skygiants

It took me ages to actually get around to reading Nona the Ninth because I was grimly determined to reread Harrow the Ninth first, a book I respected but did not particularly enjoy on my first read.

On my second read I had more patience for HtN -- as I suspected, knowing what's going on and being able to go slow and look out for the interesting clues the narrative is laying with an eye to what they actually signify made for a better reading experience than zooming through the book with ferocious impatience while dodging piles of glistening viscera -- but it is still and I think will always be a book that is more interesting than enjoyable for me.

Nona the Ninth, on the other hand, I both respected and enjoyed enormously! tbh I think one of Muir's greatest talents as a storyteller is her refusal to let any person or group of people become stock characters -- obviously much of the interest of the narrative comes from the truly wild worldbuilding and the puzzlebox nature of the way that it's revealed but an equal amount of it derives naturally from layering a huge cast all of whom do genuinely have distinct goals and viewpoints over and over and over each other before steamrolling them flat with plot to create an enormous and delicious Goth croissant. The best part of Harrow for me was the way it returned to characters from the first book who had little chance to express a viewpoint and gave them more and different opportunities to make unexpected choices. The best part of Nona, for me, is the fact that it is set in a society of refugees who hate necromancers, and the people we are spending some of the most time with are refugee kids who are not at all important in the grand scheme of the plot and have nothing to do with the epic scope of the narrative but are important to our viewpoint character and so they are important to the narrative regardless.

Obviously I also liked seeing the returning characters again and getting a strictly limited third person's eye view on characters who are now familiar enough to me that I can put together implications from things the viewpoint character observes but does not understand is a very enjoyable way for me to read, especially now that I trust Muir enough to believe that every character is going to have interesting layers to their story sooner or later .... I guess technically 'getting a strictly limited third person's eye view about things the viewpoint character observes but does not understand' was also true of Harrow but it frustrated me there and delighted me here, no shade to Harrow.

( vague but still technically spoilery details )

So, overall, three books in ... I am engaged! I am invested! I'm on board!! It's probably also relevant that this is the least meme-y book yet and I do want to thank Tamsyn Muir for that ... I do not wish to deny her joy but I did need it. Just a little break. A breather. An opportunity to relax into a chapter without bracing to be absolutely bodyslammed by Essence of Tumblr 2014.

I have seen Gideon the Ninth compared to so many things already and yet I am going to add another: to me this book felt very much like Gormenghast, if the person who wrote Gormenghast had been deeply immersed in fandom circa 2014 or so.

Bear in mind, in assessing the value of this comparison, that:

a.) I have not read Gormenghast since I was in elementary school, although it left a lasting and unnerving impression
b.) I had a vague impression that the author had been in fandom circa 2014 before picking the book up from having seen other discussions on the topic around DW, and thus was primed to expect it

The plot: Gideon Nav is one of two surviving teenagers in the Ninth House, a creepy, ossifying outpost of a necromantic space empire. (Why a necromantic space empire is unclear, although I assume later worldbuilding will reveal this.) Gideon likes hitting things with swords, reading lesbian porn magazines, and attempting to escape her terrible life. The other surviving teenager is Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House and Gideon's more-or-less overlord, and they hate each other very much in a codependent sort of way.

Until! they are summoned to the First House, a differently creepy, differently ossifying outpost, where the heirs of all the houses -- each equipped with a companion cavalier, whose job is to do fighting while the heirs do necromancy -- have been set the task of competing to discover the secret of immortality, presumably hidden somewhere in the castle. (Maybe competing? Maybe collaborating. Nobody is actually very sure. The rules are extremely unclear.)

Most, but not all, of the other heirs are teens as terrible as Gideon and Harrowhark, if not moreso; several of them have Dark Secrets and Mysterious Connections; also, several of them soon start to turn up dead, in various horrible ways. It seems, in fact, that there is a serial killer on the loose! Unless evil dark necromantic experiments are on the loose. Either is possible.

The aesthetic is extremely compelling in that disturbing Gormenghast fashion, and I really like many of the terrible teens and their variously complicated connections. People who are into intense loyalty and knighthood and codependency stuff are likely to be especially into this, if they don't mind a relatively high overall percentage of gory demises.

That said, I have some trouble with Gideon's narrative voice and I expect for many people it's going to be the sort of thing that either really works for you or really doesn't. Gideon is super casual and super slangy, in a way that matches nobody else in the book. She makes bad jokes and throws around memetic catchphrases that very patently do not exist in the necromantic space empire. An illustrative line:

"And I dislike her cavalier even more – " ("Massive slam on Protesilaus out of nowhere," said Gideon.) "-- but I would finish the challenge that sickened Sextus. Not for the high ground. But because he must learn to stare these things in the face."

I quote this example because this particular one actually worked pretty well for me - it's fun, it's self-indulgent, it's very effective at characterizing Gideon if you can roll with it as a kind of overarching metaphor for whatever slang does exist in the necromantic space empire. (Except, also, how did someone who grew up with one other very stiff-necked, very formal teen and a whole bunch of extremely decrepit adults in the farthest-off corner of a necromantic space empire learn any slang at all?) So it didn't break the book for me, but it did jolt me out of it from time to time.

( I also have plot questions that are spoilers if any other book readers want to enlighten me )

The sequel, apparently, is from Harrowhark's POV; I'm curious to find out whether the narrative voice will be as different as Harrowhark sounds in dialogue.