Way back in February, so long ago that dinosaurs still walked among us and we had to use spider skillets to make baked goods at the flames of an open hearth, the absolute angels at Tor sent me an ARC of Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth. It would be hard for me to convey the pure, all-consuming joy that I felt while read Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth — hard both because language fails when one attempts to express transcendence, and also because in these quarantimes one struggles to understand happiness.
Still, though, if you cast your mind back through the mists of time, you may recall that in the Before, when one felt the strange and alien emotion Joy, one wished to share it. Which I did! Except not that many people had read Harrow the Ninth yet so I had to track down people on Twitter and badger them into talking to me about Harrow the Ninth for an hour, and that is this podcast. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below, or download it directly to take with you on the go!
The Guests
Constance Grady is a culture writer for Vox and fearless leader of the Vox Book Club. Follow her on Twitter!
Bria LaVorgna is the managing editor at Tosche Station and our nation’s most preeminent scholar of the life and works of Dr. Aphra. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram!
Natalie Zutter is a playwright, podcaster, and pop culture critic who writes about (among many things!) TV, books, fan culture. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram and find her at New Play Exchange.
Here are some useful time signatures, if you’d like to avoid being spoiled, get totally spoiled, or listen to some people screaming about That One Thing (lol I’m kidding, there’s no One Thing in this book that’s so specifically outrageous it’s immediately identifiable as The thing):
2:05 – Non-spoilery reactions
12:00 – All the spoilers
47:17 – We address that one threesome
You can get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. As a brand new feature, you can also follow me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Storygraph! If you like what we do, support us on Patreon. Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much).
Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour
Transcripts by: Sharon of Library Hungry
Transcript
Harrow Transcript
Jenny: Welcome to the Reading the End Bookcast, with the Demographically Similar Jennys, except in this case, just me, Gin Jenny, and I am joined by a plethora of wonderful guests, Bria, Constance, and Natalie. Can y’all introduce yourselves and tell the listeners who you are?
B: Sure! My name is Bria LaVorgna. Usually I do Star Wars podcasts, so I feel like I usually have different credentials that I list here, and right now I don’t know what to say, except that I really really loved Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, so much that I dressed like Harrow the other week, so… yeah! That’s me.
C: Hey, I’m Constance Grady, I’m the book critic for Vox.com, and I guess my big cred for this is that I loved Gideon the Ninth with all my heart and then I made like all the policy wonks at Vox read it and get very disconcerted about why I was so into it, and then they read it and they were like, I get it now.
N: I’m Natalie Zutter. I used to be a staff writer at Tor.com, when Gideon the Ninth was being produced and published and released, so it was really fun to be in the background and promo side of that. I now am a contributor for Tor.com, as well as Den of Geek and elsewhere, and got to still pull some strings to get an early copy of Harrow, and I’m so happy I did.
J: Yeah, I have no idea why they sent me an early copy of Harrow, but I’m very very excited about it. I’ve been having a rough 2020, and I feel like I deserved it.
C: I think we all deserved it. We all deserve something this beautiful in our lives.
J: Yeah. So I wanted to start with a brief, non-spoiler section, and I’d like to start by doing a quick roundtable of what everyone’s non-spoiler overall reactions were to Harrow the Ninth. Bria, do you want to kick us off, as someone who has dressed as Harrow?
B: Tamsyn… She… I don’t even know what to say, what you can say without really doing spoilers, because I would like to list this book as the cause of my death and also thank her for giving me my life. And that’s about all I can say about this book in spoiler-free mode.
C: I actually found this book at the beginning a little less immediately accessible than Gideon was, right? Because with Gideon you get that really fun tension between this baroque, overwrought world of like, skulls and everything is made out of human body parts and it’s super gross, and then Gideon has that very irreverent, fun voice, and the tension between them kind of powers you through, and it’s sort of easy and fun and relaxed. Whereas in Harrow, we’re in Harrow’s head, and she is not irreverent the way Gideon is. She’s actually reverent. She’s a nun! So I think for me, a big part of sort of getting into the groove of this book was moving away from the tension of the first book and into this sense of the—instead of enjoying the gap between narrator and world, sort of rooting for more of a gap between narrator and world. What I wanted from this book was for Harrow to stop being so worshipful, and to sort of lose her religious faith, and the tension there ended up being what pushed me forward. It was sort of like the difference between a fun action comedy that gets really dark at the end and just straight-up horror.
N: Like Constance, I also found it a little less accessible at the beginning, and it was that peculiar feeling when you fall head over bones for Gideon. I knew, obviously, that it wasn’t gonna be her voice in this, and when the cover got revealed there was the excerpt that kind of primed people for the second person. I had the tiniest bit of disappointment because it wasn’t as easy to just sink into it; it really felt like you had to work for it, which of course is so fitting with it being Harrow’s story, like it’s stubborn, and it doesn’t give much away, and—yeah, you really had to earn it. There were parts of it that were difficult, but especially on a second read, I just love it. I’ll never love it as much as Gideon, but I find it such an excellent companion piece.
J: This is so fascinating, because I identify a lot more with Harrow than I did with Gideon, so for me, this was—I think both of them started a little slow, but for me, this was so much more a book that I could identify with. And I loved Gideon, but I think I enjoyed this one exponentially more than I enjoyed Gideon, and I loved Gideon the Ninth.
B: I feel like this book made you go, What the heck is going on? What the heck is going on? so much in the early section! Because, I mean, I guess if we say it it’ll be a spoiler, but I think I spent the first third of the book trying to figure out what was happening. That kept me engaged in the best way. Whereas Gideon the Ninth felt a bit more straightforward at times than this one did, with all the POV changes and everything.
C: I also identify with Harrow more than I did with Gideon, and I think that’s part of why I immediately latch onto Gideon, because Harrow hates herself, right? So when you’re stuck in her head you kind of get that sense of self-loathing, dragging you in, and it’s sort of claustrophobic and closed off. But then the POV changes really jar you and sort of create an escape, almost, from the self-loathing and the stultifyingness of that, because you’re suddenly lost in your own bewilderment. It’s very challenging to me! This book was putting up a fight! It did not want to let me in. It wants to resist your being, in a way that I thought was super interesting and made the end feel so earned and so worth it.
N: Yeah, I think Harrow definitely had the bigger emotional character journey. I think Gideon very much fulfills something she didn’t know until the end that she needed to fulfill, but Harrow I think was much more about self-discovery and truly coming to some sort of peace.
C: Yeah, the way Gideon’s emotional arc in the first one is almost more Harrow’s arc, because what she wants is for Harrow to give her acceptance and love. And once she receives that, then her arc kind of completes itself.
J: I’m like rubbing my collarbone, because I just care about them both so much. I just want them both to find happiness.
C: Oh God. Oh God.
B: It’s so hard not to say the best—or what I think is the best line in the book right now, because that’ll move us right into spoiler territory. But it’s so relevant to everything we’re talking around!
J: Well, we’ll get to it. I mean, the other thing that I think I can say that’s not a spoiler is that this book, even more than the previous one, although it’s true of both of them, felt so completely free of the male gaze. It was the most freeing and joyful reading experience that I’ve had in a while. I mean, Harrow even more than Gideon just doesn’t give a shit, and even though Harrow hates herself so much, it somehow still—the reading experience felt like it was buoying me up in these troubled times.
C: Yes! And especially I think for—the descriptions of Ianthe as being actively ugly but somehow also deeply beautiful to Harrow at the same time, I think are so key to that. She’s this really weird liminal figure in her liminal spaces that just is so clearly not written for any male gaze to appreciate. She’s just oddly beautiful and oddly repulsive to Harrow at the same time.
N: Also cause she spent so much of Gideon as a sort of shadow figure and letting everyone put their own projections onto her, and I feel like that’s a very feminine thing, where she was always the not-pretty one and the one who’s clearly in Coronabeth’s shadow, and then obviously that gets reversed. I feel like there’s a familiarity to that that leads to a certain experience.
C: I love that moment in Gideon where Harrow refers to Corona as “the big one” and Ianthe as “the other one.” It’s just so like telling to their dynamic: Even Harrow is overwhelmed by Corona and has allowed Ianthe to slip away.
J: We’ll get into it, but I absolutely loved Ianthe’s position in this book compared to in Gideon the Ninth, which I just reread earlier this week. I’m also curious what y’all think—because I’m very much a second installment of the trilogy girl—so I’m interested what y’all think about this as a second installment in the trilogy. I’m very like, The Two Towers, Emily Climbs, Empire Strikes Back.
C: This is tricky. I’m very agnostic on a second book. I think it’s the hardest part of a trilogy to make work, and when it does work, it’s like amazing and so satisfying. But when it doesn’t, you just sort of feel like you’re marking time until the resolution. I think in a certain way, it’ll be hard for me to tell whether I really loved Harrow the Ninth as a structural component of this trilogy until the third book comes out and I’ve been able to read it. As it stands now, it has done a satisfying job of both having its own standalone arcs and deepening the larger mythology and sort of setting up the stakes for book three in a way that I’m excited to dive into.
N: To the deepening of the mythology part, I feel like that’s so often the goal of the second book or a second movie, is to sort of: You’ve learned a lot about this world, and then they kind of keep expanding the borders so that they’re not just telling the same story, and I feel like sometimes it can be difficult… Like with Rainbow Rowell’s second book, Wayward Son, is here. I didn’t love it as much as I did Carry On, because I felt like it had to expand the world, and it did so in fascinating ways, but it felt like it sacrificed some of the action for that, and like the status quo didn’t feel like it changed a ton by the end, so that by the time we get into the third, it was like, well, I had this side quest, and it was great, but I don’t know if I feel like the characters have changed a lot. But with Harrow, I felt like it was a very successful second book in that it brought so much more context to the Nine Houses, which I will say took me way too long to catch on to some of the stuff.
J: Oh, God, same.
N: And the Resurrection, and all that. It was a whole new cast of characters. But at the same time, if I hadn’t known that Alecto the Ninth is coming out, then I feel like I could have read this as a duology, and that would have fit the world that Tamsyn had created of these pairs.
B: That makes a lot of sense. I agree about not really knowing how to feel about it as a middle installment until we get the next book, because if we hadn’t had that last chapter, I agree that these two could have stood by themselves perfectly fine. I also admit that the author is way smarter than me, and I have no idea what she’s going to do at any given time, so I’m just like, please just give me the next book and let me just lie on the ground and contemplate my life after I finish it, for two hours. Again. And thank her for the privilege.
J: I thought it did a really great job of resolving some major mysteries but then also both deepening existing mysteries and introducing new ones in a way that made me so, so fucking thirsty for the third book.
B: One of the first things I wanted to do when I finished reading Harrow was go back and read Gideon the Ninth, and see how not only a lot of the things that you found out towards the end of Gideon, how she had seeded them earlier on, but also how different things that we learned in Harrow the Ninth sort of came into play, and you just read it, and you’re like, Oh, oh my God. Oh my God. John something. How dare you. I can’t believe he’s named John. Okay, sorry, I went further.
J: Yeah, I reread Gideon the Ninth, and there’s a part where they find like a note that says “One flesh one end G&P” and I was like OH SHIT.
B: YES! Oh, my God. I can’t even hear the phrase “one flesh one end” without wanting to curl into myself and cry a little.
J: Oh God, same, absolutely same. Okay, you know what? We’ve been very restrained. I think it’s fine for us to get into spoilers now. Does someone here want to describe the structure of Harrow the Ninth?
C: Overwhelming, but I will do it. I will do my best. Okay. Okay. Harrow the Ninth goes back and forth between two points of view, both ostensibly in Harrow’s head. First, we get the second-person stuff that’s happening loosely in the present leading up to, we’re told in the chapter headings, the night that the Emperor is murdered. And then the rest of it is past tense third person, and it’s sort of—at first appears to be retelling us the events of Book One, but with Ortus taking the place of Gideon and every so often someone says, “That’s not how it happened,” and it’s the greatest thing in the world.
J: My whole body is curling in on itself thinking about people saying That’s not how it happened.
C: When the skeleton says it? Oh my God.
J: OKAY.
B: Oh, man.
J: Let’s start with the third-person sections, the part that’s kind of an AU of Gideon the Ninth, because that’s—It took me a really long time for the penny to drop on what was happening with that. I’m very curious how quickly y’all figured it out.
B: I didn’t quite figure it out as early as I should’ve. I didn’t figure it out until the second-person chapter that ends with “me.”
C: Ah! The greatest moment in the entire history of literature.
B: Whole body shivers.
J: Yeah, same.
B: And the other reason I didn’t figure it out as early as I wanted to, but I picked up more when I did my reread, is I didn’t remember the order of the deaths, which differ very, very differently in the AU. I knew Abigail and Magnus, I knew they died early, and I was like, huh, okay, so this isn’t quite right. But I couldn’t keep track of everyone else, and then so when I was reading it this time and paying attention to it, I was like, oh! Those are the signs I should’ve seen earlier on.
N: The Sleeper was what kept tripping me up, because it was such a departure, and yet I was not understanding what it was supposed to be representing. That kept confusing me, because I was like, so there’s a person that is the antagonist, but— And the Ortus stuff, I guess I was thinking of it as an AU, but at the same time, I just didn’t get the AU of it. I kept sort of passively listening along and kind of tracking all the details that felt different, but I couldn’t grok the intent of it for a long time.
C: Yeah, I think I sort of vaguely said, okay! This is just what Harrow thinks happens, in her understanding of the past without Gideon, and I just sort of let myself get swept up. I think because it’s so easy to trust Tamsyn Muir as an author that I was just like, she knows what she’s doing! I’m just gonna let her do this! It’ll make sense eventually, probably! If not, it’s because I’m dumb.
N: I was also really struck, in rereading it, that she writes the third person portions so well in that there are so many lines that have dual meaning once you understand that this is, as they call it, a play, with these figures playacting for her. I didn’t notice how often so many characters turn to Abigail and they ask her stuff, and about like, well I was called and I was told to appear here, and Abigail keeps cutting them off, and managing everything, but then acting as if—like, pivoting to Harrow as if Harrow is still the star of the story. It was so brilliantly done, that there’s so many little moments of specific warning, I think it’s Lieutenant Dyas who says “I don’t know why I asked that” or “I don’t know what answer I thought I’d get.” And you can tell these people are not just Harrow’s memories, but that they’re actually participating in something that they don’t understand.
C: And the moment when Ortus turns to Harrow and says “You never had any imagination. I don’t know why you picked me” is so—Once you go back and reread that moment, you feel so much for him, even though you’ve spent the entire book judging him through Harrow’s eyes. It’s such a good moment. She hates him so much, it brings me so much joy.
B: I love it when Harrow hates people. It just makes me happy.
J: This conversation is so justifying, because I felt like I was such a dumb-dumb, because I didn’t really take in that this was an AU of Gideon the Ninth until someone said Abigail Pent’s name, and at that point, I was like, Oh, shit, I know what’s going on!
B: Well, the other thing that kept throwing me was Ortus and then Not-Ortus, because I kept thinking, why are they both named Ortus?
C: And in the cast of characters, his name’s in a different font! So, so subtle. So good.
B: It’s the line—I think it’s Mercymorn asks Harrow at some point, What is the name of the Saint of Duty? And when I read that the second time around, I was like, Ohhhhhh. That’s why she’s doing that! Are we calling him Gideon Prime, Ortus, the Saint of Duty…?
C: Doesn’t our Gideon call him Gideon Classic at one point? I was kind of into that.
B: She goes through like twenty different names. I think it’s like, Gideon Prime, Gideon Original Flavor, Gideon Zero, Gideon Episode One— It’s like a different name for three pages in a row.
C: I know that they both think of Harrow as being the smart one, but I really think Gideon’s facility for nicknames shows that she might actually be the smarter one.
B: Can I now say the one line in this book that killed me and that I just wanna die over? “I gave you my whole life and you didn’t even want it.” Like—ahhhhhh. How dare you.
J: My shoulders caved in when you said that.
N: Gideon’s fury and grief—
J: God, it’s agony, and I mean, I think this is a good time to talk about how super super fanfictiony this book is, because not only are the third-person sections an AU of Gideon the Ninth, but it also, as the book goes on, gets more and more fanfictiony to the point there’s kind of a coffee shop AU.
N: I screamed. I saw that and just put the book down and was just like, are you fucking kidding me? She didn’t.
J: Gideon is serving Harrow coffee, and I was like, I need to leave.
N: And it took me until the second read to get the—they called it BARI, and they’re like, we’ll visit the BARI Star—like, barista!
C: How dare she? That’s so perfect.
B: I missed that!
N: But then even before that, isn’t Harrow in sort of a Hunger Games-y selection-y kind of AU? Where there’s a ball—
C: Like I’m honestly shocked she didn’t do a His Dark Materials daemon AU. She was leading up to that.
N: You almost wish Harrow hadn’t gotten cut off by Abigail. I would have loved to see a dozen of these mini-worlds that she was frantically thinking of, because at that point, she’s coping and trying to just shuffle in a new reality or something.
B: I loved Magnus’s reactions.
C: Basically she’s reading fic for the same reason that so many fic authors write fic, because you want to deal with the trauma of your favorite character dying by writing a world without trauma, where—or, like, one where the pain is very easy to work through and it can be cathartic and just over and done with. She was basically writing fix-it fic for herself. It’s so elegant.
N: And because there are rules and tropes. I think at one point, Ortus even says to her about the version of Canaan House she’s constructing, he’s like, there are rules and it has to follow it. And so I feel like so much of that processing is about this sense of like, well, if I only put us in a coffee shop AU, or if there’s only one bed, or if there’s a fake marriage, we can figure it out because there’s a blueprint.
B: Can I tell you guys the truly terrible thing I did, sort of related to the costumes I did the other week?
J: Oh my God I’m so excited.
B: So, I sent my Gideon a test picture without the makeup on, cause I was like, screw it, I’ll do it live, with the bones and everything. I sent it to her, and then I had—and then I turned on “I Forgot that You Existed” as soon as I sent her the test picture.
Everyone: NOOOOOOOO.
B: And it’s possibly the worst thing I’ve ever done, and I can’t tell her because she hasn’t read the book yet.
C: Oh my God!
B: I would say I’m not proud of it, but I’m still really amused by it, and I have it written down to tell her as soon as she reads the book.
N: I just handed Gideon to my husband, and again, I’ve been talking about this book for a year, I was like, you need to read this! Cause like, I am losing the ability to be able to talk to you about this, and now of course rereading Harrow, I’m like, Fuck it! You need to read at least one of these, so I can at least start to talk to you about it!
J: Some of my friends have been reading it, and they keep telling me these tantalizing pieces of information about what they’ve read of Gideon the Ninth. One of my friends was like, Oh, I just met a nerd, and I was like, TELL ME EVERYTHING that you feel about Palamedes the Sixth!
C: The relationship between Palamedes and Camilla is so important to me.
B: Yessssss. Also Camilla the Sixth can step on me, and I will thank her for the privilege.
N: Well, I love that we got to see the people who are still alive. For all that we got extra time with the characters that Harrow kind of initially dismissed in the first book, I love that she got confronted with like, oh, no, no, some people made it out, and they didn’t choose Lyctorhood, and they’re doing it! They’re part of the Blood of Eden, and they’re talking on the other side, and you’ve gotta face them, and not just dismiss them.
J: Can we talk about Abigail Pent? Because I was so excited to get to see more of her in this book, and I don’t think that I had really strong feelings about her from Gideon the Ninth, but like, seeing her in the third person sections of this book, I was like, oh, actually, I would die for her.
C: Yeah, it’s so surprising when you go back and reread Gideon after Harrow that she’s honestly barely in it? She says like five sentences the whole way through.
J: Yeah!
C: But then you realize reading Harrow why she had to die first, because she so clearly would have fully understood what Cytherea was doing really fast.
B: I love her relationship with Magnus, too. That just—the two of them just made me happy. I was like, can you guys be my parents or something?
C: They’re so aspirational and so pure!
N: I think Gideon kind of glommed onto Magnus more, even though they weren’t best buds in the first book, but of the two of them, and because we’re seeing the first book through Gideon’s eyes, Magnus was the one who stood out more because he was so welcoming and just kind of unflagging in his positivity toward them. And then it’s so interesting to see that like, of this duo, Harrow is fixating more on Abigail, and that—so they’re sort of each imprinting on one of these relationship goals kind of people.
J: I just about died when Ortus is reciting poetry to Magnus, and Harrow tries to stop him, and Magnus is like, “No, no, no, because poetry from the Fifth is really stupid, so I’m very excited to hear this!” I just felt so tender towards him at that moment.
C: Yeah, it’s really fun how Magnus and Abigail also are sort of a functional version of Gideon and Harrow? They sort of replicate their dynamic in a—if they were not super fucked up! The smart dark one and the sunshiney one together!
N: I feel like we also got a sense in this book, and this is kind of talking in the present portions, so we can also pick it up in a different part of the talk, but I feel like we’ve gotten a sense of more and more necromancer/cavalier duos where like, there was maybe something romantic, or at least some sort of intimacy, with the various Lyctors talking about the cavaliers they lost. Previously it seemed like kind of a taboo, rare thing of like, oh! Abigail and Magnus, they’re married!
J: They’re cavalier primarried!
N: But I feel like this normalized it a little more, like it was actually, oh, Harrow, you’re the weird one for thinking this is weird.
C: But I also do really love that so many of their relationships are not romantic but always still deeply meaningful. Like you always know that the relationship is the most important one in the world for both of them, even when it’s fully platonic. That’s so rare still in fiction, I feel like, for there to be that primacy of not even friendship, I think, because it’s beyond that, but still not in any way sexual or romantic.
N: It’s literally, this is my person.
J: Which was very interesting, because in the third person sections, Ortus is the cavalier primary for Harrow, and I think that the author did such a good job of starting with you thinking of him as a total sad sack, and then as the book progresses, you become very fond of him, to the point of—he acts very magnificent towards the end! I didn’t expect it at all!
C: Yeah, there’s such tenderness in it.
B: How he brings up whats-his-face—
J: Matthias Nonius? Yeah!
B: I’m like, you just willed him, his spirit, to be there with your poetry! How? Ortus! That’s what made me fond of him at the end.
N: Well, and it plays into all the fanfiction stuff, where it’s like, I was writing this epic about this figure, and I literally—yeah, like you said, I conjured him out of my scribblings.
C: There’s so much love towards every single character in these books. You can just feel how much the author is fond of all of them, even when the other characters hate each other.
N: Yes!
J: And I also thought she did such a great job of introducing so many different elements that feel like they’re just a throwaway joke, and then they turn out to be the most relevant thing. So like, the whole third-person section, there’s just constant really vicious jokes at Ortus’s expense for writing this epic poem, but then at the end, it becomes the most important thing that saves their lives! I just thought that was so much fun, and so satisfying.
N: And I love also that we got to see the real Dulcinea Septimus.
B: Yes!
C: Who is a delight! So charming! Like, I’m immediately like, I get why Palamedes is secretly in love with her from afar!
N: And she has just such nobility in—cause she’s just as wasting away, if not more, than the version that Cytherea’s pretending to be, and I feel like she was a very quiet, but then prominent character at the end, when she has her final scene with Harrow.
J: I loved that scene with Harrow! I think in the structure of the book, you are starting to worry that Harrow in the third-person sections won’t know the things that Harrow in the second-person sections would need to know. Like, not know that Gideon was still kind of around? And so that scene when Dulcinea tells her, like, Gideon is still around, is a really huge deal and I got really—I truly got emotional when Harrow says there’s a difference between keeping a shred of dance card and saving the last dance. I was just a mess.
N: That was so beautiful.
C: Should we talk about Gideon in this book? Because it’s such a relief to me when her point of view takes over, I think partially because I had been really missing the irreverence of her voice, and when it breaks out, it’s like you can take a full breath of air for the first time reading. There’s this new energy to the book that I had missed so much, and for it to come back was just like, ah! Yes! Finally! I felt as relieved almost as Harrow would in that moment.
J: Yes, so let’s get into the second-person sections. When—I think I messaged at least two of you when Harrow was talking to Palamedes, and she says something like, the narration says something like, you couldn’t have known that he had seen me.
Everyone: AHHHHHHHH.
C: SO GOOD.
J: It felt like the book had just looked up with its eyes and looked into my eyes. I really couldn’t cope with it.
B: I don’t know how my friend who read it before me and then like, made sure I got a copy of the ARC, like, I don’t know how she kept a straight face, digital straight face, when I hit that part. And I’m like IS IT GIDEON?? IS IT GIDEON???? in her DMS, and she just somehow went, I dunno what’s up!, and then once I got further on, she was like, Yep! There it is!
N: Oh, that’s a good friend.
J: Who here knew it was Gideon? Cause I definitely didn’t, I’m slow.
C: I was like, it can go either way. It’s either Gideon or it’s the thing that Abigail has already said is haunting her.
N: I knew it was Gideon. It’s funny because I was so surprised that it hadn’t occurred to me before. I flipped back and I noticed a few lines, like a few chapters prior—
C: You were also such a little bitch when you were angry?
N: Yup!
C: That’s such a good line!
N: Like why would Harrow say that to herself? And it’s like, oh no, of course, it’s Gideon saying it!
C: The second person I think is done very elegantly because even though it is mostly in Harrow’s head and you can sort of read it as, Harrow is dissociating from herself out of trauma, which is traditionally what second person does, I think, there’s still these occasional moments where the narrator is like, very affectionately puzzled by Harrow’s word choices. At one point she’s in the shuttle and she mentions the bathroom as like, a place for bodily functions, and the narrator says, Or, a toilet, as anyone else in the world would say!
N: Yes, and the repetition of, the handle of the sword, the pommel!
C: It’s just very, very like subtly worked in there, but there’s this sense that the narrator is maybe not quite Harrow, and it doesn’t fully become clear who it is until she finally wakes up and is alone in the body.
J: How do y’all feel about second person narration overall?
C: I’m very skeptical overall. I think it can be done and done well, but so often it feels a little gimmicky to me. When I saw that first chapter excerpt that came out with the cover reveal, I was kind of like, okay, like, I trust Tamsyn enough to pull this off, but I’m not in love with the idea. I think here it works so well on so many different levels that it’s fully justified and I’m completely behind it. But, you know, I was a little wary when I first saw that that was how she was going in.
B: I had just read The Raven Tower, like maybe two months before I read this, which is also done really really well with second person. So I think between that and this book, I’m just like, sure, if you are smart enough and brave enough to pull it off, I’ll read it. It’s not usually something I think of being interested in reading, but I mean, clearly here, it was done with very great effect.
N: Yeah, that’s the thing. I feel like it has to be so committed to and so carefully written to pack in those effects. I think prior to this, I regarded second person as almost like a one-trick pony of like, okay, there’s a limited number of reasons why you’re doing this, I can probably reverse engineer whatever twist you’re building toward, which again was why I felt so surprised when I was like, Oh! Why did it never occur to me that this was Gideon? Which I think is a testament to how Tamsyn’s writing it. Having read it, and then I read Raven Tower shortly after, I’m a lot more sold on it now. I look forward to reading more second person stories.
J: I loved it and I thought it was a good fit for Harrow, because even before we discover that it’s Gideon, Harrow hates herself so much so that the accusatory tone of second person works really well for her as a character. Even before I knew that it was Gideon speaking, I thought it worked really well, even though I also am a little skeptical of second person as an overall thing.
C: The moment the first-person pronoun slips in reminded me really strongly of—shifting genres completely—Fleishman Is in Trouble, which came out last summer, the Taffy Brodesson-Akner book?, which is told mostly in close third, but at the very end of the first paragraph, there’s this tiny moment where second person plural slips in and the narrator says “is what our friend Seth would have said,” and then it takes another fifty pages before you realize that the guy whose head you’re in in close third is not actually the narrator, that it’s being narrated by a friend of his who keeps deflecting attention away from herself. You realize eventually that she’s sort of Trojan-horsed her story into this man’s story because she says that the only way you can make people care about a woman’s story is to Trojan-horse it into a man’s. It’s an amazing line.
J: That’s rough.
C: I highly recommend Fleishman. But this sort of felt very similar in that it was playing off of our expectations and slipping in these tiny tiny very elegant little hints and Trojan-horsing in a way Gideon’s arc into Harrow’s in the same way that the first book Trojan-horsed Harrow’s into Gideon’s. So their stories have become completely intertwined.
J: That’s such a good point and I love it, because Harrow of course is my favorite, because I’m very very soft for an asshole genius who thinks she knows everything. I’m curious what y’all thought in general of the—so the second person narration takes place in this place called the Mithraeum?, where Harrow and Ianthe are the new Lyctors, so they’re interacting with God slash the Emperor Undying and his three Saints, Mercymorn, Augustine, and Ortus slash Gideon, Gideon Prime?
N: Gideon Prime.
J: So these were new characters to the book so I’m wondering what y’all thought of them overall.
N: I was so tickled by Mercymorn especially, like, I’d forgotten her until the reread, her propensity for speaking in double exclamation points, and I loved how just hysterical she was, but not in a hysterical way of like, that you would undermine a woman, just this sense of—she’s seen it all, she’s experienced it all, and she’s just so aggravated by it.
B: My favorite thing about Mercymorn was how she kept lowering Harrow’s age, to the point where they were like, she’s three years old! I was like oh my God, Mercy, you can’t possibly—okay. We’re gonna go with that.
N: I love their ennui in the sense of—they’d be like, well the last time I saw him was twenty years ago, a blink of an eye. They simultaneously seemed so bored with each other and with everything, but also clearly still had these rivalries and resentments and stuff built up.
C: And I loved the dynamic between Mercy and Augustine and the sort of sense of both strong sibling vibes between them, like, the mingled affection and rivaltry, but also this sense of overwhelming comradeship in the face of their love and hatred for—I feel like I just wanna call him John.
J: Yeah, call him John!
C: He’s the only character that I feel like Tamsyn does not love, and so I do not love him either, and I want to bring him down.
N: Ooh, what do you mean by that?
C: I feel like he’s the only character who I am not invited to take delight in. Even when he pulls out the greatest dad joke ever written, I think, in the history of literature—
All: [giggling]
C: I’m delighted by the moment, but I am not thrilled by him, in a way that I feel like even with Cytherea in the first book, who was as close as you would get to a villain in that book, you were invited to see where she was coming from, in a way, and feel like she was making some valid points, and even more so now that her backstory been’s retrofitted on in this book. But with the Emperor, with John, I sort of felt like I was being asked to be like, no, he’s done so much shitty stuff! Even if he does have justification for it in his own head, it’s still so overwhelmingly terrible that I can’t be delighted by him in the same way that I am by everyone else in these books.
B: See, she got me to be somewhat invested in him with that line in the epilogue of Gideon. And God said, I am not enough. And that just stabbed me right in my soul, and that kind of—I think it helped me more when I got to this book, because no one in this book is necessarily—well. Abigail. But everyone else is like, not necessarily a great person, and I liked that you actually felt the weight of the millennia on all of these characters. Someone mentioned before they were talking about—oh yeah, we made up like twenty years ago, it’s fine, don’t worry about it. They were able to be these not—I don’t know. He worked for me, and not just cause of the dad joke.
C: I think he works for me as a character, and I think he fulfills his role in the universe very well, but I just do not have the love for him that I have for literally everyone else.
B: I can’t bring myself to be fond of Gideon Prime, mostly cause he keeps trying to murder Harrow all the damn time!
C: How dare he.
B: God! Let my girl rest. She will never rest.
N: My feelings on John kept shifting because on the one hand, I love that he had this sort of bemused, like, I’m an average guy, kind of mentality. It seemed like he went to so many pains to be like, no, I’m not God, I’m your teacher, or, I’m this guy who’s trying to level with you over tea and biscuits, but then when you get such a different sense of how he caused the Resurrection and I would love at some point to actually like talk through all the revelations. I feel like I’m still not clear on everything! But it definitely seems like it was a lot more self-serving than the first time they talked about the Resurrection. I feel like the first time they talked about him, it’s a lot of, he raised everyone up. But did he also kill them? And then raise them up? And so, it was so hard to—am I getting the Emperor Undying, the Necrolord Prime, or am I getting this selfish, mediocre man?
C: And I feel like there’s so much in the way that he will sort of tell people he doesn’t want to be God, because he’s doing something very specific where he’ll be like, I don’t want to be God to you yet. Or, think of me in my aspect as a teacher. Where he’s very clear that he is God and that the life of everyone in this solar system depends on him, but he doesn’t want them to make a big proceeding out of it, because that’ll make him feel kinda weird. It’s this very selfish, egotistical way of appearing to humble while not being humble at all.
J: There’s an early line—like, pretty early in the book where I think Augustine says—either Augustine or Mercymorn says, he’s not as sentimental as he seems. And I feel like that’s a real keynote of his character, because he seems like he’s quite sentimental. He’s very soft towards Harrow, it seems like he’s very soft towards all his Saints, but then at the end of the book, he is very merciless in an unexpected way.
B: So wait. So here’s my question for you guys, then, is how did you take the revelation about him doing the cavalier Lyctor thing perfectly? But never telling them? Cause that was just like, oh my God, and I was a hundred percent, at that point, with them, and I was like, yes! Let’s kill God! Let’s do this!
All: [laughter]
N: That felt unforgivable because I feel like even when they confronted him, he didn’t really explain his justification. I wasn’t sure if it was—I honestly don’t remember what his justification was, if anybody else can fill it in. None of it felt like a satisfying enough explanation to make up for what he did.
J: I don’t wanna be this person, cause I have the greatest dad in the world, but I feel like the thing of a dad being like, giving a very inadequate justification and being like, so you understand, right? And the kid of the dads being like, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, totally, totally, like, don’t worry about it, Dad. I felt like that was very much in evidence here.
C: I feel like that moment was the moment where I was like, I will never forgive him for anything, ever, that he does. It’s such a profound betrayal, because in a way, it created all of the other betrayals that this universe is built on, right? They all did something unforgivable, when they killed their cavaliers, and this is the launching point for it. It’s sort of the original sin of this universe.
N: Yeah. So was his reasoning that he and Alecto made it work, but then was he claiming something went wrong and that’s why he pushed the others away from it?
J: That’s my understanding. Honestly, it seemed to me that he thought that Alecto had become something that he couldn’t control, and he was upset about it, and that’s why he made the decision that he made.
C: Yeah, it’s very unclear. I’m looking at the passage now, and he’s just sort of like, It would have rankled to you if I had told you the truth, and he doesn’t really explain why he felt that it could never be repeated. It’s like, not really something that he feels the need to lay out his decision on, pretty much.
N: And if we’re understanding correctly, both parties can achieve Lyctorhood—I guess that would mean the cavaliers would be similarly immortal, possibly self-healing—I think it probably depends, they don’t know as much necromancy, but I wonder if he maybe wanted to have half as many people to command as opposed to the same number he started with, and have them all turn on him, potentially.
C: Although he is making new Lyctors, so it seems like he’s pretty confident in his ability to keep them dependent on him. Although again, Harrow and Ianthe are both younger and so probably easier for him to manipulate.
B: Plus he was starting to run out of them.
J: Yeah. Can we talk about the House of the Sixth now? Because I was so excited that they were back! I almost cried. I was so happy.
N: This book consistently surprises me because it does such amazing things, where you’re trained to think that death is the end, so you lose a character and you’re mourning them, and then they keep finding ways to bring them back. But the fact that Pal was contained in the shard of his skull—
C: And he’s reading this terrible romance novel and writing a sequel to it. I love that so much. It brings me so much joy.
J: When Camilla comes back and is talking to Harrow, and she says, The Cohort took the rest of him away, and I don’t know where they have put him. I don’t want to overstate the case. Like, this is a very clear reference to the Gospel of John, where the angels come to Mary Magdalene, and she says, They have taken away my Lord and I don’t know where they have laid him. And I just feel like that is a very glossable thing, and this feels so much like Shakespeare in the sense that it makes references that we can gloss, and then it makes references that in two years will be completely illegible to people.
C: Yeah! It’s very—like when she pulls out the, in book one, Harrow does—he studied the blade meme! And it’s like, so this is completely a 2019 reference that we will never be able to remember in a few years, but then you have like, John quoting The Little Mermaid and the Hans Christian Anderson, and pulling everything out. It’s so intertextual and referential.
N: When they’re talking to Commander Wake and he calls her “Wake Me Up Inside”—
B: I died at that!
N: There was that, and then the “jail for Mother”—again, I want to table-flip this book every time one of these references comes out.
C: And they never feel completely self-indulgent. They always make contextual sense, which is astonishing to me.
J: That’s the thing! I mean, I think if a future scholar was looking at this book and trying to gloss the references, I think there are so many things that feel very—like you said, feel very contextual and don’t feel like they’re a reference to something. Like the “jail for Mother” reference is a reference to a Patricia Lockwood tweet about her cat.
N: It’s insane.
J: Yeah! And there’s an earlier thing where Ianthe says “I tried and therefore no one should consider me,” which is a reference to basically just a gif.
B: Wasn’t there like a “thank you, next” thing in there too or something?
J: Oh my God, was there? I’m sure I missed it.
B: I think so!
C: And that’s sort of in a way parallels the structure that makes the book so fun, the high-low reference tone of it, where a big part of the pleasure of this book is the way it will have a big overwrought highbrow description of something, and then it’ll puncture with this sort of lowbrow “what the fuck is going on?” And the way that the references follow in that same exact structure is so satisfying on like a very deep level.
B: And she sort of parallels that with the emotional gut punches and then the lines that make you laugh, because—I think it was maybe three lines after the “I gave you my whole life and you didn’t even want it” was like, typical Gideon irreverence that just made me want to giggle and cry at the same time. I think it’s very smart how she’s able to pull that off.
J: One thing that I loved in this book is that Harrow appears to be having some psychotic features of her life? It really struck home to me how much this book feels like my own experience of mental illness, in that it’s very sort of dire in some places but then in other places, like, this is the stupidest fucking thing that’s ever happened to me.
C: Should we talk about Harrow’s love for The Body? Because I don’t fully know what to do with it, honestly.
B: I don’t think Harrow does either!
C: No one really does! At times it seems like her love for The Body is where she puts all her feelings for everyone she’s ever cared about who’s dead. Like, the ways that it’ll sometimes talk with her mother’s voice, and ever since Gideon’s death it has Gideon’s eyes, which like, we now know mythological reasons for that, but it’s also like she’s projecting Gideon onto it as well.
N: Yeah, I found myself almost weirdly jealous of her love for The Body, in this book, especially I think before we got far enough to know what Gideon’s fate actually was. Part of me was like, How dare you! I know that you were into The Body before Gideon, but look what Gideon did for you! And how can you still be obsessing over The Body? So I had this weird emotional feeling of—she ain’t shit!
C: No, I felt that too! And also with Ianthe, even though I love her with my whole heart. Every time she made a move on Harrow, I was like, Whoa! Step off!
J: Same. Absolutely same.
B: It feels to me sort of like—I know they keep saying like, Harrow is in love with The Body, and they even bring up the like, you’re wasting your time, she’s had the hots for this corpse for forever. But I could honestly read Harrow as aroace, and just like—cause love is not really something that I think the Ninth House seems to really have a good grasp on? And something that Harrow in particular does not seem to have a good grasp on. But to me, I sort of saw it as her thinking that that’s what romantic love might be.
J: Especially because she’s a kid when she encounters The Body for the first time.
B: Also I might be projecting here, so that’s a totally different situation, but.
J: I just totally know what you mean! She has a very hard time conceptualizing what relationships should be like, because she has had a childhood of real trauma and not really a lot of healthy relationships. And so I think that The Body functions for her—whether she’s aroace or not—The Body functions as a safe place for her to pin her emotions to, in a way that real living human people are not.
N: Yeah, and I think some of her worship or fixation with The Body also is that queer girl experience of like, is this person a role model for me? Do I have a crush on them? Do I have a girl-crush on them? Do I want to be them? in addition to what—I agree with what you’re saying about pinning all these other feelings that she doesn’t know where to put them in one place. Cause there is an admiration—I mean, she’s always talking about the physical perfection of The Body. And then, was I understanding correctly that at the end—is that Alecto who is reviving Gideon? Slash, in Harrow’s body?
C: I have like, no idea what happens in the final chapter, I have to say.
B: Me neither.
C: I was like skimming over it before we talked, and the final line where she’s like, Have you worked out who I am? It’s just like—I. No. I have not. I don’t know what is happening here at all.
N: But right before that, I think it’s when Gideon’s like going to the River, has like escaped the Mithraeum, and then kind of comes to and is—there’s somebody talking about the sternum being collapsed and we need to get the heart going, and she sees The Body, and she thinks like, Oh no, your girlfriend has come to crash the party.
J: Yeah, your bullshit dead girlfriend has come to claim you, which is such a good line.
N: It’s so Gideon, so great! And then, I also hadn’t thought about the fact that Harrow’s last moment is back in the tomb that’s empty now. So then I was like, where did Alecto go?? So I love the idea of her, as this book has continued to prove with every character, not being entirely dead.
C: I guess when the full premise of this world is lesbian necromancers in space, we should’ve known from the beginning that everyone’s dead girlfriend was gonna come back to life.
B: Probably!
J: I love it so much and I have to say, the way this book ended made me so excited for the third book. Not that I wouldn’t have been anyway, but it just—the fact that Gideon Prime slash Ortus is dead at the end, and that Pyrrha is in his body? I was just so fucking excited, like I couldn’t contain myself. The idea of going into the third book and it’s all these women just fucking up the Emperor Undying made me feel so happy.
B: There was so much that happened at the end of the book. I know we talked about it earlier, about how there were so many reveals and you can’t really keep track of them all, but I’d totally forgotten that it happened until the second reread. I was like, Oh! Who needs Gideon Prime? No one does! It’s fine!
N: Speaking of the Lyctors, can we talk about the crazy God threesome?
C: Oh my God.
B: YES.
J: Oh my God! I’m so glad you brought this up!
N: I have not been able to stop thinking about it, there’s so many things in this book I can’t stop thinking, but it happened again. And I hadn’t noticed on the first one that Mercy and Augustine are kinda talking through the plan beforehand, and they use the codeword Dios Apate, which I assumed is Latin for something about Let’s fuck God.
C: It’s God deception. I looked it up.
N: Ah, okay. I was hoping it was a little dirtier.
C: I know! Same!
N: Thank you for looking it up. But yeah, it was such a human thing, and it’s like, grossing out the kids, and—so great.
C: I love that Ianthe is just as grossed out as Harrow. Like, Harrow we know is very confused and disconcerted by anything sexual, but Ianthe is always making suggestive remarks, and then when she’s face to face with this, she’s just like, No. No, I absolutely do not want to have any knowledge of this.
J: I feel like I said what the fuck in sixteen different valences while I was reading this book, and when I got to that part, and Augustine had promised to do a distraction, and then his distraction was just fucking everyone in sight—I was just like WHAT! WHAT! The! Fuck!
B: I think the best thing about that, though, is it wasn’t—there was narrative value! Cause it wasn’t the first time it happened, and the first time it happened was like, the reason all of this happened at all! You’re just like, What! Why is a god threesome having this effect on a story??
C: That’s another thing that felt very fanfictiony about this, is that like, the sex is all very character-driven and serves story function in a way that it generally doesn’t in a lot of other kind of writing.
J: I agree, and also I thought that Tamsyn Muir did such a good job of just making things plot-relevant that you thought were weird and annoying at the time? Like, not just the threesome, although the threesome is the most kind of salient example. But in the third person sections, the whole thing of Ortus always doing his epic about Matthias Nonius that somehow becomes plot-relevant at the end, it just felt so—I felt so like I was in the hands of a master, like someone was really, really, really flying this plane.
C: Yeah, that’s one of the deep pleasures of this book. Even when I have no fucking idea what’s happening, and I’m completely lost, I can just sort of relax into the confusion. I’m like, Tamsyn has got me. I do not need to worry about this at all.
J: There’s a part where Gideon is in Harrow’s body, and she gets an envelope from Ianthe that’s like, For Gideon Nav, and Harrow has kept her sunglasses, which is so lovely just on an emotional level. But then it also turns out to be plot-relevant, because Gideon Prime comes back and takes the sunglasses from our Gideon, and puts them on because he’s secretly Pyrrha. Like, it was just so fucking satisfying to read.
B: Ohhh!
N: YES!
B: That just clicked! Oh my God!
N: I thought they belonged to him, and he’d like, left them in his dalliances with Commander Wake, but no! I—you’re right!
B: Ohhhh, that’s what I thought—ohhhhhh. Why is Tamsyn Muir so much smarter than me? I hate this!
J: I just like, today, as I was walking over to have brunch with my sister and brother-in-law, I was reading the book, and I was like, wait, what color were his eyes before? And I had to go back and check. Gideon Prime’s eyes are green, but when he shows up and takes our Gideon’s sunglasses, his eyes are brown, because he’s Pyrrha!
N: And he does it just so quickly, I think they describe it as a little wincing excuse me face and just takes the sunglasses and nobody questions it, because they’re all in the middle of all the other shit that’s happening.
B: Someone has to get exploded every five seconds.
J: I really feel like I need a concordance for this book, where just I can look up—like an index—where anyone’s eyes are mentioned, where I can sort of return to that page, and when any of the Saints are mentioned I can return to that page.
C: One of the big reasons I’m looking forward to this book coming out is not just so I can talk to everyone about it, but also so that like, a really obsessed fandom person will put together a goddamn wiki and I can look things up instead of, like, turning back and forth and being like, I do not remember this detail! This book is too smart for me!
B: I mean, I even just wanna have a physical copy so I can refer back to the cast of characters, like with everyone being on there, and just like, put little notes on it with like, eye color or something, so I can check it.
C: Oh my God, I’m gonna do that now.
J: So okay, someone mentioned this earlier, and I would like to come back to it. At the very end of the book, Camilla is talking to someone, and the person says, “Have you figured out who I am yet?” and Camilla says no. Does anyone here feel like they have figured who that person is?
B: I have no fucking clue.
C: This is deafening silence. No, absolutely not.
N: She describes herself as the person who lives with her, so I didn’t know if it was in her head, and so I was like, is it a revenant? Is it Commander Wake? Did she somehow jump from Cytherea’s body to Camilla—but how?
C: Oh, I got an impression from reading it—and I may have just fully made this up—that it was some sort of weird combination of Harrow and Gideon. Like I think the exercises she does made me think that? But maybe I fully made that up!
J: Let me tell y’all my theory, and y’all can tell me what you think. Okay, so I’m looking at the Dramatis Personae in the beginning of the book. All of the Emperor’s Saints have cavaliers with surnames that suggest the House that they’re in, and the one that I couldn’t figure out was Cassiopeia the First, her cavalier’s named Nigella Shodash. So I wasn’t sure which House that was meant to be. However, the only House that’s missing is the Sixth.
C: Oooh!
J: Yeah. And Cassiopeia is said to be very like, brilliant. And at the end of the book, she is described as having grey, lambent eyes, which is how they describe Palamedes’s eyes.
B: Huh.
J: So I think—I hope and believe that it might be Cassiopeia? Possibly?
N: Maybe!
C: That is next-level. I’m very into it.
J: I really want it to be, because I think that would be very confusing—when Palamedes eventually comes back to life as I dearly hope that he will, cause he’s my second-favorite character.
C: My question is, since she is doing cavalier exercises rather than necromantic exercises, is there a possibility that it’s Cassiopeia’s cavalier?
J: I’d also be fine with that. I just want to be right that it’s the House of the Sixth.
C: I mean, I’m very into this idea.
J: Because I love Palamedes, and I miss him, and he’s described very often as having grey and lambent eyes.
N: Yeah, I definitely thought it was some reference to him. But sorry. Dumb question. Was it Camilla staring at her own reflection with his eyes, or was it—
J: Oh, shit! Was it? Oh God, you could be right. See, this is the problem. The author is too clever for me.
B: Did we ever get an explanation for why he specifically requested that Harrow give him—like, reshape the bone to be something with—
C: Articulation.
B: Articulation, there we go. Did we get an explanation for that?
C: I assume he’s gonna have to use that to recreate his body somehow.
N: I assumed he might want to write stuff down, which seems like a very Sixth thing. But probably some combo.
J: I just reread Gideon the Ninth, and I just felt so fond of him. He’s such a morally upright nerd.
B: He pairs well with Camilla.
C: I have never—the level to which eye color is so plot-significant in this book is like, the most I’ve seen it since in Harry Potter, every single person who ever met Harry was like, “You have your mother’s eyes.”
N: And that feels so fanfictiony! Like when you think about people getting married in—or in like fantasy in fanfic where it’s like, well this child has my husband’s eyes and the boy has my eyes, and—it felt like that similar obsession where they’re, like you said, they’re trying to attach meaning to it.
C: And that she does that without ever falling into that slightly trashy tic where people always describe eyes as being either jewel-colored or candy-colored. Like, chocolate eyes, sapphire eyes, whiskey eyes. Like you know that sort of writing tic that always drags things down a little bit, she has so many eye color descriptions, and she never falls into that trap once.
N: Exactly.
J: I was truly murdered by the end of this book, where suddenly Gideon’s golden eyes become incredibly plot-significant, and every character who sees her is just completely unraveled by the realization that she is the Emperor’s child.
B: I definitely wanted to just have a flowchart when that whole conversation was going down.
C: Yeah, I almost want to do—what are they called in high school biology, like a Punnett Square? I wanted to do one of those that whole conversation.
J: And I really struggled with it because you find out that Gideon Prime has done, essentially, the same thing that Harrow has done, where his cavalier is still kind of alive in there, and she has to conceal her eyes from everyone else, because she’s still alive in there and once Gideon Prime dies, she’s the only person in possession of that body. I really had to think about that very hard.
N: But I love how like, Tamsyn has established all those rules and now is exploding them and is just like, Yeah! Each of these Lyctors are so different from one another that they don’t actually all follow the same theorems, and so now we’re getting all these loopholes.
C: She’s very good at setting up magical systems that have specific rules and regulations so that every battle scene becomes a character scene because it requires strategies that have to be driven by the characters’ personalities to pull off. She’s so careful about it, and it always blows me away.
N: Definitely.
J: She does such a good job of marrying the plot significance to the emotional significance.
B: I really did, the first time I read it, I had to like, sit down in a quiet room for about twenty minutes and just exist and try to remember what my life was like before I read that book. I think I read this around Thanksgiving, and my parents are like, oh yeah! Come talk with us!, and I’m like, BUT THIS BOOK! I can’t deal with other people right now! I need some time. See, this is why—your last bullet point is what our hopes and dreams are for Alecto the Ninth, and I have none. Well, cause I feel like this book was so unlike what I could’ve possibly predicted, when I finished reading Gideon the Ninth, and it just took me on an amazing, painful but worthwhile journey that I don’t even want to try and predict what she’ll do in the third book. Whatever she does, it’ll be better than what I can possibly imagine.
N: I do wonder what tense it’s gonna be in. Like, are we gonna get full first person? Are we gonna go back to third?
C: Are we gonna be in Alecto’s head? Because that would be very jarring, but I trust her to do it.
N: Exactly! This person who feels so foreign but also increasingly familiar because we learned all these jumbled bits about her.
J: What I’ve written in my notes for this bullet point is “just an unimaginable amount of murder.”
N: Well, cause God didn’t die! We got some unresolved shit to work through.
J: Yeah! And there’s so many women that I’m so here for like—Pyrrha is in Ortus’s body, I posit that either Cassiopeia or her cavalier is with Camilla. Then there’s also Camilla. Harrow, Gideon, and Alecto. There’s so many women that I want to just kill people so much.
N: Yeah. Ianthe’s still alive, because she fished God out of the River and even though it seems like very clearly taking a side, like I still want to know what’s behind that. And as far as we know, Corona’s still alive, so I feel like that reunion has to happen in some regard.
J: God, yes.
N: Or be cruelly ripped away! But somehow resolved.
J: I dearly also want Palamedes and Camilla to reunite, because I love their friendship so much.
C: I need for there to be like, a moment of reckoning between each of the cavalier/necromancer pairs. I don’t necessarily need for it to be in any particular emotional register, I just want to see it happen, basically. It’s so foundational and there’s so much betrayal in the case of the Lyctors, and deep profound trust in the case of the pairs that didn’t become Lyctors, that I just need to see it paid off.
N: Definitely. Do we feel like we need to go back to any of the Nine Houses? Cause so much of this took place—what, forty billion lightyears away, or whatever?
C: I mean, I would be interested in seeing them, but I don’t necessarily have to. I feel about them kind of like the Districts in The Hunger Games, like, it’d be cool, but I’m not wedded to it.
N: You know, it’s funny, when I first read this, I think I was like, misreading one of the things that God or John says to Harrow at first, when they have the coffin that has Cytherea’s body in it, and I misread it because I thought it was like, we’re gonna drop off each of the bodies at their planets, and I was like, is this Catching Fire? Like, is this the victory tour? And then it quickly became clear that that’s not what they were gonna do, because we found out about the Resurrection Beasts. But at first I was like, are we just gonna—yeah, go back to each of the planets and kinda say like, Hey! Sorry your tributes died! Or we can’t find them!
J: I mean, I would say the reunions that I want very intensely are Harrow and Gideon, obviously, and Camilla and Palamedes, because Camilla is so, so—like, loves Palamedes so much, I just want them to see each other again and talk again.
C: My God. I’m kind of tearing up at this idea.
J: I am too because he also loves her so much. I mean, what brought me in on Palamedes in the first book is that the Second House challenges him and Camilla defeats them handily, and he’s so angry that they’ve put her through this at all.
N: Yeah, he doesn’t take anything about her for granted, the way that you see other necromancers do with their cavaliers.
J: Yeah! They’re really truly best friends, and I’m really really really really here for it.
B: I think that’s part of why I love the Sixth House so much, is because of that bond between them and it not being romantic, it just being—I care more about this person than anyone else in the world, and I will do anything for this person.
C: And I remember it took me a little while to realize that it was completely unromantic. Like at one point, Gideon says “oh Palamedes is a perfect fool over Camilla the Sixth,” and I sort of took that as meaning, oh, okay, they’re in some sort of romantic relationship. He’s a perfect fool over her because he’s like smitten by her. And then when it became clear that no, he was in love with Dulcinea, I had to recalibrate my expectations and be like, I feel like I’ve never really seen this in a book before! A place where someone can be a perfect fool over someone else and just consider them completely wonderful and important and the most important person in the world to them—but have it very explicitly be unromantic.
J: I don’t know. I get very emotional about that. It’s very very very very very very lovely to me, and I’m really glad that that kind of relationship is represented in these books. All right, y’all. Any other hopes and dreams for Alecto the Ninth?
C: I trust Tamsyn to do whatever she’s going to do with Harrow and Gideon, and I’m sure it will be profoundly emotionally satisfying to me. But like, I ship it so deeply. I would love some payoff of whatever kind.
N: I don’t even know what payoff is gonna be, because there’s a part of me, yeah, that’s like, are Harrow and Gideon just gonna be kind of ships in the night, as souls that never actually really interact with each other again? And I could see—again, because this is a series built on death and permanence—I could totally see that happening, and I feel like I’d have to just nod and take it, but I’m hoping against hope that there’s some sort of closure, even if it’s just for a minute together.
J: Well, and also, don’t forget, Gideon’s body has not been found, so it is not outside the realm of possibility that Gideon’s soul be put back in her body.
N: Oh shit! You’re right!
C: Yeah, but what of her vacant body, though? Because we’ve been told that an empty body draws in things to take it over, right?
B: Oh, no.
J: Yeah, we don’t know!
B: Oh, no.
J: I’ve been thinking about it constantly.
N: And also they said they went over Canaan House and didn’t find anything, so it’s like—does the Blood of Eden have her body? Is she being preserved somewhere?
C: Maybe she’s the new The Body!
N: Ooooo.
J: Another thing that I really question is: So, Commander Wake appears to have been pulling the strings in the first book, and she’s the commander of the Blood of Eden people, and Camilla is with them now, it seems. But the Blood of Eden people, if they were pulling the strings in the first book, the Blood of Eden people killed Dulcinea, who Palamedes was in love with, so I’m like, very curious what that’s gonna be like when he eventually, I hope, returns. Because he does not seem like a person who’d be like, oh, you killed my loved one! No worries! We have the same goals. We’ll just move on.
N: Well, that was something with the whole introduction of the Blood of Eden in this book where, because we started the first book being like, this is Gideon, this is this necromantic universe, this myriad, this is what life is like. And like, I’m not anybody who’s in any way gothy, so it took a while to emotionally get into the book, but I did. And we kinda continued that, and at first God seemed like this sympathetic figure, and then by the time he started talking about, Oh yeah, no, I have these rebel insurgents who’ve been bothering me forever, part of me had this moment of like, Oh no! We’re the bad guys! And I loved that—again, it was like the Gideon “he was looking at me” reveal, where I was like, I don’t know why my brain didn’t cop to this earlier, but it was a sense of like, oh there are ostensibly good guys doing something else as a ragtag rebellion through the Empire. So I’m hoping—I would love a little bit of maybe some of that perspective shift in Alecto, if it is Alecto working with Blood of Eden or—I mean, we’ll see Camilla, and it seems like she’s on that side—to get a different recontextualization of what it’s like to be these small people who have broken away from the society that otherwise has everybody else in its necromantic grip.
C: I’m so excited, you guys. I don’t know how I’m gonna wait for this book. Can it just be here already?
J: It feels physically impossible to wait for at least another year to experience the third book.
N: It feels insane, yeah, to think that it’s that long of a wait.
B: This is what suffering is.
C: But that’s how long it’s gonna take to fully understand what just happened in Harrow the Ninth.
N: Well, I’m so excited to—I don’t know if you guys have been checking out the fanfiction that’s grown up around this on Archive of Our Own. Like it was so interesting to read a bunch of Gideon fanfic and see what different people are going for, and then a couple people started writing stuff based just on the excerpt that had been released, and some of them seemed to have some decent guesses just operating off, what, a chapter, if that? And so I’ll be curious once this book is actually out in the world in June and everybody else is doing what we’re doing of this way of like, fuck, we’re waiting so long for Alecto, I’ll be really curious to see how the fandom continues to extrapolate out and what their guesses are, and how it kind of fills that time.
B: I read some of the stuff that got posted for Yuletide, and I think at least two or three of them, I just softly whispered to myself “Oh no” when I saw how they were treating what was gonna happen after, and I was like, “you’re not ready, oh noooooo.”
J: To be fair, no one could be ready.
B: No, and I did a very mean thing, once again. Katsucon this weekend, and I sort of just took my Nook and I just put it on the bed between me and my Gideon, and I was like, there’s a book on there if you would like to potentially read the first chapter. I can’t stop you. And she got to the list of all the Lyctors, and she just lost it at me, because she was like, XXXX? I don’t even get a goddamn name? What the hell?, and I said, keeping a straight face and not saying anything, and then I couldn’t say anything when people— We had five people recognize us, which I was very excited about, but someone was asking us, she was like, oh, so is Alecto in this book? And I sat there, and I’m like, I dunno! She’s like, well we know they have to be around it sometime, we know the title of the next book, I was like, Do we know that? I dunno! No one is ready for this book!
J: God, I’m certainly not ready for the third book, like, not at all.
C: It’s just physically impossible to be ready for it. We never will be.
J: I think it helps to be Catholic and crazy, and I am both of those things, but I still don’t think with either of those qualities in place, that I’m in any way prepared for the third book.
N: Me neither, but I think we’ll start bumping up against it a month or two before, a couple months beforehand, and yeah, I think with time, it’ll suddenly be like, all right! I don’t know what’s coming, but my body is ready!
J: Well, certainly I’m looking forward to hearing what other people—like, other people’s theories about what is going on in Harrow the Ninth, because I don’t think I’m the most careful reader, so I’m excited to see what more careful readers think.
C: These books are so fun to read also that I always find myself speeding through and swallowing them down in these giant gulps, and I don’t really take in exactly what’s happening with much carefulness, so I’m interested in what a period of slower rereading will reveal.
J: I’m just gonna say this. I reread Gideon the Ninth in preparation for this podcast, and on page 60, Harrow says, “All you need to know is that you’ll do what I say, or I’ll mix bonemeal in with your breakfast and punch my way through your gut.”
N: AAAAAAA
C: She has had this planned for so long!
N: Harrow, you crazy bitch!
C: What a beautiful, demented genius!
B: This is why she’s my favorite!
J: My God, I love her so much. All right, well, this has been lovely. Y’all have been absolute treasures. Bria, where can the people find you online?
B: You guys can find me online @chaosbria on Twitter and Instagram; I’m usually talking about Dragon Age.
C: I’m on Twitter @constancegrady, and my articles are published at Vox.com with a V not an S.
N: I’m on Twitter @NatalieZutter, and yeah, my stuff can be found on Tor.com, Den of Geek, and elsewhere.
J: And thank y’all so much for listening, and until next time: One flesh, one end.
C: Oh God!
B: One flesh one ennnnnnnnd! Why!