What you see in The Library of the Dead is a ‘third world’ Edinburgh, which doesn’t make much sense until you realise that prior to the Union of 1707, before Scotland benefited from the global plundering of the British Empire, it was the poorest nation in Western Europe.
A story that works excellently in twentieth century Harare may not necessarily play out to the same effect in twenty-first century Edinburgh.
It serves a greater purpose than is often paid attention to. Did you originally plan to set the book in this near-future Edinburgh or did the setting and the related themes of inequality happen organically?Įvery book has numerous moving parts that serve the whole and the setting is a critical component of that. Set in an eerily familiar Edinburgh, the effects of climate change and difficulties faced by much of the population – severe economic inequality, police brutality, corruption, exploitation – are simply facts of life and our protagonist Ropa’s environment. I spoke with Huchu to delve into Ropa’s Edinburgh and her extraordinary world. Although she drops quotes from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Ropa has to evade and deal with some pretty terrifying beings. We follow Ropa as she traverses the spectral everyThere, gains access to an elite occult library and sleuths through the stinking streets of Edinburgh trying to find missing children. Walking the outskirts of Edinburgh and educating herself with pirate podcasts, she plies her trade relaying messages from the dearly departed to their living descendants, occasionally performing exorcisms and helping spirits move on to ‘the land of the tall grass.’ Ropa Moyo is a decisive and cynical teenager, who dropped out of high school so she could contribute to the household bills.
Huchu is an unflinching rollercoaster ride of a novel. With a bevy of entertaining and disturbing supernatural characters a dystopian near-future Auld Reekie and a plucky, young, ghost-talking detective named Ropa at the centre, The Library of the Dead by T. Here, Jeda Pearl discovers the influences that fed into T. L Huchu’s Edinburgh Nights series, and will show you the city in an entirely new and fantastical way. What you have are multiple Edinburghs, grosstopically linked (to use a China Mieville formulation), different cities existing within the same space but out of sync spatially and even temporally.’ The Library of the Dead is the first novel in T. ‘In fact, I would argue a single, unitary Edinburgh doesn’t exist.
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