Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Crash Course in Being a Lyctor OR Where’s Gideon? Harrow the Ninth (2020) starts not long after Gideon the Ninth (2019) ends: young necromancers Harrowhark Nonagesimus of the Ninth House and her rival Ianthe Tridentarius of the Third have become new Lyctors, Saints of God. Both rookie Lyctors are to get a crash course in protecting God, the Emperor Undying, from planet-eating Resurrection Beasts and their insectoid Heralds. This will involve entering and exiting the River (of death) and developing life (thalurgy) and death (thanurgy) magic abilities, as well as learning how to sword fight and how to kill planets, all while receiving snide comments from 10,000-year-old Lyctor teachers (who call them “baby” Lyctors) and too sympathetic support from the man who became God or the God who became man. The novel begins with “Prologue: The Night Before the Emperor’s Murder,” as the Heralds of the 50,000 kilometers in diameter Resurrection Beast #7 are threatening to break into the House of God, the Mithraeum, a huge space station, after which author Tamsyn Muir writes back into two past plot strands to work up to that Prologue’s climax, with chapters counting down till the seemingly inevitable murder of the Emperor. The plot strand starting “nine months before the Emperor’s murder” depicts Harrowhark’s Lyctor training aboard the space station, where she is accompanied almost everywhere by “the body,” a kind of revenant only she can see. Is she insane or haunted? “Something deep inside flickered in your nervous system that was a bit like an emotion, but it died, much to your relief.” The second-person narrator, by the way, addresses Harrowhark as “you.” “You picked your way back through the concentric rings of ground acetabula you had laid, the fine gritty layers of femur, and you stood in the centre and breathed.” Will Harrowhark and Ianthe get enough training and information to be able to prevent the impending death of God? "You spurred your exoskeleton into a trot." But what the what? Where the heck is Gideon Nav!? At the end of the first book (narrated by the irreverent, foul, and funny Gideon), Harrow’s cavalier sacrifices herself to enable Harrow to become a Lyctor, so it’s not surprising not to find her living and narrating this second novel, but no one—neither Harrow nor her frenemy Ianthe nor her Lyctor teachers nor God—ever even mention Gideon. It's as if she's been erased from history! In fact, in the list of Lyctors and cavaliers preceding the novel, the name of Harrowhark’s cavalier has been crossed into illegibility. You’d think that necromancers would retain some memory of the deceased, if not resurrect her. A moving source of suspense while reading this novel, then, is wondering what happened to Gideon. That’s not all. The second-person narration main story chapters alternate with third-person chapters that start “fourteen months before the Emperor’s murder” and rewrite the events we read in the first novel, wherein Harrowhark goes to participate in a competition to become a Lyctor in Canaan House accompanied by Gideon Nav as her cavalier. In this second novel, confoundingly, Harrowhark’s cavalier for Canaan House is the cowardly, hulking Ortus Nigenad, who in tense moments recites lines from his own epic poetry. Thus, these past chapters take place in an apparently alternate reality with different cavaliers and necromancers getting offed at different times in different ways than in the first novel. To avoid spoiling the story, I will only say that Tamsyn Muir knows what she’s doing. Like the first novel, this one is full of compelling characters (though I do miss Gideon!), interesting relationships between them (especially Ianthe and Harrowhark!), spicy banter, interesting necromantic magical systems (bone magic!), and exciting and unpredictable graphic violent action (the last third of the novel is a non-stop ride of bloody and bony revelation). This novel adds some new things--like the history and personality of God (a “man-shaped eclipse” who has an ordinary face with monstrous “white-rimmed primordial” eyes of “oil on carbon” and who seems fatherly—call him John—but also resurrected nine planets and a sun ten thousand years ago), and the two enemies of the Empire: the Blood of Eden, a rebel cult dedicated to the extirpation of necromancers, and the Resurrection Beasts who are souls of dead planets who eat living planets and are drawn to God and His Lyctors as ships at night to beacons. As in the first book, there are MANY cool things here, from the fact that Harrowhark (an emaciated necromancer) must lug around and sleep with a giant two-handed “heinous sword” (didn’t Gideon favor a two-hander?) that hates her and makes her barf whenever she touches it and can only be wielded if she magics up an exoskeleton to augment her “muscles,” to all the fun necromancy stuff, from “firing” bone missiles and using fragments of bone and permanent ash to raise monstrous skeleton constructs, to insulating wires with yellow fat and regenerating one’s damaged bones and tissues. And great lines, like “I mastered death... I wish I had done the smarter thing and mastered time,” and “Poetry is one of the most beautiful shadows a civilization can cast across time.” And original similes, like “The planet was warm like the inside of a mouth,” sometimes becoming mini-epic similes, like “Memory hit Harrowhark Nonagesimus with the inexorable gravity of a satellite sucked from orbit, flinging itself to die on the surface of its bounden planet; the world hit her like a fall.” And sublime descriptions, like “For the first time you got a sense of the enormity of the flag ship, its scintillating dark and rainbow-hued steel like an oil spill, the interlocking skeletons tessellated over the whole boxy structure, so that the vessel seemed an enormous moving ossuary.” And witty snarky talk, like “We must work with what we've got as the flesh magician said to the leper,” and "I can't tell if you are a once in a lifetime genius or an insane imbecile or both." Audiobook reader Moira Quirk enhances the novel and does some great character voices (e.g., Crux and Duty), though her condescending female character voices for Harrow, Ianthe, and Mercy overlap a bit. This book entertained and moved me (view spoiler)[especially when Gideon finally appears and starts narrating and kicking ass (hide spoiler)]. And I get a kick out of perusing the many works of fan art like this one: I’m looking forward to the third volume in the series!</["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]> View all my reviews
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