On the first read-through, Harrow the Ninth is dazzling. i remember turning to my boyfriend around twenty pages in and saying, “hey, am i supposed to have no idea what is going on?” The books’ structural ambitions - the extensive use of the second person and multiple timelines throughout the book - combined with Muir’s characteristically wide-ranging lexicon, playing with the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ registers, and the significance of key plot twists late in the game, make it a challenging read - and honestly for me, the disorientation is half the fun.
Re-reading it this past month (i only ever made it to the end of Harrow and i forgot half the key plot beats, so im re-reading to get up to speed before tackling Nona), at first, i was slightly underwhelmed. Like i said, for me, the disorientation is half the fun, and weirdly enough Harrow is a lot less disorienting when you have a vague clue of what the fuck is happening (why is this in the second person? why are there multiple timelines? why is Ortus such a big deal all of a sudden?). However, as i read on, that feeling gave way to a different kind of satisfaction at the more subtle elements of the book, its careful pacing, and the frequent dissonant details dropped so innocuously throughout. Actually, i suspect that it was only on the re-read that i really appreciated the effect produced by Muir’s structural ambitions, a kind of internal expansiveness appearing from the cracks between narrative perspectives, which lends real weight to that nearly apocalyptic crescendo.
If, as i said of Gideon, what’s satisfying about the Harrow/Gideon relationship is Muir’s skillful articulation of the faultlines in hierarchised social control revealed and elided by their mutual obsession, Harrow’s drawn-out narrative fragmentation dramatises those same faultlines at a structural level, imploding and exploding outwards in the various backstabbings, coups, and counter-coups that bring the novel to a close. Muir achieves this effect via a perversion of the Lyctoral process, a strange bodily cohabitation; the various characters strife for, and fail to attain, a consumption without destruction, an intimacy that doesn’t cannibalise the other.
It is no coincidence that some of the best descriptive passages in the book are accounts of viscera, whether the fluid, swelling corpses of the River, or the internal effects of the various attempts by Harrow and Ortus the First to finish one another off. This is a novel deeply invested in the question of what a body can do, can be, and what it can’t, searching for the limits. And there’s something deeply chilling and satisfying in finding what those limits are; the full scope of The Locked Tomb’s imperial landscape is still not entirely clear, but the brief glimpses of God at his most candid in the book’s finale are deeply tantalising.
Harrow the Ninth is impressive, but it leaves you with more questions than answers. i personally wanted to immediately start Nona, but im being well-behaved. It’s been over a month since i read any Ulysses so i need to return to it or admit defeat. But i am deeply excited to dig into what is - by all accounts - the dense and meaty fleshing out of what remains a fairly shadowy and mysterious world that Muir has suckered me into so skillfully.
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oh i cannot wait for you to read nona the ninth and then the unwanted guest. harrow is the perfect sequel in that it is perverted at most levels. its a craziness you have to persist through the muck with! this + nona is really when muir shows the translucent paradox of the bodiless controlling structures situated and played out…fantastic as always :)