There is so much Noah’s Flood stuff going on in The Locked Tomb. A lot is in Gideon the Ninth, and I feel incredibly dense for missing it until now:
- The whole world is flooded
- Basically everyone died
- The representatives are sent two by two, like Noah’s animals
- Colum Asht’s first name means Dove according to the appendix, and Noah used a dove to see if the flood had receded yet
- (Noah also sent out a raven, is there something there?)
- Teacher’s sash is rainbow colored, echoing God “putting his bow in the clouds” as a sign he wouldn’t flood the world again
I noticed rainbows cropping up a lot before and I’m really glad to have a more concrete basis for interpreting that.
The reason I finally put it together is that Tamsyn smashed it in our faces in Nona:
“But that’s the grace of it, Harrow. If I’m God, I can start over. The flood, you know? You can wash things clean. That’s all the end of Earth was … making things clean. It gets dirty again, you clean it again. Like those old power-washing ads. Spray and walk away, right? (“John 5:4”)
So let’s pause here and notice that he’s styled a lot of Imperial things with rainbows, which are a reference only he understands. He went to church camp, even if it was only for the underage drinking, he would know this. Rainbows are supposed to be a promise not to flood the world again, but it’s a promise nobody else can hear and he doesn’t seem to feel bound by it.
The other thing about the rainbows is that Tamsyn also describes a lot of things as both rainbowed and oily, for instance the steel of the space ships and Jod’s eyes (“The irises were dark and leadenly iridescent—a deep rainbow oil slick, ringed with white”). I went into this a bit more in the post linked above but we’re getting farther from Noah. I don’t feel like I fully understand this, other than a connection between rainbows and pollution.
The other big Noah connection comes at the end of Nona the Ninth when Alecto finds Jod:
Afterward Alecto went down to the ship and stood before John, purposing to travel through the River, and was grieved to find it yet dead. John was asleep, and not in his garments, unshaved and still drunken.
Noah was also drunk, asleep, and naked at one point after the flood. He got drunk on his own wine. He was in his tent, his son Ham saw him in the raw and said so to Noah’s other sons Shem and Japheth. Shem and Japheth devised an elaborate way to cover up his tra-la-la without having to see it. When they did so, Noah awoke, intuited that Ham must have seen his ding ding dong, and therefore immediately cursed Ham and his descendants (the Canaanites) forever.
I honestly don’t see the connection other than the image. Maybe there are other drunk naked asleep guys in scripture. But we’ve had so much Flood stuff.
Here’s the Genesis chapter after the flood.
