Picture of Dorian Gray: “‘Still, the East End is a very important problem,’ remarked Sir Thomas with a grave shake of the head.” People make remarks in drawing rooms during Prohibition. It doesn’t fit here, tonally. The weird verb, the forced language, the horrendously unsubtle name choice – you could get away with it in other contexts, but here it stands out. The whole thing aims for poetic and mysterious and often lands at smug. When Malcador quotes Macbeth, there’s another character standing by, dutifully confused, emphasising Malcador’s intelligence and sophistication. “‘What’s the business, that such a hideous trumpet calls to parley the sleepers of the house? Speak, speak!’ Eirich scowled in confusion at the Emperor’s Regent. Malcador sighed.” Malcador is smart for quoting Macbeth, and the writer is smart for knowing that reference too. When Malcador sighs, the writer sighs. Did you sigh? That depends – did you get the reference, or were you confused like Eirich? This sort of thing comes off as slightly pissy. Gav Thorpe has a character quote Macbeth and then there’s a whole big deal about which characters were smart enough to get the reference. There’s a second, similar challenge a few pages on, framed less overtly as a test – but it is still a test.

“Malcador put the cards back and as he raised his eyes they came upon a figure seated opposite. He was tall, the hood of a scarlet cape about his shoulders. His expression was stern but not cruel, utterly unremarkable but for the potency in his eyes. His hair was dark, pulled back in a short scalp-lock. In the flicker of torchlight the skin might have been suede, tough and worn by a long and uncaring life, but not a line of age marked it – in stark contrast to Malcador’s own weathered and withered flesh. It reminded Malcador of an ancient tale of a cursed portrait, but before he could say anything his companion spoke.”

Did you get it? Malcador or Eirich? Were you reminded of an ancient tale of a cursed portrait? It is, of course, The Picture of Dorian Gray. This is really an example of where the gap between pulp fiction and elevated literary reference is grating. ‘The Board is Set’ reaches for these high literary references, but in a bit of an awkward way. It goes around calling the Emperor Revelation, which feels clumsy in contrast to the elegant naming of characters like Abaddon. The style impersonates the sort of elevated King James tone, but doesn’t quite ring true, and it puts on a whole performance ramping up to a reference to Dorian Gray, one of the most popular and enduring texts of the Victorian age. It’s too much ceremony for such a simple reference. Anything is too much ceremony, really, but this is much too much.

The gap between pulp and literature works better for the Heresy when it borrows from the classics certain ideas or motifs, reworking them into its own context. It’s sometimes noted in studies of Shakespeare that disruption for the individual is mirrored by disruption for the state. In Macbeth, which is apparently the only Shakespeare play we’re mentioning today, the pride and hubris of Macbeth leads to war. Lear‘s family drama happens against the backdrop of French invasion, Romeo and Juliet‘s love story is set in the context of civil unrest. The struggles of the individual are reflected on the level of the state. In the Heresy, in The Solar War, that basic concept is deployed to explore the tension between the individual and the massive scope of the galactic civil war. In The Solar War, Horus finally makes it to Terra. It’s fifty-five books in, the start of the ten-book Siege of Terra cycle that caps off the Heresy. Billions of soldiers and Space Marines all pour into the Solar System for this vicious, grinding final conflict. It’s one of the times when the question of scale is at its most pronounced. In a battle of billions, what impact can one person have? What possible meaning can be attributed to a single human life?

In Chapter Three, we briefly meet Saduran, a gang killer hurriedly transformed into a Space Marine to fight among the Sons of Horus. Everyone’s trying to bolster their ranks before the final conflict, and the Sons of Horus just rush through a bunch of killers from different worlds. We learn about the displacement and rootlessness that these killers experience. They try to adopt Legion language, Legion culture, “children aping adults in the hope of finding a way to belong.” In combat, Saduran is almost immediately overcome by loyalists, by a human officer and an Imperial Fist – elegant, trained combatants. He snatches back victory at the last moment, once they let their guards down, but it’s a close thing. In Chapter Seven, Saduran makes another appearance. He’s on one of Pluto’s moons, clearing out defenders. “Half a million dead,” we read – the cold cost of war. That’s only on the traitor side, only the cost to get as far into the system as Pluto. There’s an ache in his teeth, and a flash of lightning: “a sound beyond hearing that filled him for the endless instant before there was nothing.” And he’s gone. The defenders detonate the moons of Pluto, causing a chain reaction of shrapnel and devastation that claims hundreds of traitor ships. Saduran and his cohort are dead. All the detail and nuance of this guy’s life – the hasty transformation, the hours of fighting, the dead officer and Imperial Fist from Chapter Three – there’s no person left to draw meaning from those details. There’s nobody to remember it. Saduran is consumed in a strategic action that’s bigger than him, bigger than anything he can possibly impact or influence. He is, in a very real sense, meaningless. His death is only that meaninglessness in its final form.

Elsewhere in the book, a loyalist articulates that philosophy directly for the reader. “We are small things, we humans. We mean very little. Our lives are narrow and short, and our dreams, even if noble, will not shift the stars in the sky. We are not the movers of this age. Horus is, and the Emperor. The choices and the hope and the ruin belong to them.” The speaker here is Mersadie Oliton, a remembrancer from early in the series, who’s been locked up more or less since she made it back to Terra. While the invasion of Terra is going on, one of the B-plots has Mersadie escape imprisonment and try to meet with Rogal Dorn, leader of the defence, with a warning. As she gets close, it transpires that she was infected by Chaos: she makes it onto Rogal’s ship, and a whole bunch of daemons burst through her and try to murder the primarch and end the siege at the outset. At the same time, a bunch of Thousand Sons sorcerers are doing some evil sorcery on what I think is meant to be Halley’s Comet. Resultingly, the bulk of Horus’s forces erupt through a wound in space, warping in right next to Terra and skipping the beleaguered invasion of the outer planets. The two events are set in parallel. Oliton is the point of entry into Rogal’s space ship just as the comet is a point of entry for Horus’s forces. Oliton, in this moment, becomes bigger than herself. She becomes the comet, the Solar System, a point of entry for the forces of evil. She becomes galactic. It’s a motif that to me is clearly drawn from Shakespeare. The struggle of the individual is reflected in the struggle for the state – for the solar system, I guess. In the face of nihilism, in the face of meaninglessness and the inhumanity of intergalactic industrialised warfare, The Solar War elevates and centers the individual life. Oliton’s struggle is the galaxy’s struggle. She is in this moment a cosmic entity. The battle for the galaxy means nothing more or less than the battle for her soul. Oliton ends the invasion of Dorn’s ship by taking her own life, throwing herself into a plasma conduit. She sacrifices herself, subsuming her individuality back into the collective cause. That is, she doesn’t try to save herself, or get away from the conflict and survive. Where the book centers her as an individual, she offers that individuality back to win the war – to protect Terra, to save Dorn, to end the invasion of his ship. To save the human race. Her life is made the life of the cosmos, and she gives it back in service of humanity at large. That’s Shakespeare, recast into the form of pulpy science fiction, and in turn elevated into something beyond itself.