The Read: Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving

Why did I get this book?

Because I read the first book, Gideon the Ninth, and found it very interesting. I wanted to know what happens next.

Is it what I thought it was?

Not really. It’s very different than Gideon. Gideon feels like a YA novel that grew up a bit—it feels familiar, non-threatening (despite being about necromancers and despite having a rather heart-rending ending) and reads fairly smoothly, though there are questions all along about how this world works. Harrow is narratively challenging and very writerly—there are some simply beautiful literary passages throughout. It takes a lot of investment to get past the first third or so, which is full of confusion and takes place in (at least) two separate temporal and spatial frames, or so it seems.

What continuing uses might I have for it?

I’m going to need to re-read a bit of it perhaps as I move on to the next book in the series.

Quotes

“You could not say with perfect accuracy that you woke up. Having achieved a grotesque mollience and dripped and resolved into a bad-smelling puddle of yourself, you did piece yourself back together again, your eyes opened—you were lying on your back—and slowly, carefully, with great effort of soul, you congealed.”

“On last count you’d killed twelve planets, but you still found that first quick slice to the jugular the hardest.”

“That night in your bed you did not weep. Your body tried, and failed, to produce tears. Afterward, God was more careful with you than ever, and he had been careful before; sometimes you caught him glancing at you as if he was trying to see something in the confines of your face, but whatever he was looking for it was not what your parents had done.”

“And yet—there, in the alien slather of forest, among the ferns and fronds, and greenery arching against a skyline that was a more reticent verdancy paling into navy blue—you could almost believe that you had the capacity to be happy again. You were an unfilled hole, but even a hole might be content in its emptiness. At that point, though you did not know it, you were a mere kilometre from this insubstantial contentment’s obliteration. A hole might also be filled with worms.”

Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints

For anyone trying to read it who might wonder if it all makes sense in the end, it absolutely does—and yet leaves some very important mysteries and open questions. There’s a lot of world-building here both explicitly and implicitly, and the general feeling and mood of these books coalesces much more thoroughly than in the first book. It’s a strange and enticing mix in the end—I got whiffs of The Chronicles of Riddick, Gormenghast, Warhammer 40K, The Fall of the House of Usher, Frankenstein, and Rebecca, but it also stands as a real original.

I don’t think the people marketing these books in the US are doing Muir any favors with the back blurbs that reduce the books to “Lesbian Necromancers! In Space!”. The blurbs have a camp feeling to them and this book is not at all camp. (Though there is more sex and sexuality in this book than the first, but it’s not a thematically dominant element.)

I have a lot of questions still about what’s going on in the universe that Muir has built but I have much better guesses about various backstories than I did by the end of Gideon the Ninth. I have been re-reading the alternating frames of the first two-thirds of the book to see if the last third’s revelations are consistently encoded into them and the answer is basically yes from what I can see, though I think there’s one aspect of the use of the second-person perspective that doesn’t entirely hold consistent.

Without giving too much away, I’m also glad that the moral status of necromancy becomes a sharply underscored question in multiple ways. I couldn’t decide if the first book was setting out to create a universe where necromancy was just normal and that’s that (among other things, the first book had nothing to say about why the Nine Houses appeared to be on a war footing, which turns out to become a more important and present issue here). What I also especially like, also without giving too much away, is that there’s a death after death that even the necromancers don’t understand, which helps to make their own art more mysterious and interesting. In general, the moral complexity meter jumps through the roof in this volume.

Given what a cognitive workout the first two-thirds of this book are, I have to say I wouldn’t mind it if Nona the Ninth turns out to be a bit more of a smooth read. But Muir has earned my trust with this book—it’s enormously talented and way beyond the genre baselines.