Harrow the Ninth

You wake up inside a body rebuilt wrong, in a house where three immortals are waiting to see whether you are worth the trouble, and you cannot remember the parts of your life the story needs you to remember.

Muir withholds the thing everyone came back for. The first book ran on a narrator who was funny, filthy and immediately legible, and that voice is absent here by design. What replaces it is second person, an unreliable memory rather than an unreliable report, and two versions of the same past running in parallel with no signpost saying which is load-bearing.

Credit is what the book asks for and it asks early. You do not know where you are. You do not know who you were. You do not know whether the narration is on your side. The reader has to accept two hundred pages of not knowing on the understanding that the not-knowing is engineered, and Muir supplies almost no reassurance while that credit is outstanding. Either she extends it or she concludes the machine is broken. The book declines to make the case for itself until it is far too late to matter.

Confusion and dread are different states and this is where the gamble costs. Stakes need a stable model of the situation, because a reader cannot fear for what she cannot locate. So the long central stretch generates disorientation in the place where it wants tension, and when the structure finally comes clear, the payoff is retrospective. She understands what she was supposed to have felt. Feeling it at the time was not on offer.

The pronoun does more work than any single device in the series. Second person turns the narration into an address, and an address implies a speaker, so the reader spends the book quietly asking who is talking to Harrow and why they are so careful with her.

Two versions of Canaan House run against each other and the disagreement is the engine. One remembers a person the other does not. Muir keeps both stable enough to be readable and different enough to be wrong, which is a considerable technical feat performed while the reader is too disoriented to admire it.

The Lyctors bicker like flatmates and it is the funniest material Muir has written. Ten thousand years of accumulated grievance expressed as pettiness about breakfast, immortals who have run out of things to say to each other and say them anyway. Grandeur and squalor in the same sentence, held on purpose.

Ianthe is the book's best company and its most dangerous presence. Openly awful, entirely honest about being awful, and the only person willing to tell Harrow anything approaching the truth. Muir understands that a reader will follow a villain who is not lying to her.

Grief is the material here, and the structure is built out of it. A mind editing its own past to survive what happened in it, and a novel that reproduces the edit rather than describing it. That is why the difficulty exists. Nobody grieving is a reliable narrator of the thing they are grieving.

Gideon the Ninth was a locked-room mystery with jokes. This is a puzzle box about a person who has locked herself, and the sequel relationship is closer to argument than to continuation.

Difficulty as a deliberate strategy is rare in a commercial sequel and Muir gambled a bestseller on it. The publisher did not make her do this. That is worth stating plainly, whichever way the reader lands.

The book pays. Whether it pays enough is the only argument worth having about it.