Nona the Ninth
Sep. 20th, 2022 03:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ermingardenNona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
My Rating: ★★★★★
I loved Gideon the Ninth, but found Harrow the Ninth a bit of a slog, so I wasn't even certain I was going to read Nona. Then I finally read a sample on Sunday, and promptly spent the afternoon and evening devouring the book.
General thoughts (non-spoilery)
A huge part of what made me love Nona is, well, how much I love Nona! She's an immediately captivating character and narrator – she reminds me in many ways of Klara, the narrator of Klara and the Sun, which I also loved.
NtN is a vibrant book with a tremendous amount of heart, and I strongly recommend it. In my opinion, it has the strengths of both GtN and HtN but lacks much of what frustrated me about the latter. That said, YMMV, depending on what and whom you liked most in GtN and HtN.
Specific thoughts (very spoilery, and also very scattered)
1) PAUL!
Camilla Hect and Palamedes Sextus have had my heart from the moment they were introduced in GtN, so I adored how much we saw of Cam & Pal in NtN – and of course, I have to talk about their end.
First of all, the name "Paul" is absolutely incredible on so many levels. For one thing, we only know one other person in this series with one of those stereotypically common, one-syllable New Testament names – and that's John! Which works really, really well with Paul-as-the-anti-John, which I think we see getting set up.
NtN is shot through with the theme of love-as-consumption vs. love-as-communion. (Religious connotations intentional.) John literally describes the Lyctors as extensions of himself; he reshaped the people he called his friends to place them under his own control. We see an echo of this in how Ianthe treats Coronabeth, too.
Then we see Camilla and Palamedes, and Pal's desperation not to subsume/consume Camilla! I've not been looking at Tumblr reactions to NtN much, but from what I have seen, at least some people are seeing this as a bad end, a horrifying end, for Cam and Pal. I don't see it that way. Their backs were to the wall, and they wouldn't have chosen this if it weren't necessary, but ultimately...well, as Cam put it to We Suffer earlier, "the Sixth House went out on its own terms." Choosing to die (or be transfigured?) in the way they did, in Pal's words, was "the best and truest and kindest thing [they could] do in this moment." Truest – truest to themselves, to who they were and who they always tried to be. And they avoided the thing they feared most, which was one of them swallowing up the other.
Is this "Perfect Lyctorhood" – or a form of it? MAYBE! In HtN, we see the Lyctors furious at learning – or thinking they've learned! – that John achieved Lyctorhood without Alecto dying. But Alecto isn't a human! She's literally the Earth! John couldn't possibly consume her entirely. Could two human beings to achieve Lyctorhood and remain separate? Maybe not, actually. Maybe Paul is as good as it gets.
But turning again to the name "Paul":
Pal says to Cam, "In the River—beyond the River—I truly believe we will see ourselves and each other as we really are." This is essentially 1 Corinthians 13:12: "Now we are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror; but then we shall be seeing face to face. The knowledge that I have now is imperfect; but then I shall know as fully as I am known." (Note: The translation I'm using for Biblical quotations throughout this post is the 1966 Jerusalem Bible, which has traditionally been the basis for the lectionaries used by English-speaking Catholics outside the United States, including in New Zealand.)
Going down the road of Paul's name as referencing Paul the Apostle – which, considering this is Tamsyn Muir we're talking about, is probably one of at least four overlapping references, but it's the one that leapt out to me – immediately brought to mind 2 Corinthians 5:17: "And for anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation; the old creation has gone, and now the new one is here." Paul is a new person who did not exist before, but Paul also is Cam and Pal – Cam and Pal transfigured.
There's a part of me that wonders if this transfiguration is what will happen to Harrow and Gideon in the end. I doubt it – it would be too tidy for Muir! There's another part of me that wonders if this is what will happen to Harrow and Alecto: Harrow sacrificing herself to bring the Earth back to life – albeit a new Earth – through her living body?
I'd say attempts at prediction are fruitless with Muir, but shoutout tochestnut_pod for predicting the Cam & Pal "smoosheroo" back in May!
2) Nona
The line in the (delightfully Wilde-esque) epilogue that gutted me was: "For Alecto knew not how to kiss, except such as it involved the mouth and teeth." Because Nona knew. Nona knew the "lessons of the hand and the mouth"; Nona kissed Gideon's corpse so tenderly. I hope and expect that Alecto will remember what it was to be Nona. But she still won't be Nona. This is the line that drove home that Nona is gone.
It's interesting to me to think of Nona as the human i(/I)ncarnation of Earth. Nona is fully a human being in a way Alecto really isn't – or rather, she learns to be human in a way Alecto never has. And the most fundamental thing is how to love in a human way. The things Nona learns best, that she pays the most attention to, have to do with expressing love.
Continuing in a similar vein, I am struck by how important Nona's job as Teacher's Aide is to her motivations. She takes extremely seriously the idea that she is in some way responsible for her friends. For example, even as she generally looks up to Hot Sauce and follows her lead, when she helps a panicking Hot Sauce after the broadcast she does it as a Teacher's Aide: "'Listen to me,' she commanded. 'I'm your Teacher's Aide. Breathe with me...'"
Paul reminding Nona that Noodle is in the truck is what spurs Nona back into action when she was ready to let go. Why? I certainly don't think it's because Nona cares about Noodle more than she cares about Pyrrha or Crown or anyone else. I think it's because Nona feels responsible for Noodle – looking after him was part of her job as a Teacher's Aide, and even now that matters to her.
(I just love Nona so much, okay? She's so good.)
3) Crown
Crown Him with Many Crowns Thy Full Gallant Legions He Found It in Him to Forgive is such a name. Wow. I do not really know what's going on in most of the latter part – "Thy Full Gallant Legions" is a phrase in the Côte d'Ivoire national anthem, though I don't know if that's what Muir's trying to get at with it, and I don't know what "He Found It in Him to Forgive" is referencing in particular...BUT I do have a few thoughts about the first phrase!
My initial reaction to Crown/Coronabeth's full name was actually annoyance, because simply reading the words "Crown Him with Many Crowns" was enough to get the tune stuck in my head. "Crown Him with Many Crowns" (the tune name is "Diademata," which just means "Crowned") is a real old warhorse of a hymn I've sung in choir dozens of times at least. (Here's a version on YouTube.) But thinking about the text of the hymn, there seems to be a lot Muir could potentially be hinting at here.
The first question about the name is obvious: Who's the "Him"? I don't know! On a Watsonian level, one assumes it wouldn't be John, in a Blood of Eden name. Perhaps that question will be answered someday!
"Crown Him with Many Crowns" has twelve verses total, although they're basically never all sung. The first verse goes like this:
What immediately springs to my mind is the parallel we're getting between "Crown" at the start of the verse and "Awake" at the transition into the second half. Knowing Muir, I think this was deliberate, hinting at a parallel or contrast between Crown/Coronabeth and Wake/Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity. This is underlined by the similarity between "Thy Full Gallant Legions" in Crown's name and "These Valiant Dead" in Wake's.
Looking at the names in parallel makes me a little more confident about "Thy Full Gallant Legions" coming from Côte d'Ivoire's national anthem, because "Kia Hua Ko Te Pai" ("Let goodness flourish") is a line in New Zealand's national anthem. I don't know enough about the history of Côte d'Ivoire in general, and the anthem in particular, to speculate on why Côte d'Ivoire's anthem in particular, so I'll leave off that thread there.
The names are very different structurally, though! Corona's name works as a single sentence: the gallant legions the unidentified "He" has forgiven are instructed to crown him. Everything is structured around a single figure who isn't Corona. Wake's name, in contrast, doesn't have a similar internal narrative and doesn't center on any single figure apart from the hearer.
Generally speaking, I would tend to read Crown's name as pointing back in the direction of John; that was certainly my reaction when first encountering it. But while "Crown Him with Many Crowns" is definitely a triumphant hymn, and a lot of the imagery is of the sort we see used for John, it also has some astonishingly beautiful lines that don't fit John at all: my personal favorite is "Crown him the king, to whom is given / The wondrous name of Love."
4) The nun
There were three moments in NtN that really Got Me. One was Paul coming into being, another was the line in the epilogue I discussed above, and the third was the nun walking into John's room, saying the second half of the Hail Mary, and then shooting herself.
Did I know from the lead-up in the preceding paragraphs that she was going to kill herself in a kind of self-sacrifice? Yes. Did the lines "She said, Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. And she shot herself." still make my skin crawl? YES.
It has me thinking about different symbolic languages, especially in the context of religion; religious practice as language, in a sense. My particular background and cultural context makes the words "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death" just about as weighty as words get – I've surely said them literal thousands of times. And that passage is only as much of a gut-punch as it is to me because of that external context. It reminds me how much I'm missing when reading books, watching movies, etc., that draw on different symbolic languages! I can be told "Oh, this has this association, and this is used in that way," and that gets me to a certain point, but inevitably there is a gap in emotional experience.
Anyway, I'd love to hear what you think! How did NtN compare to the first two?
My Rating: ★★★★★
I loved Gideon the Ninth, but found Harrow the Ninth a bit of a slog, so I wasn't even certain I was going to read Nona. Then I finally read a sample on Sunday, and promptly spent the afternoon and evening devouring the book.
General thoughts (non-spoilery)
A huge part of what made me love Nona is, well, how much I love Nona! She's an immediately captivating character and narrator – she reminds me in many ways of Klara, the narrator of Klara and the Sun, which I also loved.
NtN is a vibrant book with a tremendous amount of heart, and I strongly recommend it. In my opinion, it has the strengths of both GtN and HtN but lacks much of what frustrated me about the latter. That said, YMMV, depending on what and whom you liked most in GtN and HtN.
Specific thoughts (very spoilery, and also very scattered)
1) PAUL!
Camilla Hect and Palamedes Sextus have had my heart from the moment they were introduced in GtN, so I adored how much we saw of Cam & Pal in NtN – and of course, I have to talk about their end.
First of all, the name "Paul" is absolutely incredible on so many levels. For one thing, we only know one other person in this series with one of those stereotypically common, one-syllable New Testament names – and that's John! Which works really, really well with Paul-as-the-anti-John, which I think we see getting set up.
NtN is shot through with the theme of love-as-consumption vs. love-as-communion. (Religious connotations intentional.) John literally describes the Lyctors as extensions of himself; he reshaped the people he called his friends to place them under his own control. We see an echo of this in how Ianthe treats Coronabeth, too.
Then we see Camilla and Palamedes, and Pal's desperation not to subsume/consume Camilla! I've not been looking at Tumblr reactions to NtN much, but from what I have seen, at least some people are seeing this as a bad end, a horrifying end, for Cam and Pal. I don't see it that way. Their backs were to the wall, and they wouldn't have chosen this if it weren't necessary, but ultimately...well, as Cam put it to We Suffer earlier, "the Sixth House went out on its own terms." Choosing to die (or be transfigured?) in the way they did, in Pal's words, was "the best and truest and kindest thing [they could] do in this moment." Truest – truest to themselves, to who they were and who they always tried to be. And they avoided the thing they feared most, which was one of them swallowing up the other.
Is this "Perfect Lyctorhood" – or a form of it? MAYBE! In HtN, we see the Lyctors furious at learning – or thinking they've learned! – that John achieved Lyctorhood without Alecto dying. But Alecto isn't a human! She's literally the Earth! John couldn't possibly consume her entirely. Could two human beings to achieve Lyctorhood and remain separate? Maybe not, actually. Maybe Paul is as good as it gets.
But turning again to the name "Paul":
Pal says to Cam, "In the River—beyond the River—I truly believe we will see ourselves and each other as we really are." This is essentially 1 Corinthians 13:12: "Now we are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror; but then we shall be seeing face to face. The knowledge that I have now is imperfect; but then I shall know as fully as I am known." (Note: The translation I'm using for Biblical quotations throughout this post is the 1966 Jerusalem Bible, which has traditionally been the basis for the lectionaries used by English-speaking Catholics outside the United States, including in New Zealand.)
Going down the road of Paul's name as referencing Paul the Apostle – which, considering this is Tamsyn Muir we're talking about, is probably one of at least four overlapping references, but it's the one that leapt out to me – immediately brought to mind 2 Corinthians 5:17: "And for anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation; the old creation has gone, and now the new one is here." Paul is a new person who did not exist before, but Paul also is Cam and Pal – Cam and Pal transfigured.
There's a part of me that wonders if this transfiguration is what will happen to Harrow and Gideon in the end. I doubt it – it would be too tidy for Muir! There's another part of me that wonders if this is what will happen to Harrow and Alecto: Harrow sacrificing herself to bring the Earth back to life – albeit a new Earth – through her living body?
I'd say attempts at prediction are fruitless with Muir, but shoutout to
chestnut_pod for predicting the Cam & Pal "smoosheroo" back in May!2) Nona
The line in the (delightfully Wilde-esque) epilogue that gutted me was: "For Alecto knew not how to kiss, except such as it involved the mouth and teeth." Because Nona knew. Nona knew the "lessons of the hand and the mouth"; Nona kissed Gideon's corpse so tenderly. I hope and expect that Alecto will remember what it was to be Nona. But she still won't be Nona. This is the line that drove home that Nona is gone.
It's interesting to me to think of Nona as the human i(/I)ncarnation of Earth. Nona is fully a human being in a way Alecto really isn't – or rather, she learns to be human in a way Alecto never has. And the most fundamental thing is how to love in a human way. The things Nona learns best, that she pays the most attention to, have to do with expressing love.
Continuing in a similar vein, I am struck by how important Nona's job as Teacher's Aide is to her motivations. She takes extremely seriously the idea that she is in some way responsible for her friends. For example, even as she generally looks up to Hot Sauce and follows her lead, when she helps a panicking Hot Sauce after the broadcast she does it as a Teacher's Aide: "'Listen to me,' she commanded. 'I'm your Teacher's Aide. Breathe with me...'"
Paul reminding Nona that Noodle is in the truck is what spurs Nona back into action when she was ready to let go. Why? I certainly don't think it's because Nona cares about Noodle more than she cares about Pyrrha or Crown or anyone else. I think it's because Nona feels responsible for Noodle – looking after him was part of her job as a Teacher's Aide, and even now that matters to her.
(I just love Nona so much, okay? She's so good.)
3) Crown
Crown Him with Many Crowns Thy Full Gallant Legions He Found It in Him to Forgive is such a name. Wow. I do not really know what's going on in most of the latter part – "Thy Full Gallant Legions" is a phrase in the Côte d'Ivoire national anthem, though I don't know if that's what Muir's trying to get at with it, and I don't know what "He Found It in Him to Forgive" is referencing in particular...BUT I do have a few thoughts about the first phrase!
My initial reaction to Crown/Coronabeth's full name was actually annoyance, because simply reading the words "Crown Him with Many Crowns" was enough to get the tune stuck in my head. "Crown Him with Many Crowns" (the tune name is "Diademata," which just means "Crowned") is a real old warhorse of a hymn I've sung in choir dozens of times at least. (Here's a version on YouTube.) But thinking about the text of the hymn, there seems to be a lot Muir could potentially be hinting at here.
The first question about the name is obvious: Who's the "Him"? I don't know! On a Watsonian level, one assumes it wouldn't be John, in a Blood of Eden name. Perhaps that question will be answered someday!
"Crown Him with Many Crowns" has twelve verses total, although they're basically never all sung. The first verse goes like this:
Crown him with many crowns,
The Lamb upon his throne;
Hark how the heav'nly anthem drowns
All music but its own:
Awake, my soul, and sing
Of him who died for thee,
And hail him as thy matchless king
Through all eternity.
What immediately springs to my mind is the parallel we're getting between "Crown" at the start of the verse and "Awake" at the transition into the second half. Knowing Muir, I think this was deliberate, hinting at a parallel or contrast between Crown/Coronabeth and Wake/Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity. This is underlined by the similarity between "Thy Full Gallant Legions" in Crown's name and "These Valiant Dead" in Wake's.
Looking at the names in parallel makes me a little more confident about "Thy Full Gallant Legions" coming from Côte d'Ivoire's national anthem, because "Kia Hua Ko Te Pai" ("Let goodness flourish") is a line in New Zealand's national anthem. I don't know enough about the history of Côte d'Ivoire in general, and the anthem in particular, to speculate on why Côte d'Ivoire's anthem in particular, so I'll leave off that thread there.
The names are very different structurally, though! Corona's name works as a single sentence: the gallant legions the unidentified "He" has forgiven are instructed to crown him. Everything is structured around a single figure who isn't Corona. Wake's name, in contrast, doesn't have a similar internal narrative and doesn't center on any single figure apart from the hearer.
Generally speaking, I would tend to read Crown's name as pointing back in the direction of John; that was certainly my reaction when first encountering it. But while "Crown Him with Many Crowns" is definitely a triumphant hymn, and a lot of the imagery is of the sort we see used for John, it also has some astonishingly beautiful lines that don't fit John at all: my personal favorite is "Crown him the king, to whom is given / The wondrous name of Love."
4) The nun
There were three moments in NtN that really Got Me. One was Paul coming into being, another was the line in the epilogue I discussed above, and the third was the nun walking into John's room, saying the second half of the Hail Mary, and then shooting herself.
Did I know from the lead-up in the preceding paragraphs that she was going to kill herself in a kind of self-sacrifice? Yes. Did the lines "She said, Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. And she shot herself." still make my skin crawl? YES.
It has me thinking about different symbolic languages, especially in the context of religion; religious practice as language, in a sense. My particular background and cultural context makes the words "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death" just about as weighty as words get – I've surely said them literal thousands of times. And that passage is only as much of a gut-punch as it is to me because of that external context. It reminds me how much I'm missing when reading books, watching movies, etc., that draw on different symbolic languages! I can be told "Oh, this has this association, and this is used in that way," and that gets me to a certain point, but inevitably there is a gap in emotional experience.
Anyway, I'd love to hear what you think! How did NtN compare to the first two?
(no subject)
Date: 2022-09-20 12:25 pm (UTC)Every book in this series is SO different from each other, and I love it!! (I also find Harrow a... harder, for lack of a better word?... read than Gideon, which I've re-read x4 to Harrow's x2, but I look forward to re-reading Harrow in light of Nona.)
I loved Nona, all the more for being Alecto, because like-- she's been entombed for ten thousand years, and then she's given six months of amnesiac human-ness and she's like, I love dogs and my friends and jokes! I love this for her!! And then she has to go back??
I discussed this a bit in my own review, but I think one of the most fascinating things to me from a plot-construction level was how Nona's and Gideon's situations were basically inverse to each other's. I feel like there's a parallel between John's plan to get everyone off-planet and Pa(u)l's, as well, but that's something to keep in mind for a re-read...
(no subject)
Date: 2022-09-20 05:14 pm (UTC)I forgot you reviewed NtN – I skipped it because spoilers, but I went back and read it just now and yes yes yes! I hadn't thought about the Nona vs. Gideon mirroring but you are so right. And the parallel between John's plan and Pa(u)l's...I'm so invested in the idea of Paul as the anti-John at this point.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-05-06 11:23 pm (UTC)