Time Jumps and Narrative Power in the opening of V.E. Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is an ambitious novel with a complex structure: A quick look at the table of contents shows us heading for five different point-of-view characters. The first two chapters of the book train us to expect a sweeping chronology and big time jumps within each character’s strand. Let’s take a closer look at those first two chapters to understand how author V.E. Schwab starts to fill in the ground of the vast canvas she has cut out for herself while also pulling readers into the plot of the novel.

The first part heading we encounter is “María (d. 1532).” The tagline of the book declares it to be “a new genre-defying novel about immortality and hunger” and readers familiar with the book and its tropes will guess right away that vampires might make an appearance. Thus, revealing a character’s date of death before we even meet her does not have the same effect here as it would in, for example, a literary fiction novel or a romance, in which death is the ultimate end of the story. In a novel with immortal characters that death date marks simply a major life transition.

But the timestamp at the beginning of Chapter 1 pulls us back in time to 1521 and introduces us to María on the precipice of another transition—this one into puberty, not death. Let’s take a tour through the opening pages.

The first line of the novel is “The widow arrives on a Wednesday.” This simple sentence punches above its weight for a few reasons: First, the word widow itself encompasses a transition, one defined by a movement from life to death; knowing that immortality is going to be a theme of the novel, we are especially interested in that particular transition. Second, the verb arrives functions as both event and promise—it tells us something important is happening right now, while creating anticipation about what this arrival means for the story ahead. Finally, the word Wednesday introduces specificity, which always adds to the effect of realism, while also contributing a nice moment of alliteration with the word widow.

But Schwab doesn’t show us the arrival right away. After this first sentence, we meet thirteen-year-old María, who is simply sitting near her home waiting for her hair to dry. But within that seemingly static moment, we find out a lot about her. We hear that María was “born restless,” that she has neither patient hands nor a patient heart, and her hair is “an angry shade of red… the hot orange of an open flame. Once she cannot seem to douse.”

The action of the scene kicks into gear when the town church bells begin to ring, signaling a caravan of pilgrims approaching; this town, Santo Domingo, is on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route. María climbs up on the roof, her favorite hiding spot, to watch the pilgrims come in. Then we see a brief conflict between María and her older brother Rafa, which establishes two things: First, this is an extremely patriarchal society, and Rafa expects María to obey him implicitly, especially in the absence of their deceased father. Second, María is not inclined to obey and, in fact, she invites conflict with her brother.

In the second scene, we finally get a closer look at the widow, and here Schwab begins to build curiosity about who or what she is. María observes, “She has seen widows on the road before. They have never looked like this.” When María approaches, she can feel the woman look at her and she freezes under her gaze, which Schwab has already established is quite unlike her. What power, we wonder, does this woman have that she can make even María turn to stone?

The third scene takes place a day later, and we learn that rumors about the widow are traveling around the town since she stayed behind the rest of the caravan and has been declining all offers of food and drink. Later that day, María happens upon her gathering herbs, and the two have a short conversation. The widow is harvesting some kind of poisonous plant to make a tonic and makes two proclamations to María—pronouncements we readers might recognize as possible theme statements for the novel. “Nature gives us what we need,” says the widow, but also: “In nature, beauty is a warning—the pretty ones are often poisonous.” It begins to rain, and the widow tells María to run home. The first chapter ends with these words: “that night, señor Baltierra dies in his sleep. By dawn, the widow is gone. It will be ten years before María sees her again.” We don’t yet know how all of these statements are related, but their careful juxtaposition suggests they must be. Our desire to untangle the connections propels us forward into the story.

When we move to chapter two, we jump forward in time again, to 1529 when María is eighteen and on the cusp of yet another transition—and this is one that María herself can see coming: “She is many things—stubborn, cunning, selfish—but she has never been a fool. She knows that she was born into this body. She knows it comes with certain rules. The question has never been whether she would wed, but whom.” María and the reader discover the answer at the same time. She is summoned to the house and introduced to Andrés de Guzmán, Viscount of Olivares, who does not ask for her hand in marriage, but rather declares he already has it. When María bows to him, he tells her “a woman need not bow so low to her betrothed.” And here readers get a fun surprise because María herself is not surprised. After this introduction, we learn via María’s interiority that she has taken to watching all of the pilgrims who come through town and deliberately lured the viscount into the church and flirted with him in the hopes of exactly this outcome.

It seems like a victory—the outcome María herself wanted: “María has known, all her life, that she is not meant for common paths, for humble houses and modest men. If she must walk a woman’s road, then it will take her somewhere new.” But very quickly we have a new question: Will María find herself outmatched by this new husband of hers? When María pretends for an instant that she plans to refuse, her brother apologizes for her sense of humor, and the power seems to shift back to the viscount:

This power struggle is key to understanding how Schwab manages to walk a very tricky line with this character. María’s point of view dominates the first half of the novel, and Schwab needs us to care what happens to her, to root for her to win her struggle against a power structure that is stacked against her. At the same time, she needs to plant the seeds that make María’s later character arc seem believable. María is a flawed but compelling character, and even after these first two chapters, we want her to win the battles ahead of her.

By the end of chapter two, María has made the transition to wife and, once again, Schwab ends the chapter by revealing something far in the future. María says her farewells, then “takes her husband’s outstretched arm, and lets him lead her away, not knowing, of course—She will never see her family again.”

These glimpses of the future achieve a few things: First, they make our narrator visible, reminding us that we have a well-informed guide through this complex story, one who knows how it all ends. Second, they stoke curiosity and give us something to speculate on—now we know that María will meet the widow again but not her family. With these two revelations, the narrator shares some of her power with the readers; now we too know something that the María of 1529 does not. In this way, Schwab transforms us from passive observers into active participants in María's story, deepening our investment with the novel.

If you've read the novel, what was your experience of the time jumps and those peeks into the future?