Harrow the Ninth is a 2020 science fantasy novel by Tamsyn Muir. It’s the sequel to the series’ debut, Gideon the Ninth and overall the second entry in The Locked Tomb series. As the title implies, the reticent and dour Harrowhark Nonagesimus becomes the main character in this book as she wades through the consequences of Gideon Nav’s self-sacrifice at the end of the first installment. The primary conceit of the novel, however, is that not all is as it seems in Harrow’s telling of the first year of her Lyctorhood.

What struck me immediately as I began reading was the variety of perspectives given by the narrator(s). First off, Harrow’s continuing story from the end of Gideon the Ninth is told in a second person perspective. Rare enough on its own, the use of this perspective is compounded by the fact that the narrator is unidentified. The text reads as if someone is writing a letter to Harrow with many uses of the word ‘you’ to refer to harrow. My initial thought as I was reading was that the narrator itself was Harrow recounting the story from a later time. It’s clear that the narrator has intimate knowledge of Harrow’s thoughts and feelings through the story, so that was my natural conclusion.

Of course, this is only half the story; there’s a second narrator, this time in traditional first person from Harrow’s perspective. The chapters trade off between two narratives, one the natural continuation of Gideon’s story while the second, first-person one is a twisted and remade version of the events of Gideon.

This retelling has characters mixed around or entirely missing. Perplexingly, characters who perished at certain points in Gideon instead survive longer than they should have, making me question my own recollection of events. There’s no in-text explanation for this for much of the runtime of Harrow. It instead occupies this strange, dreamlike quality because it assumes that the reader would intimately know how wrong this retelling is. 

What results is an infuriatingly puzzling yet fascinating example of an unreliable narrator diegetically incorporated into the writing itself. Between every chapter I found myself taking stock of what I’d read and trying to square it with what I thought was going on on a macro-scale. I revised my theories multiple times as I read, making me feel at times like a detective uncovering the truth of the events. I had the feeling that Muir had managed to write a 500-page riddle that took the near entirety of those pages to piece together. 

Muir’s unique writing style extends to the dialogue of the characters as well. Since Gideon, I’d been impressed by the sheer vocabulary on display. I found myself thinking that it felt like an anatomy textbook had vomited itself into the manuscript for Harrow, but it’s appropriate for the narrative. The necromancers that make up the main cast are experts in corporal magic. They naturally use all sorts of medical and anatomical terms in their speech that make perfect sense in context, even if my limited knowledge can’t exactly parse their meaning. All too often I was finding myself looking up the words, or even asking my medically-trained family for context, and as soon as I read the details of what strange bodily part was being discussed I would laugh at the perfect strangeness of the term.

Harrow, herself an expert in bone manipulation, could mentally identify the exact locations where she becomes injured. On other occasions, she’s able to channel her magic, here called thanergy, to precisely manipulate specific bones, conveying a sense of the strategy involved in the book’s magic system.

Regardless of what I loved in Harrow, I’d be remiss to gloss over what I consider a bit of a slow start. Something I noticed in Gideon as well is the writing’s almost aggressive lack of exposition. I do appreciate Muir letting the reader figure out things as they go along; that said, both books in the series so far do suffer from very difficult beginnings, just because there is so little actual explanation of the setting and the admittedly complex magic system. Most if not all questions do get answered by the end. In spite of this, I did struggle through the beginning as a result of not exactly understanding what was going on (which was compounded by the confusing retelling of Gideon’s events). This method of writing does help to draw the reader into the world, once they’re acclimatized, but I can see it causing a lot of people pause; I almost put down Gideon before I was able to really get into it.

I left Harrow the Ninth feeling like I’d just unwound a most fascinating puzzle box. When the final reveal actually unfolds, I felt like I had triumphed in successfully solving the conundrum of the story. Nothing is obvious prima facie to the reader; Harrow is the sort of book that you have to trust the author to hold the curtain closed and confirm the details about later on.

When I reached the finale, and with the answer before me, I was able to look back at all the events of the novel and make sense of what I’d read. In an exciting twist, the true identity of the second-person narrator is revealed and actually becomes first-person in a lexical turnabout that truly astounded me as I was reading.

It’s not all just wordplay and mindbenders; Muir was able to convey a message of learning to rely on the people who want to support you. I would normally say that it’s a somewhat basic and uninspired theme, but I’m leaning towards it working well for Harrowhark as it encapsulates the journey it was obvious she needed to take. Harrow was a supporting character in Gideon, and we were able to feel Gideon’s frustration at the rugged and infuriating individualism Harrow embraced, much to the detriment of her own health.

In Harrow, with the identity of the narrator and the meaning of the twisted flashbacks revealed, it makes sense to embrace this theme. Harrow is a career climber, willing to step on others to ascend the ladder. She refuses to properly process the sacrifice that Gideon made in the first installment in laying down her life for her, to the point where it feels like Harrow tried to carve any memories of her out of her mind. In the climax, Harrow is forced to rely on the necromancers and cavaliers primary from Gideon the Ninth in the face of her own helplessness and it truly feels like Harrowhark ends the story as a more developed person. This lets a rather simple theme form a level of nuance that truly works in Harrow the Ninth.