“There had been another girl who grew up alongside Harrow—but she had died before Harrow was born.”
“Harrow the Ninth”—the sequel to “Gideon the Ninth” and the middle book in the Locked Tomb trilogy—is, in the words of its author Tamsyn Muir, “a story about how absolutely nothing happened the way you thought it did.”
We’ll come back to that.
Sequels are famously difficult. It’s the sort of fact that’s brought up so often one might justifiably doubt the truth of it, but unless there’s an army of authors out there lying about how hard it is in order to provoke sympathy, it’s true. Fortunately, there’s plenty of advice to be had about doing it: The sequel shouldn’t simply be a continuation. It should break the rules of its predecessor. It should be the antithesis to the first book’s thesis.
Harrow the Ninth is a book which looks at this advice, steeples its fingers together, and says, “Watch this.”
I won’t spoil the ending of the first book, except to say that it is so strange, its world so gleefully unstraightforward, that one of the biggest questions I had afterwards was whether Gideon would (or could) appear in the sequel at all. I thought no. Several of my friends said yes. We were all right, give or take. Gideon isn’t simply absent in Harrow the Ninth—her absence is weaponized in the service of narrative. It is so central to the experience of reading the book that it can’t really be called an absence at all. It is the contradiction at the centre of a sequel so full of contradictions that they start before the story even begins. (This leads me to a piece of advice: bookmark the dramatis personae.)
Harrow the Ninth opens with our heroine—Harrowhark Nonagesimus, now Harrowhark the First, ninth saint to serve the King Undying, &c—on a besieged space station occupied by “God, three assholes,” and her erstwhile enemy Ianthe (also an asshole). (I’m once again cribbing from Muir’s tumblr which, I cannot emphasize strongly enough, is an unmitigated delight.) The book ends half an hour later with the Emperor’s (i.e. God’s, on reflection also an asshole) murder. This isn’t a spoiler. We’re told as much up front. In between—and I say this taking Gideon the Ninth for a baseline—it is powerfully weird.
Tamsyn Muir lives and writes in Oxford in the UK
Harrow the Ninth is a more difficult book to read than its predecessor. It’s told (for good reason) primarily in second person. The swashbuckling sarcasm that powered Gideon through the first book is swapped out for Harrow’s more restrained point of view. She’s uncertain and insecure. She’s lonely. All the things Gideon cheerfully ignored in the first book weigh heavy on Harrow. Her world is shifting constantly under her feet—because nothing happened the way we thought it did. To make matters worse, it’s doing so in ways that are often her own fault. Or better said: in ways she chose for herself. To read Harrow is to be mired right alongside her.
This isn’t to say the book isn’t funny—on one memorable occasion I was treated to the most atrocious sex joke I have ever encountered in print, thank you Ms. Muir but there was really no need—but it’s less fun.
Characteristically, this is both the book’s greatest weakness and its greatest strength. At times the narrative is confusing. Things happen for opaque reasons. Mysterious conversations are overheard. Necromantic details are discussed at length. But have faith. Let go, in the moment, of the desire to understand exactly what is happening, and you discover that the Locked Tomb trilogy is not meant to be a puzzle box. There’s a mystery here to be solved if you’re so inclined, but it’s not the foundation on which the series rests. Even more so than Gideon the Ninth, Harrow is a character study. We get to know Harrow through a process of reactions and counter-reactions, contradictions and reflections, two steps back for every three steps forward. We begin to recognize when she is lying to other people and when she is lying to herself. Her character isn’t so much developed as revealed, one facet exposed at a time. It’s beautiful. Often, it’s heart-breaking.
Have faith, and you will be rewarded with the final third of the book, in which—have no fear, even if I wanted to spoil it I frankly wouldn’t know where to begin—everything shifts sideways. There is a moment that made me gasp, a deft maneuver of narrative tied inextricably to character, a gimmick of the best kind. There’s a minor character, given a personality quirk and condemned to be the butt of jokes throughout, who blossoms in one of the most unexpectedly poignant resolutions to a character arc I’ve ever read. Questions are answered; mysteries revealed; the Internationale quoted in the same breath as Eminem; at least one meme referenced; and through it all, the tension of a romance that—of course—isn’t really a romance at all.
This brings me to the end.
The closest comparison I can think of for the strangeness of the Locked Tomb trilogy isn’t a book, but the Zero Escape series of video games—a series that failed to stick the landing so badly, it was later reissued minus the third installment. Fans of that series will understand my reticence in looking forward to the conclusion of a trilogy.
But even with this in mind, I say: bring on “Alecto the Ninth.”
Byline
Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko is a writer and translator living in Maine. He is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop (2019) and his work has appeared (or will appear) in such venues as Clarkesworld and Escape Pod. Follow him on Twitter @filiphdz.
A diverse collection of sci fi and fantasy stories and poems about Western and Eastern dragons and their relationships with families and humans, blood and gold.