Review:
Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
| Series: |
The Locked Tomb #2 |
| Publisher: |
Tor |
| Copyright: |
2020 |
| ISBN: |
1-250-31320-1 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
510 |
Harrow the Ninth is a direct sequel to
Gideon the Ninth and under absolutely no circumstances should you
start reading here. You would be so lost. If you plan on reading this
series, read the books as closely together as you can so that you can
remember the details of the previous book. You may still resort to
re-reading or searching through parts of the previous book as you go.
Muir is doing some complex structural work with
Harrow the Ninth,
so it's hard to know how much to say about it without spoiling some aspect
of it for someone. I think it's safe to say this much: As advertised by
the title, we do get a protagonist switch to Harrowhark. However, unlike
Gideon the Ninth, it's not a single linear story. The storyline
that picks up after the conclusion of
Gideon is interwoven with
apparent flashbacks retelling the story of the previous book from
Harrowhark's perspective. Or at least it might have been the story of the
previous book, except that Ortus is Harrowhark's cavalier, Gideon does not
appear, and other divergences from the story we previously read become
obvious early on.
(You can see why memory of
Gideon the Ninth is important.)
Oh, and one of those storylines is written in the second person. Unlike
some books that use this as a gimmick, this is
for reasons that are eventually justified and partly explained in the
story, but it's another example of the narrative complexity.
Harrow
the Ninth is dropping a lot of clues (and later revelations) in both
story events and story structure, many of which are likely to upend reader
expectations from the first book.
I have rarely read a novel that is this good at fulfilling the tricky role
of the second book of a trilogy.
Gideon the Ninth was, at least on
the surface, a highly entertaining, linear, and relatively straightforward
escape room mystery, set against a dying-world SF background that was more
hinted at than fleshed out.
Harrow the Ninth revisits and
reinterprets that book in ways that add significant depth without feeling
artificial. Bits of scenery in the first book take on new meaning and
intention. Characters we saw only in passing get a much larger role (and
Abigail is worth the wait). And we get a whole ton of answers: about the
God Emperor, about Lyctors, about the world, about Gideon and Harrowhark's
own pasts and backgrounds, and about the locked tomb that is at the center
of the Ninth House. But there is still more than enough for a third book,
including a truly intriguing triple cliffhanger ending.
Harrow the
Ninth is both satisfying in its own right and raises new questions that
I'm desperate to see answered in the third book.
Also, to respond to my earlier self on setting, this world is not a
Warhammer 40K universe, no matter how much it may have appeared in
the glimpses we got in
Gideon. The God Emperor appears directly in
this book and was not at all what I was expecting, if perhaps even more
disturbing. Muir is intentionally playing against type, drawing a sharp
contrast between the God Emperor and the dramatic goth feel of the rest of
the universe and many of the characters, and it's creepily effective and
goes in a much different ethical direction than I had thought. (That
said, I will warn that properly untangling the ethical dilemmas of this
universe is clearly left to the third book.)
I mentioned in
my review of Gideon the
Ninth that I was happy to see more SF pulling unapologetically from
fanfic. I'm going to keep beating that drum in this review in part
because I think the influence may be less obvious to the uninitiated.
Harrow the Ninth is playing with voice, structure, memory, and
chronology in ways that I suspect the average reader unfamiliar with
fanfic may associate more with literary fiction, but they would be wrongly
underestimating fanfic if they did so. If anything, the callouts to
fanfic are even clearer. There are three classic fanfic alternate
universe premises that appear in passing, the story relies on the reader's
ability to hold a canonical narrative and an alternate narrative in mind
simultaneously, and the genre inspiration was obvious enough to me that
about halfway through the novel I correctly guessed one of the fanfic
universes in which Muir has written. (I'm not naming it here since I
think it's a bit of a spoiler.)
And of course there's the irreverence. There are some structural reasons
why the narrative voice isn't quite as good as
Gideon the Ninth at
the start, but rest assured that Muir makes up for that by the end of the
book. My favorite scenes in the series so far happen at the end of
Harrow the Ninth: world-building, revelations, crunchy metaphysics,
and irreverent snark all woven beautifully together. Muir has her
characters use Internet meme references like teenagers, which is a
beautiful bit of characterization because they
are teenagers. In a
world that's heavy on viscera, skeletons, death, and horrific monsters,
it's a much needed contrast and a central part of how the characters show
defiance and courage. I don't think this will work for everyone, but it
very much works for me. There's a Twitter meme reference late in the book
that had me laughing out loud in delight.
Harrow the Ninth is an almost perfect second book, in that if you
liked
Gideon the Ninth, you will probably love
Harrow the
Ninth and it will make you like
Gideon the Ninth even more. It
does have one major flaw, though: pacing.
This was also my major complaint about
Gideon, primarily around the
ending. I think
Harrow the Ninth is a bit better, but the problem
has a different shape. The start of the book is a strong "what the hell
is going on" experience, which is very effective, and the revelations are
worth the build-up once they start happening. In between, though, the
story drags on a bit too long. Harrow is sick and nauseated at the start
of the book for rather longer than I wanted to read about, there is one
too many Lyctor banquets than I think were necessary to establish the
characters, and I think there's a touch too much wandering the halls.
Muir also interwove two narrative threads and tried to bring them to a
conclusion at the same time, but I think she had more material for one
than the other. There are moments near the end of the book where one
thread is producing all the payoff revelations the reader has been waiting
for, and the other thread is following another interminable and rather
uninteresting fight scene. You don't want your reader saying "argh, no"
each time you cut away to the other scene. It's better than
Gideon
the Ninth, where the last fifth of the book is mostly a running battle
that went on way longer than it needed to, but I still wish Muir had
tightened the story throughout and balanced the two threads so that we
could stay with the most interesting one when it mattered.
That said, I mostly noticed the pacing issues in retrospect and in talking
about them with a friend who was more annoyed than I was. In the moment,
there was so much going on here, so many new things to think about, and so
much added depth that I devoured
Harrow the Ninth over the course
of two days and then spent the next day talking to other people who had
read it, trading theories about what happened and what will happen in the
third book. It was the most enjoyable reading experience I've had so far
this year.
Gideon the Ninth was fun;
Harrow the Ninth was both fun and
on the verge of turning this series into something truly great. I can
hardly wait for
Alecto the Ninth (which doesn't yet have a release
date, argh).
As with
Gideon the Ninth, content warning for lots and lots of
gore, rather too detailed descriptions of people's skeletons,
restructuring bits of the body that shouldn't be restructured, and more
about bone than you ever wanted to know.
Rating: 9 out of 10
A couple of years ago, I moved into a new flat that comes with RJ45 sockets wired for 10 Gigabit (but currently offering 1 Gigabit) Ethernet.This also meant changing the settings on my router box for my new ISP.I took this opportunity to review my router's other settings too. I'll be blogging about these over the next few posts.
Migrating to Predictable Network Interface Names
Ever since Linus decided to flip the network interface enumeration order in the Linux kernel, I had been relying on udev's persistent network interface rules to maintain some semblance of consistency in the NIC naming scheme of my hosts. It has never been a totally satisfactory method, since it required manually editing the file to list the MAC addresses of all Ethernet cards and WiFi dongles likely to appear on that host to consistently use an easy-to-remember name that I could adopt for ifupdown configuration files.
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The naming scheme is surprisingly simple and logical, once 
Back in 2017 I announced that the 
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during October 2020 (
So, a bit more thank 18 months ago, I started a new adventure.
After a few flights with a friend of mine in a Robin DR400 and
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PPL is an international flight license for non commercial
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There has been a session about
