Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Necromancers and Cavaliers in an SF Mystery Romance “In the Myriadic Year of Our Lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the Kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.” Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth (2019) starts with the 86th attempt 18-year-old Gideon has made to escape from the House of the Ninth: Keepers of the Locked Tomb, House of the Sewn Tongue, the Black Vestals, where reanimated skeleton servants outnumber the living, who paint their faces like skulls, use soap made from human fat, eat snow leaks, and do without weather or sunlight. Gideon’s life as an indentured servant in the decayed necromantic House (“high on ancient shitty treasures but low on liquid assets”) buried in “the darkest hole of the darkest planet and the darkest part of the system” has been boring and gloomy and lonely. When Gideon’s anonymous mother dropped in, dropped Gideon, and died, all 200 children of the Ninth then present quickly succumbed to some virus that somehow spared Gideon and her lone enemy-playmate-mistress Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of Drearburh, Heir to the Ninth House. Well, no wonder Gideon wants to abscond to join the army! This time she’ll surely succeed, won’t she? Alas, 17-year-old Harrowhark foils Gideon’s attempt at the last second to inflict maximum pain on her long-time whipping girl, whom she then informs must become her cavalier, her sworn swordswoman/companion of the “one flesh, one end” variety, which means that she has to take a crash course in manners and fencing (after growing up fighting with a two-handed longsword) and paint her face skull white, all in order to enter with Harrowhark an unprecedented competition to be held at the First House among the top necromancer adepts and their cavaliers from the Second to the Ninth Houses. The winner is to become Lyctor, “an undying necromantic saint” and disciple to the Emperor. If Harrowhark wins, she’ll ostensibly set Gideon free from the Ninth House. Gideon decides to play along. After Gideon and Harrow arrive at Canaan House, the beautiful, dilapidated, labyrinthine site of the competition, the novel speeds up, as they meet a variety of strange and savory “people,” including the priest-host Teacher and the competition: the Second House’s martial discipline pair, the Third’s twin adepts (one gorgeous, one wan) and snide cavalier, the Fourth’s naïve and jumpy fourteen-year-old boy and girl, the Fifth’s hospitable middle-aged couple, the Sixth’s ultra-cool library-medicine experts, the Seventh’s dying adept and hulking cavalier, and the Eighth’s puritanical young uncle adept and stolid old nephew cavalier. Except for being advised not to open locked doors, the competition has no guidelines or rules. Muir does employ rules for her magic system, based on Thanergy (death energy) and Thalergy (life energy), which enable Bone, Flesh, and Spirit magics. One neat touch is that because the void of space has no life and hence no death, travel between planets is risky for necromancers, because they can’t do their usual stuff then. Another neat touch is Harrowhark’s ability to conjure up skeletons from bone fragments: “From as little as a buried femur, a hidden tibia, skeletons formed for Harrow in perfect wholeness, and as Gideon neared their mistress, a tidal wave of reanimated bones crested down on her.” Although the novel at first looks like a standard YA story about an unappreciated and unloved orphan who is super talented and Destined for Big Things, albeit set in an necromantic solar system, it morphs into an And Then There Were None murder mystery and a Hunger Games last one standing challenge and even a cracked romance. And in the end Muir bracingly feels no need to fulfill reader expectations. I enjoyed reading this book because I cared about the characters and wanted to find out what would happen and who would survive and who was the villain and why. I especially loved the hostile odd-couple relationship between Gideon (“Griddle” or “Nav” to Harrowhark) and Harrowhark (Harrow or “my crepuscular queen” to Gideon). They are contrasting and complementing frenemies whose banter is amusing and whose backgrounds reveal unexpected depths. Harrow is a brilliant, stick-like, unhealthy (sweating blood and passing out when overdoing the necromancy), adept heir, Gideon a muscular, physical (“thinking with her arms”), instinctive, cavalier orphan. Can they get in formation to win let alone survive the competition? Or will they just act all “Touch me again, and I’ll kill you” and “I hate it when you act like a butt-touched nun”? Lots of exciting violent action: blades, bone constructs, duels, boss fights, and the like. The climax is full scale and the resolution surprising and moving. And it’s well written—I found myself constantly cracking up and jotting down great figures of speech or lines or descriptions, like-- Similes: “Crux advanced like a glacier with an agenda.” “So with extreme reluctance, as of an animal not wanting to take medicine, Gideon tilted her face up to get painted.” “… eyes glittering like beetles beneath the veil, mouth puckered up like a cat's asshole.” “Harrow slithered more deeply underneath the covers like a bad black snake...” “Cold air wheezed out like a pent-up ghost.” Lines: “Anyone can learn to fight. Hardly anyone learns to think.” “She wouldn't have passed muster with a glaucomic nun in a room with the lights shot out.” Dialogue “Your vow of silence is variable, Ninth.” “I'm variably penitent.” Description: “It was just simply suddenly there, like a nightmare, a squatting vertiginous hulk, a nonsense of bones feathering into long spidery legs, leaning back on them fearfully and daintily, trailing jellyfish stingers made-up of millions and millions of teeth, all set into each other like a jigsaw. It shivered its stingers, then stiffened all of them at once with a sound like a cracking whip. There was so much of it.” The boss fight goes on a little too long. And it is improbable that with their 10,000-year history, including lots of scientific and necromantic research and interplanetary (at least) space travel and space shuttles, they’d no longer use guns. But it was a great read, a little like Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Empire of the Necromancers” (1932), but with compelling characters, amusing conversations, and moving revelations, and I’m looking forward to the second book. Especially as it’s read by the splendid Moira Quirk. View all my reviews
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