Harrow the Ninth

About Harrow the Ninth

Harrow the Ninth is the second book in Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series and one of the most formally audacious works of fantasy published in recent years. Following Gideon the Ninth's joyful mayhem, Harrow takes an almost opposite approach: fragmentary, unreliable, written partially in second person, and structured around a mystery that the narrator herself is unable to solve because the truth has been hidden from her own mind. Harrowhark Nonagesimus, the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House who performed an impossible act of necromantic surgery on herself at the end of the previous book, wakes aboard the Emperor's ship as one of his new Lyctors - immortal saint-soldiers - with no memory of the cavalier she sacrificed. The Gideon-shaped hole in Harrow's consciousness is the book's central wound, and Muir builds her entire narrative around the question of what happens when grief is too large to be consciously carried. The second-person sections - you did this, you were this, you thought this - create an intimacy that is also a kind of entrapment, forcing the reader into identification with a character who is actively unreliable and occasionally monstrous. Muir uses this disorientation not as a gimmick but as characterization: the fractured narration mirrors Harrow's fractured mind. The book rewards patience and rereading. Details that seem incidental in the first read reveal themselves as crucial in the second. Muir is playing a long game with her readers, and the reveals - when they come - have the quality of puzzle pieces finally placed correctly after being handled wrongly for chapters. Harrow the Ninth is not a book for every reader. It demands that you trust the author more than you trust the narrator, and it makes you work for every satisfaction it provides. But for readers willing to surrender to its strange demands, it is an experience unlike anything else in contemporary fantasy.

Tropes & Themes