The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy

by Megan Bannen

August 23, 2022 · Orbit

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This is a book about loneliness, about living a life when constantly dealing with death, and about being seen and heard and understood. If you like grumpy, taciturn characters with squishy, gooey insides, characters who struggle to become who they are or be recognized for who they are, and, above all, you like a major epistolary element to your stories (I have raised all my hands to that list) you will really like this.

Hart and Mercy do not like each other at the start of the story. Hart is a marshal who journeys into a magical world called Tanria and basically hunts zombies? Sort of? They aren’t called zombies (they’re drudges) but they’re corpses reanimated by a soul that takes over the dead body. Those souls get violent as they have to then find a new body, because dead bodies are really poor investments in terms of maintenance and upkeep.

Mercy, as per the title, is an undertaker. Funerary services in this world are a Whole Thing, involving sail cloth, salt, incantations, ships, and a trip across the Salt Sea, where a god (there are many) welcomes souls into the world beyond. Her father inherited Birdsall and Sons from his father, and Mercy and Roy, her dad, have been expecting Mercy’s brother, Zeddie, to take over. Roy’s had a heart attack, and under doctor’s orders he’s supposed to not do things (he does things anyway). Mercy has been running the business herself, but when Zeddie finally shows up after finishing his educational program to learn the process, he turns green, freaks out, vomits, and runs. Zeddie is not cut out for mortuary work, poor thing. Turns out, he secretly studied history when he was supposed to be studying undertaking, and he is not interested in becoming yet another son in Birdsall and Sons.

Hart, meanwhile, has so many chips on his shoulders I’m surprised his shirts stay on. He’s an isolated loner, he’s grumpy, he’s lonely, he’s grieving* and he’s got a dangerous job that he’s had since he was 19. His late mentor both raised him, and left him with some large misconceptions, including one about the morticians.

Hart adores Mercy’s dog, Leonard (who is a very very good dog) but he does not like Mercy on sight, merely because she’s an undertaker. He’s got the same negative opinions about the mortuary industry in his world that I do in mine:

You gouge your customers by upselling mass-produced boats at a criminal markup, and you convince people that they need to be preserved in Tanrian heartnut sap because it’s ‘sanitary.’ And then you gouge them for that, too.

But Hart is wrong: Mercy is trying to run an ethical, stable business that doesn’t price gouge, and hand crafts each funerary boat, unlike a rival business that indeed buys wholesale and sells egregious markups.

When a person in this world dies without a funeral plan in place, the body has to go to one of the undertakers for funerary processing to protect the body and prevent the corpse from becoming reanimated. (It is fascinating to me that end of life plans and making arrangements for one’s death are a very important and normal part of this world. I support this message.)

Hart regularly has to take bodies without funeral directives to certain undertakers as part of his job. He’s killing drudges and those bodies died without plans in place (that’s how they were vulnerable to becoming drudges). Only some undertakers are part of a grant program that pays for the funeral rites of those without plans in place, and Mercy is one of them. So Hart interacts with Mercy regularly, and very few of these encounters go well, because Mercy does not like how judgmental and prickly he is. Their mutual opinion of one another would be zero stars.

Hart, alas, has a problem: he is fascinated by Mercy as much as he is frustrated and infuriated by her. Yup, yup, yup, folks. We have got a SOLID and HEFTY amount of “I don’t wanna like you, I don’t wanna like you, I can’t stop thinking about your hair DAMMIT” here. Step right up for yearning and grumpy smoldering.

The thing about Hart is that he’s isolated himself in grief* and he is desperately lonely, and thinks that is all he deserves.

So one night, Hart writes a letter to “A friend,” and drops it in a magical mailbox for the magical talking animal delivery service (yes, more on that in a second) (seriously there is so much to say about this book). In the process of writing out his feelings, Hart feels a little better…

…to have applied the weight of my loneliness to a piece of paper rather than to my own heart for a change.

Aw, Hart!

And of course, the letter is delivered by the magical talking animal delivery service to Mercy, who is touched by the letter because the feeling of isolation and frustration are extremely familiar to her. She writes back anonymously, and her return letter pretty much blows Hart’s hat off. Soon they’re being deeply, fully honest with each other in writing anonymously, while sniping at each other in person. Ooooooh, yes, it’s that tasty epistolary goodness of characters secretly revealing themselves while publicly interacting through their own layers of narratives and expectations.

The fantasy and the reality of this book are absolutely fascinating. There are ships that carry the dead, multiple gods, a magic cloud veil that surrounds Tanria, and, yes, talking animals who deliver the mail (as you do).

There are also eyeglasses (Mercy has great ones), dresses printed with cherries, debates about coffee over tea, romance novels, interlibrary loan (some things transcend genre!), whiskey, and:

..her boob sweat made the underwires of her bra chafe her skin.

Mercy, Mercy. Yes.

Whenever specific and mundane aspects of my world would pop up in this book I was charmed and surprised. Amid the fantasy elements, I understood the emotions and very human experiences of love, loss, confusion, and growth. Those feelings ground the book in emotional reality, and the character driven parts of the story dealt in universal experiences.

And the realities of debt, underwires, hard work, and the stress of owning a business were also relatable and served as a different sort of grounding, one that’s practical instead of fantastical. Both were very effective.

As much as this is a story driven by character, there is also a lot of plot. I was concerned early on that the characters surrounding Mercy and Hart would be uniformly one-dimensional, only present to perform a role in the conflicts initially surrounding the protagonists. But everyone develops with such nuance and humanity and foibles that I wanted to read about all of them.

There were a few times when the infodump of some big portion of world lore would make me skim. I wanted more characters talking! Lots of characters talking, writing letters, caring for one another in their own valuable ways. So much catnip in one book! The moments when a large portion of the world had to be sketched in broad strokes in one chapter weren’t my favorites, but there were few, and most of it made sense in context. There wasn’t really a way to integrate that info into the character conversations, not that I could see.

Even with the small things that bothered me, I am so happy to still be thinking about this book, and to be telling people about it. (Hi!) I could keep talking about this story, about all the characters and the food and the emotional complexity, the adventure and the world and the taciturn smoldering. I loved that so much of Hart and Mercy revealing themselves occurred through their letters, and I loved that Mercy’s sister points out that letter writing is still a curated version of oneself, that there’s already a lot of editorial before the words are written. I loved Hart slowly extracting his head from his backside, and I love that I completely understood why he had such a bad case of cranio-rectal impaction. I loved that Mercy wanted so badly to take care of everyone around her, and reaches a point where she can’t deplete herself the way she has been any longer, but doesn’t know what to do differently. There is so much to think about with this book.

One last quote, from one of their letters, illustrates the underlying theme of every character and their story:

Maybe the question we should both be asking ourselves is what do we have the power to change?

If you like fantasy with characters that might sound like your neighbors sometimes, in a world with big stakes and little stakes and magical talking animals who deliver the mail, and especially if you like epistolary novels that lead to characters becoming more of themselves, you’ll like this undertaking. (Bad dum bum.)