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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![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
- 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.
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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.
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Oh man I don't know if Zelazny ages that well -- I was reading him as a tween and Amber sunk really deeply into my psyche. I most enjoyed the first five books of the Chronicles, written in the seventies, altho I know other younger people who grew up with the next five, written in the eighties, who imprinted on those. I just couldn't get into them though. I'd recommend reading the first one! The narrative voice is very entertaining.