The crowning flight of fancy, however, sees Gideon imagine Harrowhark opening an envelope full of praise and medals and a fat check all based on Gideon’s role as an “outstanding and very hot” soldier. Kinship, too: why else would Nav, upon finding a concealed door, and “out of a complete sense of perversity, tacked the tapestry back up so that” it is completely covered (97)?Īnd what do Nav’s fantasies tell us? An extended one, based on upwards of a million comic books, can be boiled down to, Gideon goes off to fight for the Cohort and annihilates, near single-handedly, the Empire’s enemies.
If there’s anything that such a level of antagonism evokes, it is familiarity. Is it a stretch to think this is something Harrow does at least in part for Gideon’s benefit? On first thought, yes but then again, Gideon and Harrow have grown up together, have beaten each other black and blue over their entire lives, are the absolute fiercest enemies in the oppressive environment of Castle Drearburgh.
Yet upon her very first possibility of interaction, what is Nav surprised by? Shyness, and relief thanks to “Harrow’s diktat against talking” despite the overwhelming feeling that she should “yearn to talk” with anyone not of the House she’s unwittingly spent her whole life in (93). So for example, one of Nonagesimus’s orders in absentia is that Gideon keep her mouth shut and not talk with anybody-a seemingly mean-spirited order, as any reader will have come to expect from Harrow (91). The impression it drew on me coloured every scene of animosity, every bizarre Ninth act and order that follows. That small moment of camaraderie in the face of two decrepit fossils fighting over the limits of duty informed my perception of the Ninth protagonists more than anything else in those first eighty-six pages of Gideon. What did it for me at the onset was the following: “Harrowhark’s eyes found hers, and that disdainful mask slipped in its blankness her lips thinned.
And it’s not that the thrashing and back-and-forth don’t convince you there’re plenty of issues to explore in a healthy space such as a therapist’s couch, or….I don’t know, a long-abandoned gothic castle at the heart of empire? It’s that you recognize the fuel behind that “absolute fucking hate” the two girls swear on left and right is only half of the (abusive) story. That something isn’t the vague, zeitgeisty knowledge I had about the novel before ever picking it up (thanks, blogosphere!) nor was it an errant turn left down the Internet’s archives of scalding lesbian necromancer fan-art (which I would know nothing of *he said, beefing up his Pinterest privacy settings*). Something about the absolute animosity between Gideon Nav and Harrowhark Nonagesimus lets you know…these two crazy kids love each other to death.
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