I’m going to end my run of essays on the Horus Heresy with a structural analysis – taking all sixty-plus books and talking about them in one giant essay, actually looking at how they’re put together as a sequence. As a bit of a prelude, it might be worth talking about how the climactic sequence, the Siege of Terra, is constructed. The Siege of Terra is a ten book sequence that rounds out the Heresy. It is the final battle, with the forces of Chaos besieging the Emperor’s Palace – the battle for Minas Tirith, if you want a classic fantasy analogy. The ten books are built around a series of concentric circles, the defences surrounding the Palace. In each book, the next layer falls. We can very neatly map the progression of the Siege:

Number	Title	Fallen Defence	Enemy Primarch
1	The Solar War	The broader solar system
2	The Lost and the Damned	The trenches outside the city
3	The First Wall	The Lion’s Gate spaceport
4	Saturnine	The Eternity Wall (spaceport)	Fulgrim
5	Mortis	Mercury Wall	Perturabo
6	Warhawk	The Inner Palace	Mortarion
7	Echoes of Eternity	Delphic Battlements	Angron and Magnus
8	The End and the Death (3 vols)	Eternity Gate	Horus

As you can see, the sequence is structured but not rigid. The loss of the Eternity Wall in Saturnine is significant, but the book as a whole is more focused on the loyalist victory over the Sons of Horus at the Saturnine Wall. Similarly, there’s not really a specific territory lost in Warhawk – the enemy forces breach the Mercury Wall at the end of Mortis, the previous book, and spend most of Warhawk cleaning out the defenders from the Inner Palace. They don’t get up to the Delphic Battlements (the actual next line of defence) until the book after that. Instead, while they’re mucking about, Warhawk focuses on a moment of retaliation, with Jaghatai Khan and the White Scars pushing out of the defences and retaking the Lion’s Gate spaceport from Mortarion and the Death Guard. The later volumes also all feature a key Traitor Primarch, who gets defeated by the end of the book. Again, this process is structured but not rigid. Perturabo could arguably be listed against The First Wall, for reasons explored previously, and he’s not defeated at the end of Mortis – he quits the battlefield halfway through, on p189. There’s enough little variation and nuance that they’re clearly not being programmatic. It’s ordered but still fluid – it’s not legalistic. It’s a good structure. Each book raises the stakes. As the series progresses, civilians cowering in the inner walls are exposed to traitor forces. They either die horribly or pick up improvised weapons and throw themselves at traitor Space Marines – they still die, in hundreds and thousands, but through sheer weight of numbers they drag down one or two super soldiers at a time. It’s an increasingly grim read, and absolutely a highlight of the series as a whole.

Today we’re talking about Mortis – the fifth book in the sequence, and probably the least popular. On Goodreads, Mortis has (at time of writing) the lowest average score of the Siege novels, with 3.59 stars out of 5. We’ve discussed Goodreads in the context of the Heresy books before (Which Heresy Books Are Best?), so I won’t rehash too much of that – suffice to say, obviously there are limitations to the 5-star ranking system, especially in the context of a social networking site, but even so I think there’s some limited usefulness to these scores as a rough guide, especially within the context of a single series. Within the Siege of Terra, Mortis has the lowest average score – and that probably reflects something accurate about its quality. It has clear motifs but not necessarily strong structure.

In essence, Mortis draws on a similar structure to The Return of the King, counterbalancing the journey of a couple small wanderers against the context of a staggering battle. In Return of the King, you obviously have Frodo and Sam travelling to Mordor to destroy the Ring while Aragorn and the human kingdoms fight against the Orcs at Minas Tirith. All the military maneuvering and speeches and battles are cast against the moral struggle of two small hobbits: their moral challenge, their task of resisting the Ring’s corrupting influence, is as epic and grand as any of the mighty wars going on around them. The inner struggle is as great and as necessary as the military conflict. That’s part of the message of Lord of the Rings: it’s not just about force. Mortis has a similar structure but a couple of problems. The major battle, the book’s grand conflict, is the Traitor Titans (giant mecha robots) hiking up to the Mercury Wall. They have been landed on Terra via the spaceports captured in the previous two books, and they make their way inwards, to the next defensive layer. The remaining loyalist Titans harry them and try to slow their progress, but ultimately the traitors breach the wall. Mortis tries to build up this inexorable sense of threat, of pulsing invasion, with a counter that tells you how far away the traitors are. It starts at the end of Part One, and then you see it at the end of every couple chapters, with the traitors making another ten kilometers or so. “Enemy distance to wall: 106 kilometres.” You can see that as potentially a compelling narrative – the Titan battle as this sort of furious scrum, with the traitors pushing the loyalists back, step by step – but that’s not how it unfolds in practice. It becomes more like a countdown. It might be compelling if it represented territory gained, the mathematics of the enemy advance, but it becomes just a marker of delay – fifty kilometers until something interesting happens. It’s action deferred rather than the balance of a grueling conflict.

Partly the issue with the countdown is that the Titan combat that does exist is generally just not that interesting. Maybe that’s just me. I haven’t been compelled by it anywhere in the Heresy – I didn’t think it was thrilling in Titandeath, and I didn’t think the tank combat was that interesting in Tallarn, either. I haven’t really enjoyed any of the big mechanised combat sequences in this series. Maybe that’s just my bias, but I think there’s something genuinely not quite right with how those battles are written, especially in Mortis. I think it’s part of why this book is the lowest rated. I just don’t think there’s enough juice in that central conflict. It’s meant to be a Pacific Rim-esque giant robot battle, but it doesn’t hit hard enough. There’s not enough pomp and bombast. Correspondingly, the lack of pomp leaves Mortis overwhelmed by its scenes with minor characters. If the structure is meant to be massive battles set against little characters making their way, the massive battle sort of fizzles, and then the little characters feel like they’re dragging the book down. Mortis becomes a salad made up of garnish. The little scenes clump together, becoming this unwieldy mass – because there’s no central thrust, they’re not able to function as these poised, balanced moments of contrast. Shiban Khan walks back to the Palace walls. John Grammaticus and Oll Persson, finally on Terra, walk towards the Palace. Perturabo rides off into the sunset. It’s bitsy. The Titans are out there, allegedly (forty kilometers to the wall), but they’re not doing all that much. They should be planets set against the satellites of these little scenes – they are the book’s core substance. They should tower over the narrative. Instead, everything ends up proportionately about the same size.

Some of the decisions about theme I think accentuate the issue a little as well. When Perturabo departs, Mortarion takes over the siege, with all his plagues and ailments. The transition is meant to show a shift from a siege of bullets and steel to more of a psychological battle, a war on the defenders’ psyche. Loyalists start going insane. They turn on their own people, commit murder in the night, or just break down crying. Mortis is about failing strength of will. It’s about trying to summon the courage to carry on the battle. At the same time, it’s about how that rot is already inherently present within the defenders. Again, that’s a concept borrowed from Return of the King – it’s not just about the will to fight the Orcs, it’s also about Denethor’s corruption as the Steward of Minas Tirith. The city was already sick, even before the war. In Mortis, we learn that some of the loyalist Titans have stayed out of the conflict, angry that the Emperor has not retaken Mars. Some of them are petty, squabbling barons, having not yet confronted the reality of this final war. There’s stifling bureaucracy, even under siege. One character, Mauer, enters into the newly formed Inquisition, and she’s kitted out with a full uniform – freshly designed, just for her cohort. “Part of her wondered who had had the time to consider how a newly conjured division of Imperial authority should be dressed.” Even under siege, she’s not just given a badge and set to work. There’s a whole administrative infrastructure still in play. Somebody during the Siege of Terra was designing uniforms for the Inquisition – and someone approved them, and someone else made them. Someone was on the sowing machine during the war for Terra. There’s a real sense of wastefulness in this book, of misdirected effort, even as each new wall is breached (thirty kilometers to the wall). The book as a whole often feels frustrating, sluggish, caught in the toxic wheels of infinite bureaucracy. That’s a thematic choice, which is fine, but when the book’s main thrust is possibly already underwhelming, that choice makes things feel even more bogged down. It’s a push for the wall with no real push. There’s no force, no clarity. It’s all just mud and trinkets.

At the heart of the issue, I think, is John French’s sensibility as a writer. We haven’t talked so much about the specific qualities of each individual writer with this series – we’ve more been dealing with the books as a collective, or with specific scenes and their thematic import. There are stylistic differences between the writers, though. There’s something dense and heavy about French’s writing. You don’t fly through his prose – it has weird little corridors and clauses, it turns in unexpected ways. His imagery is quietly powerful. In Chapter Seventeen, some gunships fly in to land, and there’s just a little shock of an image: “Thruster jets sent pools of bloody rain-water rippling away.” That’s such a clear, specific image. Morally, John French’s vision is of a very sensible world. Throughout Mortis, good people are sensible, while bad people are self-indulgent, dramatic, lacking in perspective. The Mechanicum is paralysed by political debates about whether they should or shouldn’t engage in the war – while the enemy is busy stalking towards their stronghold (twenty kilometers to the wall). Caradoc, the world’s shittiest Titan pilot, lashes out at his sister – she reports about some intelligence she found on a mission, but he’s her senior officer, and he wanted the glory of reporting what she found. He’s petty and stupid, and by the end of the book, that character flaw blossoms into a full-grown betrayal of the cause.

This aesthetic of the sensible vs the senseless is, again, fine in concept, but not necessarily well-suited to the hyperbolic space opera of 40K, where everyone is a bit of a diva. French’s worldview doesn’t quite fit. He uses the language and structure of the pulp novel, with all of its cool little quips and hero moments, but it often feels a little forced – he doesn’t have the same natural comfort with that style. He pitches all these chapter ending moments that are meant to be dramatic and cool, but they’re not. We’ve talked before about Jim Butcher‘s knack for the strong cliffhanger or dramatic moment to close out his chapters:

“‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, God, please help me.’”

That’s the type of technique used routinely in the Horus Heresy. To pick a random book from the Siege, Chapter Three in Guy Haley’s The Lost and the Damned ends like this:

“‘Contact Lord Dorn,’ he said. He kept his eyes on Thuria’s work station. ‘Tell him I have direct confirmation that a new fleet has arrived. Possible identity, Fourteenth Legion. The Death Guard.'”

You can just hear the outro music as we move to the ad break – dun dun dun! French never has the same easy comfort with those scene-closing moments.

“‘Lord… Shiban, where are we going?’ said Cole, following.
‘The only way that’s left.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Forwards,’ said Shiban.”

“‘Yes,’ said Keeler. ‘I shall take the oath. I shall tell the lie. It shall be done.'”

“‘It seems I must give my thanks again,’ said Corswain.
‘What else is the meaning of brotherhood?’ replied Vassago.”

Even without context, the endings from Butcher and Haley are just immediately more compelling. They’re heightened, more dramatic. There’s more of a sense of the cliffhanger. Something’s about to change, something’s about to happen. There’s reason to turn the page. French’s moments are more often prosaic. He’s not as comfortable with cool. The actual coolest thing that happens in Mortis is that someone gets their shit together. There’s a conscript, Katsuhiro, who’s been moving around since The Lost and the Damned. He’s one of the main threads throughout the Siege – he’s just a guy caught up in the fighting, and he makes it through all these battles – really he symbolises the normal person, sort of the windswept survivor. He’s not great at fighting, he’s not powerful, he’s not there through anything other than luck. He’s been on the wall through the whole of Mortis. His comrades have been going insane, succumbing to depression or misery or hopelessness. Everything is failing and the Titans are coming. A Space Marine, one of the few stabilising forces left on the wall, finally falls to his wounds. With his dying breath, he orders Katsuhiro to hold the wall. Katsuhiro stands up, his hands stop shaking, and he starts issuing orders. He becomes sensible – he engages with the situation and starts to create order. It’s an emotionally climactic scene – strategically insignificant, in the broad scheme of things, but it’s a sign of triumph over despair and depression, and it’s a stylistic shift. After five hundred pages of swamp – finally! Somebody starts to do something. It’s individual human agency, again, reasserted over the chaos of war, the horrific noise and violence of events that are far beyond any one person’s control. It’s an affirmation of the indomitable human spirit.

It’s easy to misunderstand Mortis, I think. It has some problems, it’s a little unbalanced, and the thematic choices and John French’s writing style – while not bad in and of themselves – don’t favour the type of story being told. We shouldn’t be sitting around waiting for the Titans to reach the wall. The emotional climax of the book shouldn’t be a single line soldier making good decisions. It’s a grounded, sensible book set in the context of in a lurid space opera. It just doesn’t quite fit.