“Harrow the Ninth” by Tamsyn Muir

Harrow the Ninth is the sequel to the first novel in the Locked Tomb series, Gideon the Ninth, which I wrote about already. I really liked the first book, but mostly because I loved the narration. Which puts a bit of a damper on any sequels, since the protagonist dies at the end of Gideon the Ninth. So I was skeptical, to put it mildly, that Harrow the Ninth could hold my attention.

And in some senses I was right, it took me forever to get into this book. I didn’t love the narration or the fact that Muir loves to not explain things to the reader. But once I got to the end, I did manage to appreciate a number of elements about the book.

To summarize, Harrow is now a Lyctor in the service of the Emperor, who is essentially God. She’s going through her training and learning that there are these things called Resurrection Beasts after the Emperor. They’re like planets that are attracted to his energy. These can be defeated by going into the River, which is like a highway that dead souls go along, and also has a hole into the depths of the universe. Plus you can use it to travel quickly. The snag is that Harrow is insane and keeps having flashbacks to an alternate version of the events in Gideon the Ninth.

We eventually learn that Harrow removed the memory of Gideon from her brain. In response to this, the souls of the characters who died in Gideon the Ninth have been stuck with her. Towards the end of the book Harrow realizes this, and they all team up to fight a separate ghost who is haunting Harrow and trying to kill her. While Harrow is in the River dealing with this, Gideon regains control of Harrow’s body and has to fight the Resurrection Beast. In the end though, the Emperor is murdered by his other Lyctors, Harrow’s ghost is exorcised, but Harrow decides to die so that Gideon can live.

All in all, it’s kind of a disappointing ending to the book. And I’m not sure where it’ll go from here. This entire book takes place in a kind of space training area and it’s hard for me to get bearings on it as the reader, and now for the next book we aren’t even sure who will be narrating it! But to back up.

Obviously this is a book that deals entirely with grief. Harrow has essentially “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”’d herself by removing Gideon’s memory. And the strange thing is that she never has to face that grief in the end. She just dies instead. Which doesn’t seem like it’s the best message to give the audience, to be perfectly honest.

What I did really like is that a lot of the characters, even Gideon, return by the end. Gideon’s voice was such a welcome change, it wasn’t altered at all and was still hilarious. And it was nice to see characters from the first book that weren’t fleshed out as much get some screen time.

But if what’s great about this book is just the references to the first one, is this book actually any good? I’m not sure. Sure there’s aspects of the overall metaphor that I appreciate, but I’m not sure that I would ever recommend this over the first novel. I think I’m solidly along for the ride here though, so we’ll just have to see how the next book, Nona the Ninth, does!