Reading Wednesday: Harrow the Ninth by Tamsin Muir

[chomiji]

I have mixed feelings about the much anticipated sequel to Gideon the Ninth. In some ways it's a very clever piece of writing (a great deal of it in the second person), and it's both gritty enough and ironically humorous enough not to come across as too full of its own cleverness. But it suffers very much from a huge lack of Gideon Nav.

You can think about that last statement some more later.

I'm going to cut this because it's really impossible to discuss Harrow without some monster spoilers for Gideon.

When we last saw Harrowhark Nonegesimus, she was dressed in a hospital gown and mourning the loss of her childhood companion and whipping girl, the cheerfully smutty-minded sword-jock Gideon Nav. Too late, the two had realized that they were actually each other's other half, and far too late, Harrow had finally realized what it meant to become a Lyctor of the Emperor Undying. It was ironic and yet wholly fitting that of the two of them, it was Gideon who first realized that to become a Lyctor, Harrow would have to absorb her Cavalier.

Harrow allows herself to be convinced by the Emperor himself that she should go on and serve him. But by the time a reader has finished the first chapter or two of Harrow the Ninth, it's clear that something is very wrong with Harrow, something much more extreme than grief over Gideon's death and her own role in it. Harrow is an incomplete Lyctor. She is unable to integrate her cavalier's consciousness, and worse, something is wildly off about her memories. We re-live the sojourn in Canaan House, and it is a completely new story.

To understand how wrong it all is, all you need do is read the list of Dramatis Personae at the beginning.

In the meantime, the Emperor and his remaining senior Lyctors have to rush the two new recruits into their full powers as soon as possible. The situation was already dire when the Emperor sent out his call for Lyctor candidates, and it has only become worse. A horror is coming to destroy the human universe, and it's no spoiler (because it's revealed in the first chapter heading) to say that the Emperor himself will not survive.

The story cuts back and forth in time, with interludes in Harrow's dreamverse version of the events of the past. Some of the lost are found, and many of the characters so lightly sketched in Gideon become so real and endearing that I finally felt their loss. There are scenes of sheer horror, and some lines that made me grin despite myself.

And then it all stops, and we're left to await Alecto the Ninth.

When I finished this, I thought I would not want to read it all over again very soon. But now, having told you about it, I think I do.

Comments

[isis]

I think I need to read it again, too. I loved the setup, mostly because I'm a big fan of unreliable narrators, and the incredible dissonance of the first part of this book is very much catnip to me.

[telophase]

Not sure how spoilery or unspoilery you want discussion to be, so I'm rot-13ing part of this just in case.

But it suffers very much from a huge lack of Gideon Nav.

Gur ragver obbx vf jevggra nebhaq Tvqrba--gurer'f n uhtr Tvqrba-funcrq ubyr va vg. (Which I liked quite a lot, actually--a technique I don't remember coming across before.)

However... I read the books through in a giant gulp in one day, and now we're listening to the audiobook, and the SECOND read shows a lot of the foreshadowing, the little clues dropped here and there that pay off later in the book...naq fb sne va gur er-"ernq", V guvax gung Uneebj'f frpbaq-crefba ibvpr vf qvssrerag guna ure guveq-crefba ibvpr, naq abg orpnhfr bs Gur Jbex, ohg orpnhfr vg'f na nznytnz bs Uneebj naq Tvqrba.

[lydy]

I really suffered from the lack of Gideon through most of the book. And I was just plain confused for most of the book, as well. But I am not a careful reader, and some of this was my own damn fault. Over on my own DW page, I listed the fairly short number of things I actually understood. I am definitely reading these again. And I do think that the Gideon-sized hole at the center of the narrative works really well, if you aren't rushing. But I was rushing, desperate to see if Gideon showed up again. I need to slow down and savor HtN, I think.

It really is very much a middle book, isn't it?