Harrow the Ninth

[netgirl_y2k]

I sometimes feel like I'm being a bit negative when I talk about books because I spend more time talking about the books I didn't like than the books I did. Part of it is that it's often easier/more fun (delete as appropriate) to talk about what you didn't like, and part of it is that bad books are often bad in interesting ways while I find it harder to articulate why I like the things that I like.

For instance last month I read The Searcher, and it's good. If you like literary thrillers you've probably already read Tana French, and if you like her books then this is another one. It was good, but I don't have a whole lot of value to say about it.

And not all bad books are interesting. Her Lady to Love was bad, but it was bad in the way that most f/f regency romances I've read (a genre I now read more in hope than expectation) have been bad.

Which brings us to Harrow the Ninth a book which is very, very good, but which also infuriated me so much that I wish to load it into a rocket and shoot it into the actual sun.


Okay, so, my e-book copy of HtN was five hundred and nine pages, and the first four hundred of those were indecipherable bullshit, and deliberately so. It starts in media res, lurches in and out of second person, seems only tangentially related to the previous book, and the world-building and internal logic of this necromantic space empire is, er, mushy at best.

I mean, deliberately trying to alienate your readers is a bold artistic choice, sure, but I don't have to like it.

So why did I keep reading? Two reasons. 1) Tamsyn Muir is a really, really good writer; line by line, in the technical word-handling sense, HtN is a really good read. Muir can turn one hell of a phrase, construct one hell of a sentence, her dialogue is witty, colourful, and in places genuinely, darkly funny. 2) I've been reading HtN since November, and the main reason I didn't abandon it on one of the many, many occasions that I was tempted to was that I realised that if I put it down I'd never get back to it. I read Gideon the Ninth in the summer of last year and I'd already forgotten enough of the detail that I'd forgotten Cytherea had been a character in the first book; the animated corpse wandering the halls blended in with the assorted other nonsense I wasn't supposed to understand.

By 2022 I am going to remember precisely zero of this and Alecto the Ninth is going to read like nothing so much as a collection of syllabels to me.

The other thing I can't get on with in this series isn't even about the books, it's a me thing - I can't get behind the central relationship because I, well, I don't like Gideon. I thought I liked her in GtN, but just as the necromantic space empire was starting to come together for me as a coherent universe with its own rules and internal consistency this tumblr millennial turned up and started quoting memes all over the place, and I know it's a deliberate choice and all, but ugh.

I actually shipped Harrow/Ianthe more than Harrow/Gideon, and don't get me wrong, I know that Ianthe's the worst, but at least she feels organic to that world.

But after all that, after slogging through the bulk of the novel over four months, I stayed up way, way past my bedtime because I had to read those explosive, propulsive final one hundred pages all at once, I just had to know, and I am super mad about it.

Comments

[likeadeuce]

I understand a lot of your HtN feelings and I had all this + really not giving a shit about the world building? But I'm glad I read it?

WTF Tamsyn Muir.

[netgirl_y2k]

Yeah, I spent most of my time with this novel going '...I recognise that you've made a choice here, just... why, though?'

I am glad I read it, and I will probably read Alecto the Ninth too. Even though I'm honestly not sure why?

[ravurian]

+1 on all of this. I was furious about it. The moment I twigged I was genuinely so relieved and simultaneously incandescent with rage. Funny, ain't it?

[netgirl_y2k]

It's not fair, I know, but I get so much angrier at things that get so close to being something I'd like and then do something else than I do at things where it's obvious I'm not the intended audience from the get go.

Which now I come to think about it, probably explains my feels about Happiest Season too.

[stranger]

Her Lady to Love was bad, but it was bad in the way that most f/f regency romances I've read ...

How, then, are most f/f regency romances bad? I haven't run into enough of them to generalize, though I have to say I wasn't overly impressed by two or three I've seen. The one impressive exception is Heather Rose Jones' Daughter of Mystery, which is more of a fantasy Ruritanian story, but starts with a close approximation of Regency society and then segues into magical intrigue, while the two heroines grow closer. It's an edge case, but at least it isn't thin.

[netgirl_y2k]

I think it's that one of the main tropes of m/f regency romances is that the heroine is playing with a very limited set of cards, especially financially - Bridgerton for instance kinks really hard on this - but that's not a trope that translates well to f/f. In Her Lady to Love both heroines meet in the marriage mart where they both have to marry for family or financial reasons, and when they get their HEA and run off together the book never engages with the question of how they're going to, you know, keep a roof over their heads or food on the table.

There are different ways around this - Daughter of Mystery does it by being set in a fantasy world with different rules, The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics did it by handwaving male primogeniture out of existence, and Proper English (the best of the bunch) doesn't bring it up at all. But there's always this tension where one of the fundamental tropes of the genre is in conflict with the type of relationship the story is about.

[stranger]

This is a fair point. One charm of the m/f regency genre is seeing a heroine reach her goals by wit and social nous, but of course there has to be money somewhere to support the lifestyle.

[adafrog]

Part of it is that it's often easier/more fun (delete as appropriate) to talk about what you didn't like, and part of it is that bad books are often bad in interesting ways while I find it harder to articulate why I like the things that I like.
Absolutely.