(no subject)

[skygiants]

What I knew for sure about Harrow the Ninth before reading it:

- it's generally considered to be a weirder book than its precursor Gideon the Ninth, which, for those unfamiliar, is about a group of terrible teen necromancers and their sword-fighting sidekicks competing to find the secret to immortality in a mysterious castle with a serial killer and/or terrible bone monster on the loose. In space.

- a dramatic and tragic scene is capped by a 'none pizza with left beef' reference (thanks for the warning aria, I was very glad to be braced for it)

Harrow the Ninth is indeed a weirder book than Gideon the Ninth, in large part because it becomes very clear very quickly that the protagonist not only has very little idea what's going on in the present, but also that there is significant confusion about what happened in the past as well; a solid third of the book is dedicated to recounting a version of the events of Gideon the Ninth that does not in fact include the titular Gideon the Ninth. Since the relationship between Gideon and Harrow is the main emotional thread of the series, this is an audacious choice!

In some ways I do have a lot of respect for the things this book is doing; in particular, I really like how it takes characters that were more or less nonentities on the page in Gideon the Ninth, whose deaths meant nothing to the reader at the time except as an indication that Things Were Escalating, and forces a reconsideration of them as losses to be mourned in their own right. I respect that this series that's so much about the use of death and death energy does not actually take death lightly, or class anyone as expendable; every single character, no matter how minor, is a human mourned by somebody, a person with a rich and complicated life of which we will only ever know a fraction as it intersects with the particular story being told. In other news, I truly did not expect that my favorite character in this book would be the sad middle-aged lump who died in the first chapter of Gideon the Ninth to make way for Gideon's cavaliership, but here we are, I'm wildly attached to Ortus the Ninth! Who knew!

However ... the trouble is that once it becomes clear, as it does become clear very early on, that Harrow has edited her own memory and won't be able to access it until a certain point in the book, it made it very hard (for me) to do anything but race grimly ahead to that inevitable point at which Harrow got access to her full personality again and remembered how to care about all the things I also cared about. As this did not happen for like 350 pages, that made for a fairly significant amount of grim racing! It's definitely bold for a an author to stare the reader dead in the eyes and go "I'm cutting the beating heart out of my book and you're going to sit there and wait patiently until I put it back;" I respect the chutzpah, and indeed I did sit there and wait (not patiently), but I don't know that the first 2/3 of this book will ever feel to me much like anything besides marking time.

... other things about the book, for the record, I do not respect intellectually. I can accept that the millenia-old Necrolord Prime, God of this particular narrative, may well have been a Tumblr teen in his long-ago youth and still holds the ancient memes close to his heart. The worldbuilding allows for this perfectly well. I refuse to believe, however, that the Necrolord's ancient memes have remained culturally widespread enough for it to make ANY sense that Gideon -- a child who! once again! grew up on a remote necromantic outpost with no other human contact besides Harrow and Harrow's extremely elderly relatives! -- would shout, at a crucial moment, "JAIL FOR MOTHER!" I refuse!

Also, like, I guess I'm glad that Tamsyn Muir is having fun with all her descriptions of gleaming viscera but I, personally, would perhaps call it a slightly self-indulgent amount of viscera.

That said, if we're speaking of self-indulgence, I did laugh at the coffeeshop AU.

Also, apropos of absolutely nothing, I have no really clear mental images for anyone else in this book, but whenever Augustus said anything on the page an image of Tobias Menzies as Brutus in HBO's Rome sprang fully-formed into my head and absolutely refused to depart.

As a sidenote, I also reread Gideon the Ninth before reading Harrow and I am glad I did both for enjoying-the-experience reasons and for having-any-clue-what's-going-on-with-Harrow reasons, but I was trying to keep my eye on the ball with Dulcinea/Cytherea this time around and I still have no idea why she did half the things she did in that book ... what DID she have against the youths of the Fourth?? And why did she need to recruit Harrow to help her complete a challenge she had already completed for the first time around several thousand years before? If anybody has theories on this I would truly love to hear them.

Comments

[shadaras]

God, Ortus. <3 He was so much better than I ever would've expected.

The thing about both Gt9 and Ht9, for me, is that I really enjoy the experience of reading the books but I don't tend to feel a desire to go back to them? I'll read Alecto the Ninth, but I will probably not touch the books between now and when I reread before Alecto.

Ht9 gave me better fanfic fodder, mentally, but also... not as much as it feels like a number of my friends got out of it? *shrug* They're fun books! They're lovely brain popcorn! I do not expect more out of them, and I enjoy them for what they are.

[skygiants]

I actually think I enjoyed Gt9 more on a reread than I did first time around, but I don't know that I'll reread Harrow, at least not in its entirety. I definitely do understand why they're such fanfic fodder, though -- it's such a big cast with just enough weird details about all of the characters to hook people in.

[campkilkare]

-Aw, even though she has lost all her character development, I did enjoy seeing Harrow go to Lyctor school with Worst Girl Ianthe and constantly dodging being murdered. The soup, for instance, was worth the price of admission for me.

Obviously the AU scenarios owe a lot to fandom, but I think the main scenario does too; Harrow is sort of a generic-fandom-Harrow acting like herself but put in an absolutely hellish scenario.

-Also, everything about Gideon-in-Harrow but especially the Chapter where she confronts Ianthe is some of my favorite prose ever.

-Oh I absolutely do have theories about Cytherea!

To start with, you have to remember that she immediately knows that Gideon is God's daughter and that that means there is a perfect Lyctorhood. So I think this explains why she is so weird and manipulative to G throughout and like, kills people in the same room but leaves her alive. She needs Gideon alive, to prove to the others they were betrayed.

Her big overall plan, as she states in GtN, is to ruin the new Lyctor hunt before anyone can make the terrible mistake she did but slowly and messily enough that someone calls the Emperor (as the Second eventually does).

She explains why she kills the Fifth first; I don't think she had anything against the Fourth in particular, but knew it would provoke the most upset and outrage and get the Second to call in the Emperor, as indeed it did.

I think why she had Gideon and Harrow help her complete the challenge is maybe the biggest mystery? My theory is she wanted to test Gideon's capacity, but it seems unlikely to ever be answered.

-There is a theory that because God is an incorrigible memelord, memes are recorded in holy writ, which means Gideon is being blasphemous rather than anachronistic. This is largely hole-patching, but Harrow does get a "while we were X, she studied the blade" joke in GtN.

-Not related to this, but did you catch what's up with Camilla at the end of the book?

[skygiants]

The soup was pretty incredible! The Harrow v. the Saint of Duty throughline in that part of the book was definitely the thread that worked for me the most, I did love her rescuing him from the Possessed Zombie Cytherea Murder Attempt. I do think part of my problem honestly is that Camilla and Pal were my favorites from book 1 so as soon as she mentioned the Camilla envelope on page 30 or so I was sitting there quietly chanting 'Camilla Camilla Camilla' under my breath until we got there 300 pages later ...

(Relatedly, I am fairly sure I DID catch what's up and I'm VERY EXCITED. Admittedly I'm normally quite bad at tracking physical descriptions but there are enough dramatic textual zooms on Pal's Beautiful Eyes throughout the books that even I couldn't miss it this time!)

yesss Cytherea theories! I think the thing that confuses me about the death of the Fourth kids is the specific cruelty of it, mean writing in big blood letters on the wall to terrify Jeanne before killing her -- none of the other deaths get that kind of specific venom attached that I remember, though I suppose that could also be a mind game for Gideon, who's supposed to be guarding them ...

I'm trying to remember if we ever get external confirmation that she did ask Palamedes and Camilla first before Harrow and Gideon as she says, because I can think of why she'd want to establish a link with Harrow and Gideon, but it doesn't make sense to me that she'd care at all about getting the Sixth House to give it a go, unless she expected them not to succeed.

[kore]

you have to remember that she immediately knows that Gideon is God's daughter and that that means there is a perfect Lyctorhood. So I think this explains why she is so weird and manipulative to G throughout and like, kills people in the same room but leaves her alive. She needs Gideon alive, to prove to the others they were betrayed.

OHHH THAT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE

I love the idea that God is a memelord! That goes along with his other cultural references, like Poe and "Annie Laurie" which is an OLD popular song. And Gideon would totally be a blasphemer.

[aamcnamara]

Oh man, yeah, I read like a page and a half and went "so Gideon's narrating" and then read like two? chapters and was like "and Harrow has excised her memory of Gideon" and then...there were an awful lot...of pages to read...before that really went anywhere, without a lot of reader-apparent clues to what was going on underneath (if the twist had been less twisty and more a slowly-becoming-apparent-to-the-reader horror, I would have liked the book more, I think, but that was not the author intent, so).

Rereading Gideon first seems like a good idea, I had forgotten enough random details about secondary characters and plot points that a) it was hard for me to track what was changing in the AU sections (except for the obvious) and b) once characters from Gideon did turn back up IRL as it were, I kind of went "wait and remind me what happened with them in the actual book?"

There were some great sequences, though, and I am very intrigued to learn what happens in Alecto.

[skygiants]

As soon as we hit the 'to-open-in-case-of' envelopes I was like "right, at least some of these envelopes are going to have to get opened so let's get TO it ... are we opening one now?? .... are we opening one NOW???" which is, in large part, my own impatience, so. >.> But it did make it hard to focus on the actual present-day things that were going on.

On the one hand I was very glad that I'd reread because it meant I was filled with fondness for all the reappearing secondary characters (and could put some stuff together a little more easily about the memory-edited sections) and on the other hand I think being filled with fondness for secondary characters from Book 1 also contributed to my relative lack of interest in the new characters from Book 2 ... I already like these doomed disasters on this dreary space necromantic outpost! I don't need new ones! Again this paid off well for me in the back third but made the first two-thirds more of a race to get there.

[sovay]

I respect that this series that's so much about the use of death and death energy does not actually take death lightly, or class anyone as expendable; every single character, no matter how minor, is a human mourned by somebody, a person with a rich and complicated life of which we will only ever know a fraction as it intersects with the particular story being told.

Okay, that's cool. I discovered a murder mystery variant of that ethos last month and appreciated it very much.

but I don't know that the first 2/3 of this book will ever feel to me much like anything besides marking time.

Would it have been possible to run the same kind of revisitation of characters without the time-marking?

That said, if we're speaking of self-indulgence, I did laugh at the coffeeshop AU.

That is a charming sentence to encounter in the wild.

[skygiants]

I enjoyed your review of that film very much and it has gone on my to-watch list for sure! It (your review of the film, not Harrow the Ninth particularly) reminded me a bit also of one of the Ngaio Marsh books I read recently-ish, which I got on with much better than many of the Ngaio Marsh books I've read.

I don't honestly know that it would have been possible to run the revisitation of characters in the same way if the pacing of the book had been different ... like some things could have been staggered earlier for my personal satisfaction, but I don't know how that would have affected the balance.

[melannen]

My current guess as to why she killed the Fourth was to protect her identity. They were playing Terrible Teen Detectives, and were apparently much better at it than Gideon ever noticed. Meanwhile by killing them spectacularly while Harrow and Palamedes (the people most likely to be suspicious) are with her, she gives herself an alibi.

My guess with the challenge is also that she wanted to test Gideon. And possibly that she couldn't complete that challenge by herself (I don't remember the mechanics well enough to decide if a full-power Lyctor could do it alone, even if they knew the method) and she wanted to make sure that certain other people didn't end up with that specific key - we never do find out what's behind the door that only she and Harrow went through. As a bonus, it kept Harrow distracted from worrying about other things for several days.

The extent to which she did things just to fuck with people is probably hard to overestimate, though.

(My favorite things about these books is how much ridiculous theorizing they insist upon you doing.)

[kore]

My favorite things about these books is how much ridiculous theorizing they insist upon you doing

That reminds me so much of fandom! and also of the kind of medieval scholasticism that the book is riffing on with the necro-knowledge. (Someone did a writeup of all the many references in the book and the breadth and depth was pretty incredible.)

[skygiants]

Oh, I hadn't thought about the alibi aspect, that's quite true! The thing that really throws me about their murder is the really mean bloody writing on the wall, which as far as I remember is unique to the deaths of the Fourth, but of course it is all to put on a show in one way or another.

I think a full-power Lyctor could have completed it (it's about constant destruction and regeneration, which seems like the sort of thing that Lyctors do automatically) so whatever her reasons there was definitely some component of fuckery about it. I FORGOT we never found out what's behind the door that challenge opens! You are absolutely right about the ridiculous theorizing, one really does need a map or a murderboard to keep up with all the various plot threads.

[starlady]

I love both books unreasonably and I'm not personally troubled by the memes. They are fun! They are funny! Harrow in particular needs some humor, it is a dark and dolorous book and she is completely fucking sad, as Gideon tells her.

My favorite AU was the royalty one, but the coffeeshop and the places swap one were also great. I love this book.

I read it in ABM and again when it was actually published, and I strongly don't feel that any of it is marking time! The first time through I was seized by a creepy dread of trying to work out just WTF was going on, and the second time through I was picking up on the hints I'd missed or hadn't worked out the significance of while feeling even worse for Harrow. I also had even more appreciation for the many Utena references. So yeah, I do think it holds up on reread.

[kore]

The first time through I was seized by a creepy dread of trying to work out just WTF was going on, and the second time through I was picking up on the hints I'd missed or hadn't worked out the significance of while feeling even worse for Harrow

Yeah, I was VERY confused the first time I tried it and had to go refresh my memories of GtN, and then went back and tried it again and really got into it. And then on rereading it, the story deepens and gets even more emotion.

[kore]

I didn't feel the book was marking time, but that is possibly because I LOVED Harrow. I loved this book so much. I liked Gideon the 9th, altho the memes were annoying (until I just ignored them, and I also just didn't get half of them, lol). But I absolutely loved this book and how tricky and metafictional and unreliable it was.

Everyone's pointing out how the AUs are very fannish, but they also reminded me of similar surrealistic riffs you get in Zelazny. I don't know if the author's read Zelazny, but the deliberate gleeful anachronisms also reminded me of Amber ("Does Macy's tell Gimbels?" "Beg pardon?").

[skygiants]

It is a really fascinatingly-constructed book, and I think I might honestly have enjoyed it more if I'd liked Gideon less -- looking forward to when characters from Gideon might reappear definitely interfered with my ability to live in the moment with Harrow and appreciate the book as it was. But it's fully worthy of appreciation and I'm really glad you loved it! :D

I've never actually read Zelazny ... I keep wondering if I should do it now, or if I missed my window and should have read them when I was sixteen.

[nineveh_uk]

Harrow has edited her own memory and won't be able to access it until a certain point in the book

That sounds like the incredibly annoying contrived delays of Connie Willis.

[hebethen]

It's not contrived like it's set on a specific timer or anything, it's just waiting until the penny drops for *her*.

[whimsyful]

My reaction was pretty similar to yours, I think. I really liked the narration shifts and how it fleshed out characters that died early in GtN, and I really enjoyed the interactions with Ianthe and the soup scene and straight up lol'ed when I hit the coffeeshop AU...but overall the balance of intellectual admiration to emotional engagement was tilted more towards the former than I would have liked.

[skygiants]

Right, like, it's an interesting book! It's an impressive book! For me it was not a fun book until relatively near the end, in marked contrast to Gideon which was extremely fun from at least the thirty percent point onwards.

i have had this userpic for years

[vass]

I wasn't certain if Harrow had edited her memory. That was my first guess, yes (although I didn't figure out how) but then I started wondering about time travel or actual alternate universes, or an iterated experiment trying to find a version of Harrow who could succeed without killing Gideon. I wondered if the Sleeper was Harrow herself, sent back in time and there all along.

So I had a lot of speculation to keep me busy during the main story.

a dramatic and tragic scene is capped by a 'none pizza with left beef' reference

And this is nothing when compared to the dad joke. Which I was spoilered for, but it was still good. (I loved the memes.)

But also... SOUP.

Re: i have had this userpic for years

[skygiants]

I had a couple chapters where I was genuinely wondering about clone!Harrows, but as soon as we started hitting the past stuff and characters kept turning to the camera to plaintively ask "is that really how it happened?" I was like oh, okay. Though that still definitely didn't confirm for me the Sleeper's identity; for the longest time I thought might have been either the part of Harrow that she locked away in her subconscious, or Gideon locked away in Harrow's subconscious.

I was not spoiled for the dad joke, and I hit it and just kind of gently put the book down and was like "you know what, Tamsyn Muir? You're right. You win. I absolutely should have known that this was an inevitability."

[happydork]

You know, it fully did not occur to me that any of the memes were meant to be in-universe references? (Apart from the dad joke, which is a meme because it’s a common joke.) I just thought it was part of the general balls to the wall delightful narrative tone! I think you’re probably right that there’s a vague in universe gloss for it, but you have blown my tiny mind that there needs to be.

[kore]

VERY interestingly, Muir said that she would explain the silly-sounding title "Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity," but it was a spoiler so she couldn't!

[innerbrat]

I had never heard of either of these until a few weeks ago, but TBH the memes and the slang sound like they would be an instant nope-out for me. Which seems a shame!

[kore]

The memes annoyed me in Gideon the 9th, but I was able to eventually just sort of block them out (also, I didn't get most of them, along with the Homestuck stuff, lol). Harrow has a LOT less of the memes and slang, but it's really difficult to understand without Gideon.

[sophia_sol]

I was not planning to reread Gt9 before I finally get my hands on Ht9 and now I am a little concerned about how confused I am going to be while reading that book! I had so much trouble following who the characters were in Gt9 and I definitely don't remember a single one of them beyond Gideon and Harrow. Also Gideon and Harrow's relationship was one of the things I found most compelling so Gideon being Not Present even in Harrow's memory for most of this book is...hmm. Well, we'll see how that works for me.

[kore]

Yeek, I tried reading Harrow without rereading Gideon at first, and it really really did not go well. I'd recommend at least looking up all the characters in Gideon and their various relations. (Someone on reddit -- I know, I know -- said they had made a detailed list of who was who in Gideon, including how they died, and that actually let them anticipate a lot of the action in Harrow.) Harrow is very much riffing off and rewriting and re-viewing Gideon.

I wouldn't say so much that Gideon is "Not Present" in the book exactly -- that's how it seems at first, but a lot of things in the book are not at all how they seem at first. It's one of those books that really rewards rereading, but you need to be aware of a lot of planted clues and inconsistencies.

[happydork]

I’m loving not just your response but all the responses in the comments, too — so many different reading experiences! :) For me the whole thing was a wild and delightful trust fall where half of me was desperate to land and the other half was enjoying the whistling sensation of all the gore, poor decisions and ridiculous jokes travelling past me so quickly (I could tell H had edited G out of her memories, but I couldn’t tell why the memories were so weird and wrong in other respects too).

[skygiants]

ME TOO, I'm so happy when these posts just turn into a discussion space! On the one hand it's always very frustrating for me when I post something and lots of people respond then I get too busy for a few days to come back to the comments, because I want to talk with people immediately, and on the other hand when I don't have a chance to respond people are far more likely to have their own conversations in comments and that's always really pleasing and exciting ... dilemmas!

(I could tell H had edited G out but I did not know that everyone was ghosts and that was a delightful reveal -- it was very pleasing to me that Harrow had actually been interacting with these people for real and not just making up her own versions of them, which is what I had assumed at first and part of the reason I was like "well this is just us hanging out in Harrow's head," and once that was confirmed it made stuff like Abigail Pent being the Mom Friend and Ortus apologizing for being a bad adult to Harrow and Gideon so good and so satisfying!)

[dimestore_romeo]

I definitely had that same 'race to the end' experience - and the skimming over the loving descriptions of viscera experience.

I'm going to do another read of it now that I know the shape of it - maybe with a notebook - so that I can appreciate the flow of it better, I think.

I do love all the horrifying theories appearing about what happened to our solar system, and the war between the two sides of humanity.

And...still very confused about who the person with Camilla is in the ending. Alecto? Gideon's consciousness? Harrow's consciousness? An amnesiac combination of?

[skygiants]

At first I was like "I will not reread this book before Alecto I think" but now that it's been a week I'm like "hmm ... maybe, actually, I will reread this book before Alecto." I still think there will be a fair amount of judicious viscera-skimming though.

What are some of the theories?? I haven't even begun to dive in yet ...

I have NO idea who Camilla is with in the ending! I thought at first Alecto because of Camilla being like "idk whomst" but now looking at the pushups and bone-arranging I think prooobably amnesiac Harrow's body? I'll be honest though the most exciting thing to me is just the fact that Lyctor!Cam is the babysitter ... I love her.

[etirabys]

The "takes characters that were more or less nonentities on the page in Gideon the Ninth, whose deaths meant nothing to the reader at the time except as an indication that Things Were Escalating, and forces a reconsideration of them as losses to be mourned in their own right" is SO tempting, but I don't think I could deal with the amount of amount of tumblr in this. Which is a shame!

Is Gideon the Ninth less like this than HtN?

[skygiants]

Gideon the Ninth I would say is actually more like this -- Harrow is not really very much like this, but it does mean that on the occasions that it is like this, it hits you more like a hammer to the head!

[bloodygranuaile]

bwa ha ha I love memes and viscerae

I think one of the things I like about this series is indeed that it is sort of pandering and self-indulgent but for a type of person who never gets pandering indulgent stuff sold to them the way that like, horny dudes age 15 to 35 are constantly pandered to, or petty-bourgeois middle-aged men who think they are a lot deeper than they are, or even these days girls who read books and think they are the only girls who ever read books (I appreciated those as a misfit young'un but I'm a little bit over it by now). But bloody-minded, extremely online queer shitposters just don't get pandered to the same way by respectable publishing houses, and I just super appreciate the level of shamelessness it takes to be like "and i'm giving her AVIATORS because they LOOK COOL" and run with it for hundreds of pages.

[skygiants]

I have so much respect for the people for whom this book has the exact correct amount of viscera! I personally am too weak ... at a certain point I have to turn off my inner mind theater or I cannot continue ......

These books truly are just being what they are as hard as they possibly can, and I also respect this! It's significantly preferable than books that do not have the courage of their convictions; Tamsyn Muir is perfectly willing to (textually) stare anyone down because She Does What She Wants! and good for her!!!

[julian]

I skimmed a lot of the viscera, I admit.

Also, in large part because of this entry, I came into _Harrow_ knowing about where Gideon was (or wasn't), which, for me, made it a better book to read because I *wasn't* impatient and got to enjoy other parts of it (like Harrow's unspoken-and-unrealized-but-present grief and the various AUs) without trying to rush the story's telling. So I'm sorry that it didn't work for you, but thank you for making it work for me!