Wednesday Reading: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

[chomiji]

This was part of my Hugo reading; also, people were raving about it.

The Ninth House, charged with guarding an infamous tomb, inhabits a gloomy world barely capable of growing food to support its human inhabitants -- and that's saying something, because there aren't that many mortal beings around the place. The residents are necromancer priests and nuns, and most of the servants are animated skeletons. And then there's Gideon.

Gideon is a smart-mouthed, tough young woman with something of a talent for swordwork and a head full of lusty fantasies about pretty girls. In between martial arts training with the Ninth House's aging swords-master and reluctant bouts of menial work, Gideon reads naughty comic books, lobs dirty and sacrilegious quips at her betters, and plots to escape off-world to become a soldier. The main reason she doesn't get worse punishments for her sins is (at a guess) that she is the only young person left in the Ninth House except for the high priestess in waiting, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, and someone will have to serve Harrow in the years to come, besides the skeletons. Gideon and Harrow have a mutual enmity fest going that dates back to infancy.

As the story opens, Gideon's latest escape attempt is foiled, and a message arrives from the Emperor God. The necromancer heirs of all nine Houses are commanded to come to the first House and prove themselves worthy of becoming his Lyctor. And because the challenges will be of both mind and body, each competitor must also bring their cavalier. And who will be Harrow's cavalier? Take a wild guess!

Once the candidates come together at the First House, the story becomes a crazed ride of a locked-room mystery combined with a haunted house Gothic. In fact, this is the first time since Marta Randall's The Sword of Winter (anyone else remember this?), with its murderer run amok on a storm-isolated island castle, that I have come across anything that scratches this particular itch for me. Gideon is encountering other people (and green vegetables) for the first time in her life, even as the body count mounts, and it's in many ways a wonderful experience for her. But she and Harrow come to realize that surviving will mean depending on each other, and the ultimate result of this growing trust is, as one critic pointed out, deeply dysfunctional (but also beautiful, in a sick sort of way).

Gideon has a wonderful narrative voice, rather as though Sha Gojyo (Saiyuki) had been reincarnated as a buff young gay woman: the story is told pretty much entirely from her tight third-person viewpoint.The world-building is sheer crack, with all the good and the bad that implies: are the Houses on separate planets? In separate dimensions? Who cares! But if you do care about this kind of information, you may find this book both slight and frustrating.

I enjoyed this an awful lot, maybe more than it deserves. The sequel, Harrow the Ninth, is due out this August.

Comments

[isis]

I read Harrow the Ninth in ARC and it does fill in some of the WTF worldbuilding (but also, raises other questions!)

[melita66]

waves!! Here via skygiants reading list. Just in case you weren't aware--Randall has revised The Sword in Winter into Mapping Winter and there's a sequel, The River South, both published last year. They're good!

[chomiji]

Hi, this is me doing my usual business of ignoring a Kindred Spirit who shows up right in my own journal until I'm beyond embarrassed. *waves awkwardly*

I started following Randall on Book of Faces about a year ago, so I heard about the re-release and the sequel. I was worried about reading them, because I really did like Sword of Winter, even though I now understand it wasn't exactly what she wanted to publish. Between your vote of confidence and Daegaer's (below), it sounds like I should bite the bullet and read them.

[lauand]

Ha, ha, you're actually selling it very well. I've got a very soft spot for enemies that are forced by circumstances to cooperate. And if you tell me the main character's voice resembles Gojyo, I'm pretty much in.

Thanks for the review!

[theskywasblue]

Sounds like fun. I've been wondering if I should check this one out (because everyone has been raving about it) and now I definitely think I will.

[flemmings]

If I could think of Gideon as Gojyo I might be able to get through the book. But Gojyo has a warmth to him and Harrow sounds plain mean-spirited to me (besides that trope I hate, the Meen Gurlz.) So I gave up when the interminable opening chapters gave way to the 'who are all these people again?' miďdle bit. Maybe if I plow through to the locked room murder mystery- love locked room mysteries- but I probably won't be able to remember who the victim was.

[flemmings]

Argh. Gideon. For 'Harrow' read 'Gideon' throughout.

[daegaer]

This review sold it to me in a way that everything else I'd seen about It hadn't- a lot of fan reviews seemed to mainly be "read this because it has a gay main character and you should read it". As I said to some friends earlier today, if I'd known it was about a bunch of Lawful Evil magic users and paladins in a locked room mystery (and sometimes spaaace) seeking the secret to becoming liches, I'd have been there a lot sooner. (Ahahaha, autocorrect thinks they want to become lichen).


Oddly enough, I have very recently read the reissued Randall, which I enjoyed greatly.

Gideon the Ninth, Marta Randall, etc.

[chomiji]

Auto-correct is very opinionated and usually wrong. *slaps it upside the head*

I was worried about reading the re-issued Sword of Winter because I liked the original so much (even though I now understand that the publisher made her do stupid things to it). You are the second positive review of it in this space, and I know you have some idea of what I like. So I need to get it, clearly.

(On a related note: oh daegaer, daegaer, will I ever love any thing again the way I still love Saiyuki? *cries*)

Re: Gideon the Ninth, Marta Randall, etc.

[daegaer]

I love the sort of low-fantasy that Mapping Winter has (I never read the original version so can't say anything about differences between editions), as well as genre-crossing books. Especially mysteries - I could read fantasy/sci-fi/deeply oddly historical mysteries until they come out of my ears. (On which note, Carrie Vaughn's Bannerless and its sequel The Wild Dead are post-apocalyptic, low-tech mysteries set in an agrarian, communitarian California about a century in the future. They scratched the same sort of itch that the Randall did, for me).

Oh, fandoms of the heart! They are always the best. Saiyuki is good at keeping the affections.

Do you know about saiyuki_party? Where we are sci-fi troping it out to while away lockdown hours.