I read NONA THE NINTH

Luther M. Siler3 Comments

Sort of. Maybe. I saw all the words.

I have read and reviewed the first two books in Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series, Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth. There will be a fourth, supposedly this year, called Alecto the Ninth. That will apparently be the final volume. This one, Nona the Ninth, only happened because apparently Nona’s story got a bit out of Muir’s control and she had to make it its own book; early printings of Harrow actually say that Alecto will be the next book, an error that I don’t know if they corrected in later versions.

You might notice that the word “review” does not appear in the title of this post. This is not a review. I am functionally incapable of reviewing this series any longer, and I can only barely apply the verb “read” to the process my brain was attempting while my eyes were roving over the words on the page. If I had read the book, I would have understood more of it. By the end of this book, there are so many characters who are not in their own bodies that I feel like I need a fucking spreadsheet to understand what is going on. Some characters may — or may not, no one is clear– be in more than one body. My wife loves these books unreservedly; I keep asking her questions and she begins to answer them with “Well, do you remember when …” and my answer is invariably no. No, I do not remember that happening. No, I do not remember that character, who was apparently mentioned six hundred and thirty times in book two. No, the back cover copy on this book describes several different events in the book and I don’t remember any of them. Blue thing in the sky? What blue thing in the sky?

I only just found out, in conversation with her before coming in here and writing this, that not one but two of the characters are apparently planets. I missed that! I feel like a character being a planet should have been something I noticed. Two of them I definitely should have noticed. I did not. The main character, Nona, is physically nineteen years old but has the mentality of a six year old and is in some unclear way only physically six months old; the book is fairly adamant that she, Nona, is not Nona, but is in fact one of the two main characters of the two previous books, possibly in one of their actual physical bodies and possibly not, and by the end of the book I am literally unsure if any of the three of them are alive, in any sense of the word. I think Gideon’s actual physical body is running around, but someone else is in it, I think, unless we were supposed to realize that the other person who is in Gideon’s body now was always in Gideon’s body and this is not a change of the status quo but a reveal. I have no fucking idea.

Also, there are other Gideons, and at least one of their bodies is still running around, also not occupied by the spirit of that Gideon. I think. I saw a reviewer on Goodreads refer to that Gideon as G1deon to help distinguish them.

There is one person who is actually two people, but not at the same time, until they get into a fight with someone else and win it by the second person in the body shoving the owner of the other body out and taking it over, so then the one person who is actually two people is actually two people, until later, when one of them catches fire for, as near as I could tell, no fucking reason at all, and then suddenly both of them are back in the same body again only now both of them are one person. Whose name is Paul.

There is a character named Hot Sauce. Another named Pants of the Undying. A third’s name is Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity. I made one of those up. I dare you to figure out which one.

I swear to God, I’m literate. I really am.

#REVIEW: Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

Luther M. Siler4 Comments

Honest truth: I almost don’t want to write this, because in general I don’t like to write reviews of books I didn’t like. I have now read Tamsyn Muir’s debut, Gideon the Ninth, twice, and … well, it is a book that has some flaws. There are at least twice as many characters as there need to be, for starters, and each of them has at least three or four different ways they’re referred to throughout the text, so the book can be a nightmare to keep everyone straight. And I only realized at the sixty-fifth page of Harrow that the title character in this book, who was a major character in the first one, was named Harrowhark and not Harrowhawk. It took two complete readings of Gideon and a chunk of Harrow for me to get that.

So: I am not the world’s most careful reader, y’all. it’s a fact. I don’t love that about myself, but it’s still true. And I have said many, many times in this space that I prefer my narratives nice and straightforward.

Harrow the Ninth features the following:

  • An unreliable narrator who spends a lot of time hallucinating and is never clear on whether anything she’s experiencing is real
  • A bunch of other characters who lie all the Goddamned time
  • An unclear, time-jumpy, back-and-forth timeline
  • Multiple competing notions of reality
  • The main character being both dead and alive at the same time
  • Multiple other characters being both dead and alive at the same time
  • Perhaps 70% of the text in second-person, with a first-person narrator of those second-person sections, except the person who seems to be the narrator of those sections explicitly denies doing so late in the book
  • Wholesale rewriting of the events in the first book

I could not give you a plot summary of Harrow the Ninth if my Goddamned life depended on it. I finished all 510 damn pages of it and I have no idea what happened in it. Why did I do that? Because my main praise of Gideon the Ninth remains true– that Tamsyn Muir can write a hell of a sentence, and there were bits on nearly every page that I would just sit and admire for a moment before moving on. It’s just that they don’t stitch together into anything that, at least for me, was even remotely coherent or understandable. One gripe from the first book, that there were too many poorly-distinguished characters and that between the too many characters they had at least three times as many different names, is not the case here. The cast is much smaller. But the worldbuilding is still an utter mess. I have no idea at all what a regular person’s life might be like in this world, or really even if there are any regular people. One of the characters is actually God? But, like, I don’t know who he’s God to, other than maybe these five or six other people in the book? Why are God’s main servants necromancers? Why does the House system exist in the first place? Are there people out there who aren’t part of a House at all?

No fuckin’ clue.

There’s some shit with giant monsters and what I think is a metaphor for the underworld; I have no fucking idea what the deal is. Everybody’s ten thousand years old. At one point there’s a minor side character with an Eminem reference in his name.

The punch line to all of this is that I went and looked at reviews of this book on Goodreads after I finished it, and everyone seems to more or less agree with everything I just said, except that a whole lot of them seem to have considered all of this a positive, and … I just can’t. The really ridiculous thing is that this is a trilogy and Book 3 is still forthcoming and I am probably going to buy it. I can’t tell you for the life of me if Gideon or Harrow are even alive at the end of this book but I don’t want to miss the final book in the trilogy.

It doesn’t make any damn sense, I know, but that doesn’t stop it from being true.

At any rate, I decided to call that three stars, because I can’t take this book and reduce it to a star rating. Right now I just want to find someone else who also read it and just go somewhere and stare at each other for an hour.

#REVIEW: GIDEON THE NINTH, by Tamsyn Muir

Luther M. Siler2 Comments

I have preordered two books this year, both in response to pre-publication hype that lasted months and had me salivating for the book in question. The first, Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers, ended up being everything I hoped it would be. The second is Gideon the Ninth, a book I’m pretty sure I added to my Amazon wishlist in January and now somehow it is September and it’s finally been released and I’ve read it.

And … well. I wouldn’t quite use the word disappointed. Okay, yeah, I would, because I am kind of disappointed with it, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad book, it means that I went into it wanting my world changed and did not get that. Gideon the Ninth is a good book. Depending on how it survives in my memory, despite the four-star review I gave it on Goodreads I can imagine it sneaking onto my end-of-year list anyway despite its flaws. But this is going to be a rare mixed review from me; normally I don’t review four-star books– it’s usually extreme enthusiasm or warnings to stay away, and this will be neither.

Let’s start with the part I can say unreservedly positive things about: if you can get a first edition of this book, with the black-stained pages, do it. Gideon the Ninth as a physical artifact is a rare piece of art; the paper feels great, the endpapers are nice, the gold embossing on the actual hardcover is gorgeous, and there is something primordially satisfying about flipping through black-stained pages and watching them settle back down, to the point where I frequently found myself doing it for the hell of it. I tried to get video of it and couldn’t get anything I was happy with, but if you want to read this, go get it right now, because the black edges are only going to be on the first edition and you want them. The book has already gone back for a second printing, so get going.

I have never been able to use “not enough lesbian necromancers” as a complaint about a book before, although now that I think about it I can complain that literally every book I’ve ever read does not feature enough lesbian necromancers now that I’ve conceived of the idea. And make no mistake: lesbian necromancers are mentioned on the cover and the phrase “lesbian necromancers in space” has been a big part of the pre-release promo of this book. The thing is, they’re not really in space– they travel from one planet to another at one point but space travel really isn’t a thing this book is concerned about, and the lion’s share of the action takes place in a single building. When I started reading this I said on Twitter that it felt like Kameron Hurley had written a Gene Wolfe book, and that’s still true but there are undeniable echoes of Gormenghast in this as well. And yes, there are necromancers– lots of them– and Gideon is indeed a lesbian, but other than a mild crush on another character and whatever the hell her relationship is with the other major character of the book is, the “lesbian necromancer” angle is somehow left less explored than you might think.

Weak worldbuilding is kind of a major problem, really; Gideon and Harrowhawk, her necromancer, are of the Ninth House, out of (presumably) nine total, and the book basically takes representatives of Houses two through nine and dumps them into a crumbling castle to … compete? over … something? Like, they’re trying to become Lictors, or maybe it’s Lyctors, I don’t remember and the book’s in my bedroom, only what a Lictor is is never really very carefully explained, the characters themselves don’t really know what they’re being asked to do, and the very nature of the contest itself is left deliberately unclear, even to the characters. This isn’t me not being a careful enough reader; the characters are literally told that the only rule is not to open locked doors uninvited and then the dude in charge basically shrugs his shoulders and walks away. They spend most of the rest of the book collecting keys and eventually there’s somewhat of a murder mystery. Imagine Myst, only with lots of skeletons and something like twenty characters to keep track of. It’s kind of a lot. I can’t wrap my head around how this world works at all, and the author mostly doesn’t want you to.

I would forgive you if you were, at this point, wondering why I’m saying I still liked the book. And here’s the thing: this is Tamsyn Muir’s debut novel, and the last few pages make it clear that a sequel is coming, and where Muir excels is her actual, sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph writing. I just wish the whole book hung together as well as any individual page does, because her writing is gorgeous and a joy to read. Gideon herself is a fascinating character for the most part even if some of her decisions don’t necessarily make a ton of sense and her dialogue is weirdly anachronistic a lot of the time (no one else in the book talks like Gideon does) and I genuinely wanted to know more about her. I think ultimately the best comparison I can make is to Nicky Drayden’s The Prey of Gods, a book I actually didn’t finish but was nonetheless so oozing with potential that the idea that I might not buy her second book never even occurred to me. And that’s ultimately where I’m at with Gideon the Ninth: this is not a great book, but Tamsyn Muir is absolutely going to write great books in the future, and I’m excited to have gotten in on the ground floor.