Nona The Ninth (2022)

By Tamsyn Muir

480pp, Fiction

Notes

2024-04-17

Not a good book, not terrible, definately sub-par. To put it diplomatically Muir does not play to her strengths as an author.

Gideon, the first book in this series was a a kind of fun and dynamic mashup of Warhammer 40k style space fantasy, country house murder mystery, and teenage interpersonl drama. The tight setting and schematic nature of the characters, (they come in numbered pairs) made the whole thing easy to follow in spite of Muir's heavy reliance on -- and weakness with -- dialogue. Everyone sounds the same in these books. In Nona... scenes often involve multiple characters arriving or leaving (or posessing/ leaving a body) with little notice, I found myself not really knowing who was speaking and so tended to treat dialogue as pure information rather than indicating much about character, this leads to everythign feeling rather flat. Not fasionable I know but I wish there was a bit more telling and a bit less showing.

The first novel's remote setting also provides an excuse for the eerily empty feeling which pervades the book, this emptiness persists awkwardly in Nona... which though apparently set in a crowded refugee city feels deserted. Muir just doesn't seem interested in people outside her main group of characters -- kind of apt as the characteras themselves don't really show much interest in the world outside their clique -- but this solipsism doesn't serve the book well.

Anyway, I could go on but listing the ways this book doesn't work would be kind of exhausting, essentially I don't feel Muir has control of the material. I think it's interesting to compare this with Gene Wolfe's books often use similar narative tricks; unreliable narrators, multiple conciousnesses contained in a single body, a tight point of view used to hide or obscure facts about the world. With Wolfe you might feel at sea but never like he's making things up as he goes along, Muir by contrast feels like a DM whos party have decided to ignore her carefully planned adventure and who's permanently on the back foot scrabbling to catch up. This kind of writing can have its own vital energy but in Nona... it doesn't work.