Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral procession last Monday included one bespoke Jaguar hearse, two original works of music, three crown jewels atop the coffin, two corgis, at least 1,650 marching military personnel, 500 world leaders and other dignitaries—all watched by millions of television viewers worldwide. But among the event’s ostentation, one aspect was noticeably modest: the royal garb. Apart from those in military uniform, the family wore dark outfits that were understated, neat, and simple.

Sure, subtle cues reminded us of their provenance and wealth: Kate Middleton’s dress came from her go-to luxury designer Alexander McQueen, and the nonmilitary suits worn by some of the men appeared high end if subdued. But even the morsels of flash—Queen Consort Camilla’s large diamond brooch and the new Princess of Wales’s four-string pearl necklace—were worn in homage: The former had belonged to Queen Victoria; the latter had been owned by Elizabeth herself. Were a royal to have wandered out of the procession and into the quiet sea of mourners outside Westminster Abbey, you’d be forgiven for finding them indistinguishable.

Funerary dress code can be powerful when it makes royalty look, at first blush, like one of us. In contemporary England, as well as in the United States, the donning of subdued black clothing can be an equalizer. In its best moments, it is a common costume for people unified in grief. But black mourning attire, simple and accessible as it appears now, has a long history of being neither.

More than 400 years ago, the body of the first Queen Elizabeth was brought to Westminster Abbey in a largely dark-hued procession. Her coffin was accompanied by statesmen in black gowns and imposing hats. Even the horses were draped in fine black velvet. The color black’s use at funerals had some precedence: Since the sixth century, it had been deployed in the Christian Church for its suggestion, according to the 19th-century artist and professor F. Edward Hulme, of “the spiritual darkness of the soul unillumined by the Sun of righteousness.” By the 14th century, it was widely associated with death. But white and brown were also among the colors long considered suitable for mourning in the Anglican world—white because it was easily approximated by sun-bleaching undyed wool and linen, brown because it was similarly practical to produce; in multiple accounts from the 16th and 17th centuries, the latter was referred to interchangeably as “sad colour.”

What set black apart—and helped solidify its status as the shade of mourning by the time of Elizabeth I’s 1603 funeral—was its expense. Achieving a luxurious hue, coaxed from the red roots of the herb madder and the small bluish leaves of the flower woad, required multiple rounds of costly dyeing. Black-clad royal funerals were political theater, intended not just to console the bereaved but to put on a show so over the top that it reified the cultural crevasse between commoners and the ruling class. Funerals were the red carpets of the early modern era.

[Read: How gold went from godly to gaudy]

Extravagant displays of funerary excess weren’t just unattainable for common people; they were, for centuries, illegal. Beginning around the 1300s, England, and much of Europe, was governed by “sumptuary laws.” The laws made unorthodox fashion literally a crime by dictating the colors and fabrics that one could wear based on rank in society, making one’s social status evident upon first sight. Laborers, for instance, were permitted to wear linens and most lower-quality wools, but were barred from embroidered silk, tinseled satin, finer furs, certain buttons, and threads of gold, purple, and silver.

By the time of Elizabeth I’s funeral, however, England’s growing middle class was eager to dress not for the lot they had but for the life they desired. Policing grief garments, in turn, became a core component of England’s control-by-aesthetics. As the fashion historian Lou Taylor wrote in her 1983 book, Mourning Dress, the people in charge of overseeing aristocratic funerals were also tasked with ensuring “that no social-climbing upstart families displayed arms or carried out grand funerals to which they were not entitled.” Ignobles were fined for wearing mourning trains that trailed far longer than their social status allowed. An English proclamation banned “devising any new forms of apparel.” But aspirational mourners repeatedly broke the laws and paid the penalties.

Throughout the 17th and into the 18th century, upper-class panic over the haughtiness of grieving commoners continued to sweep through England. But by the 19th century, new technologies like the mechanized production of cloth and the nascency of synthetic dyes—which made the color black slightly cheaper to render—helped businessmen see dollar signs in death. Exploiting such industrial advancements, as well as the aspirations of the middle class, entrepreneurs including William Chickall Jay turned mourning attire into some of the first mass-produced “fast fashion.” Jay opened “Jay’s London General Mourning Warehouse” on London’s high-end Regent Street in 1841. Competing shops sprang up in imitation. And from their multistory, nearly block-long megastores, these entrepreneurs helped shape an entire tradition around death.

Together with new women’s magazines and “etiquette guides,” they codified distinct “mourning periods” that ensured steady demand. According to such guides, a man could avoid social scrutiny by wearing a black suit, a black watch chain, black buttons, and a black tie for three months following the death of his wife. But widows were required to visibly mourn for two and a half years, entering prescribed phases of ever-easing despair: The widow must pass a year and a day in the woven silk-and-wool blend known as bombazine plus black crepe, and another nine months in black, although with less of the lightweight, puckered crepe; she could introduce lustrous black fabrics and jewelry made of shiny jet in the following three months, and was permitted muted purples and grays in the final half year. With Jay’s Mourning Warehouse and other stores incessantly advertising the “latest mourning fashions,” few self-respecting Victorians would be caught dead in last season’s outfit.

When Queen Victoria died, in 1901 (after wearing exclusively black for her last 40 years—the ultimate flex following the death of her husband, Albert), much of the ostentation of the Victorian period died with her. World War I dealt black mourning attire more blows. Mourners eased off the ritual after fashionable cities such as Paris filled with black-clad pedestrians who had lost loved ones in battle, a weighty visible shift that wreaked havoc on national morale. And women, now working in wartime factory jobs, were unable to adhere to the ludicrously impractical demands of regimented mourning. The Great Depression put another nail in the coffin of Victorian consumerism. And by the 1980s, the all-black outfit was adopted into the broader worlds of fashion, as well as the punk and goth subcultures: An eyelet-studded black dress no longer represented a recent death, but rather portrayed an allegorical grief for the state of the world.

Our modern rituals—whether birthdays, weddings, or funerals—rarely emerge organically. Many of them are designed, marketed, and given legitimacy through faux-histories and an exaggerated sense of timelessness. But they also are created to respond, at least somewhat, to a human need. Death leaves a hole that ritual can help fill, however slightly. Today, donning black clothing at a funeral is an opportunity for the grieving to exchange individual expression for collective solace. In a sea of sameness, one can feel cocooned. The tradition of wearing black to funerals might be the most egalitarian it has ever been.

And yet, for others, the ritual can remain an opaquely defined obligation that one has to somehow not screw up. At worst, it is a shell of a tradition rooted in opulent inequality. Perhaps trying to find true solace in a tradition that was never intended to benefit the masses is futile.

Or maybe such traditions can be remade. I have no desire to return to the years-long grief protocols of the Victorian era. But the tradition of donning mourning clothes long after a loved one is buried still has value. It can mean that a griever’s burden is wordlessly announced; they can see other mourners on the street and share an empathetic nod. While old dictates cruelly required the bereaved to be visibly defined by their grief for months or years, today we’ve swung the opposite direction: Black clothing’s association with grief ends as soon as the funeral does. Perhaps a piece of jewelry, a pin, or a somber corsage is how I’d prefer to mourn—a voluntary, personal accessory, flexible enough to allow for individuality but identifiable enough to build community in loss. It asks, subtly, for some compassion. And it fits more like grief does on the best days we can hope for: not subsuming us, but indelibly a part of us.

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“You can slash a book,” says the narrator of Yiyun Li’s new novel, The Book of Goose. “There are different ways to measure depth, but not many readers measure a book’s depth with a knife, making a cut from the first page all the way down to the last. Why not, I wonder.” This feels like a challenge—to take a knife to this book, the seventh work of fiction from the Chinese-born author, cutting right through it to reveal what’s at its heart.

There are many ways of avoiding this challenge—of being distracted from Li’s real project—because of just how many elements she throws into this novel: its primary setting in a bleak, rural postwar France; its dip into the English boarding-school novel; a take on the well-worn trope of “female friendship”; the possibility of a queer relationship never made explicit; a commentary on the capriciousness of fame. Then there’s the too-easy comparison with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet—a comparison that is really only helpful in orienting the reader toward the themes of desire and self-determination that they share.

But take the knife that Li offers, cut through all these outer trappings, and you find something much more mysterious. Though it is ostensibly a realist historical novel about the lives of women and girls in mid-century France, as its fablelike title indicates, The Book of Goose secretly dwells in the realm of fairy tale. Early on, its narrator, Agnès, declares, “Some people are born with a special kind of crystal instead of a heart … That crystal in place of a heart—it makes things happen. To others.” This magical image is Agnès’s way of describing the sway her friend Fabienne has over her, an insatiable urge to disturb the order of things that shapes the dynamic between the two girls. The dominant Fabienne issues commands that Agnès, seemingly in thrall to her friend’s superior imagination, is compelled to act out.

Li depicts Fabienne as almost superhuman in both marvelous and terrible ways. As a character, she gives Li a chance to explore the strange power of the myths we form about the people who shape us. Yet what really lies in Agnès’s own heart, and the novel’s, is only dimly revealed and much harder to bring to light. To do so is the real work—and pleasure—of reading this subtle and evasive book.

[Read: A Chekhov from China]

Agnès and Fabienne are 13 years old when we meet them, but they have already seen a lot: the slow death of Agnès’s brother, after his return from a German labor camp, and the fast, violent death of Fabienne’s sister, in childbirth. And they have little to look forward to beyond youth. The expectation is that, like Agnès’s older sisters, both girls will marry, have children, and remain in the small, stifling world of their village, Saint Rémy. Unlike most historical novels, the material world of this village is largely abstract; we don’t know what region of France it’s in or what kind of crops grow in the fields that surround it. All we know is that to Fabienne, it is not enough, and because Fabienne believes this, so does Agnès. Fabienne lives only to experiment and provoke, as Agnès puts it: “To peel a young tree’s bark to see how fast it would die. To pet a dog and then give it a kick, just to cherish the confused terror in the poor beast’s eyes.” The limits of the village and the life that awaits them are too restrictive for the monstrous urgency of Fabienne’s need to generate action.

It is Fabienne who decides one day that the two of them will play a “game” that extends beyond the boundaries of Saint Rémy: They are going to write and publish a book. Fabienne dictates the stories—a collection of brutal tales about dead children—and Agnès writes them down; as Agnès flatly observes, “I was not bad at penmanship. She was not bad at speaking like a dead woman.” This decision sets the novel’s dramatic plot in motion: At Fabienne’s request, the book is soon published under Agnès’s name, as she intuits that Agnès, more conventionally attractive and well mannered than she, will fare better in the public eye. She is right, and the publisher markets Agnès aggressively as a child prodigy in Paris and London. The success of the book eventually takes Agnès away from the village, while Fabienne remains behind. Now a celebrity author, Agnès is sent to a finishing school in Surrey, where the school’s headmistress hopes to claim the girl’s success as her own.

Yet the plot is, in some ways, a distraction. The book’s eventfulness is all on the surface, and the exciting things that happen to Agnès mean nothing to her. All the while she longs to return to Saint Rémy and to Fabienne, the one person in the world who is real to her, and with whom she feels real. This pull is at the book’s core: the effect of a friend whose presence feels so essential that her arrival was like a cosmological event that determined the color of the sky or the pull of gravity—there was nothing until she came. Li’s attention to the illogic of childhood friendships is evocative of the strangeness of that kind of relationship, which is not like a family bond, and not like romantic love. Children who experience this kind of affinity do not choose to become friends because of shared interests or convenience; rather, as Agnès believes, “childhood friendship, much more fatal, simply happens.”

[Read: The philosopher who took happiness seriously]

These singularly compelling relationships can feel like fate itself. To Agnès, for instance, the circumstances of her life—who her family is, where she was born—seem arbitrary; her friendship with Fabienne, though, is “not an accident.” In Agnès’s retrospective telling, Fabienne is not a girl but a mythic figure, at once human and inhuman, whose presence is a clue to Li’s larger argument. We are all, whether we realize it or not, constantly engaged in the process of mythmaking in an attempt to understand the inexplicable—namely, the motivations and desires of those who are dear to us, and the curious grip they have over our emotions.

And yet, as Agnès herself admits, “what is myth but a veil arranged to cover what is hideous or tedious?” The more you cut into this book, the more the problem of the “hideous or tedious” becomes visible. Less than a year after Agnès leaves, she returns to the village and to Fabienne. The “game” of book writing and the adventure that followed is over. What had been briefly real in the game—the dramatic events of the book’s publication and its consequences that Fabienne, using Agnès as her puppet, “made happen”—is still not “life-real.” While Agnès hopes that the two of them might escape to Paris or even America, Fabienne’s imagination hits its hard limit. Now that adulthood is nearly upon them, the expectations of marriage and childbearing are inescapable. For all that it made life temporarily different, the book game has not fundamentally changed the workings of their world: “Can’t you see,” cries Fabienne, “that we’ve already lived past the best time of our lives?”

What Fabienne does not comprehend, however, is what we slowly come to understand about Agnès over the course of the novel. Outwardly guided by Fabienne, or her publisher and headmistress, or later, her husband, Agnès appears passive, while other characters appear to have agency and self-determination. But that seeming passivity is just a front. We realize as the story progresses that Agnès’s true source of autonomy lies in the epic figure of Fabienne that she has sketched for us—and taken liberties with. The deep sadness of the book is revealed in the partial traces we see of the real, human Fabienne behind the obscuring veil of Agnès’s myth.

As an adult, Agnès cultivates a flock of geese. “If my geese ever dream,” she speculates, “they alone know that the world will never be allowed even a glimpse of those dreams, and they alone know the world has no right to judge them.” Despite the fact that she is our first-person narrator, Agnès, too, knows that her inner dreamworld is hidden, and chooses to keep much of it that way. This is what makes The Book of Goose demand a careful, incisive reading. The pleasure lies in seeing, obliquely and incompletely, glimpses not of the stories she tells, but of the secrets that she keeps.

French and British police try to prevent demonstrators in their capital cities from reaching Iran's diplomatic missions.