Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

When I write a review I usually try to do what everyone else does: give a summary of the book and then some idea of what I thought about it.  So I guess this isn’t a review of Harrow the Ninth, because my reaction when I finished it was, “What the f*ck did I just read?”

Harrow revisits some of the events in Gideon the Ninth, but it’s a weird, funhouse version of what happened, where instead of Gideon it’s Ortus, her old cavalier, who accompanies her to the meeting of the Houses.  Meanwhile, in the present, Harrow meets the Emperor himself, disconcertingly called God, and three other Lyctors, and trains for the Emperor’s war against the Resurrection Beast.  Her fellow newly created Lyctor, the opportunistic Ianthe, is there too.  This part is told in the second person — “You went to your room” —which I really hate a lot: it has the precious quality of literary fiction without actually having to be literary.  Also, for the first chapter or so, I usually find myself thinking, Nope, still right here.

Harrow has deeper problems than just her memory, though.  She sometimes sees the Body from the Locked Tomb of the Ninth House, though no one else does, and she reads letters that to other people are just blank pages.  In other words, she is the most untrustworthy point-of-view character in the history of untrustworthy p.o.v. characters: I wouldn’t rely on her to give me directions to the end of the block.

In addition to that, the three older Lyctors are extremely powerful, and one of them keeps trying to kill her.  Or does he?  I mean, can we really trust Harrow’s perception here?  Is the body of a dead Lyctor really getting up and walking around, and if so, why doesn’t Ianthe see it too?

And everyone keeps having cryptic conversations —

“He’s fine.”

“You call that fine —”

“ — sudden access of sympathy a little uncharacteristic when —”

“Not difficult to imagine that maybe —”

“Don’t,” God said, sitting back down with some difficulty.

—  and dead people keep coming back to life, and the older Lyctors keep changing allegiances, or reality.  Those Lyctors are so powerful, in fact, that at the end things seem to pop up out of nowhere, with no reason, though sometimes, thank God, they’re explained later.  (God himself doesn’t give a lot of explanations, though.)  And if you ask me to clarify what happened in the last chapter I would probably stare blankly, or start reciting from The Nonniad, Ortus’s multivolume work of epic poetry.

And yet.  Some things are answered.  Other things probably would be, if I had read more carefully.  There turns out to be an actual reason for the second-person viewpoint, which happens so rarely I nearly cheered. *  And I’m eagerly looking forward to the third book, which means this one succeeded on the most basic level, that of telling a good story.  Maybe it’ll clear some things up.  I hope so, anyway.

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* Other books that use the second person for reasons other than the fact that it sounds cool are Complicity, by Iain Banks, and The Fifth Season, by N.K Jemisin.