With Ninth Life, Holborn returns to her science fiction/mystic setting of Factus and its environs for a third time.

In the first book, Ten Low, we followed just one first person narration by the eponymous convict/medic/traitor. Then in Hell’s Eight we got two first person protagonists in Ten Low’s present-time experiences and Pec Esterhazy’s past journal. In the third excursion to Factus, Holborn has given us three distinctly voiced first person protagonists. There is the future archivist Idriis Blake documenting their attempts to collate and compile all the records of the life of General Gabi Ortiz. A significant part of that archive is the fragmentary first person testimony of Havemercy Grey as she travelled with Ortiz in the last (recorded) stage in the General’s career. And within that testimony are Havemercy’s transcriptions of Gabi’s voice talking us through the past daisy chain of events from the end of Hel’s Eight, to the start of Ninth Life.

That structure makes for an intriguing Russian doll of nested narratives and different voices as each of Blake, Havemercy and Gabi have their own demons to face and their conflicts to reveal.

As I wrote reviewing Ten Low here and Hel’s Eight here, the two previous books in Holborn’s Factus series could be read as a standalone, and Ninth Life is no different. Blake and Havemercy are new names to carry their story and Holborn’s immersive style of writing ensures we pick up the sense of the plot and the worlds pretty quickly. Although, glancing back over my previous reviews I found an added poignancy as my memory was jogged about familiar characters from the previous novels that had flitted into Havemercy’s odyssey.

The spine of the story is that an injured Gabi has been captured by Havemercy and is being taken to be handed in for a significant reward. Oh, if only it were that simple! The journey is as tortuous as it is dangerous, with Gabi both a rich prize and a deadly threat that makes the venture anything but straightforward and risk-free. In the brief hiatuses between the many excitements Gabi fills in the chapters of her life and Havemercy records that testimony.

The book’s title obviously references the proverbial feline’s propensity for evading danger, and Gabi’s tales cover the occasions on which she died – or should have – or maybe did? Holborn’s inventive creation of the Ifs haunt Gabi as they haunted Ten Low before her. Those ephemeral parasites of chance, that laugh at chaos and spit in the face of  entropy are always swirling around key moments in Gabi’s life and ensure that anything or everything could have happened – and probably did.

As Gabi tells Havemercy

“I knew I wasn’t about to die, I just didn’t know how I’d get out of it. Or what it might cost me. That’s the old curse of it all – seeing the what but not the how.”

For me though, there was another more tangential resonance between Gabi’s tale and that of the Second World War Aircraft Carrier ‘Ark Royal’ – a ship as iconic in the Royal Navy’s battle against Hitler’s Germany as Gabi is in Factus’s resistance against the Accord. A foe so significant that the enemy reported her sunk/dead many times – yet somehow she came back to torment them some more.

 While the narrative orbits Factus, the trajectory of Gabi and Havemercy’s tales takes them to a rich diversity of moons, planets and space stations, including the lush and invasive flora of the prison camp of Molscher Nord in the swamps of Prodor, as Gabi relates

“The guards slept under microbial nets, but we had to scrape our flesh every morning to get rid of the micro-organisms before they took root. Knew a prisoner who died that way. Passed out in some tree roots from exhaustion. By the time we found him, three days later, he’d become a garden.”

Beside the central trio of incomparably sardonic Gabi, youthfully desperate Havemercy, and bookishly naïve Blake, Holborn treats us to an array of ancillary characters all of them convinced they are the good guys but not all of them so convincing to the reader. F0r example, alongside returning favourites like Falco and Silas and the occasional tear-inducing apparition of Hel’s Eight, we have Roper and his band of bounty hunters.

The warmth vanished from the bounty Hunter’s face. ‘Listen kid, we’ve been doing this for years… catching her ain’t shit. There’ll be no payment until she’s in the hands of the Accord. And beg pardon if you don’t know, but we aren’t exactly their favourite people.” He took a buzz stick from his jacket and held it between his silver teeth. “You get to live. That’s my final offer.”

But I particularly enjoyed the fighting-pit-boss Bhoomika.

You blinked, stepping forward as if from a dream

‘Bhoomika?’

A silence. Then the beads groaned as a figure shifted out of the shadows, a tall old woman in a crumpled plastic skirt, her wild red hair showing white at the roots.

“Nifia,” she said, staring at your face. “Is that you?”

“It’s me.” You took your hand from your torso. In the dim light your palm was slick with blood. “And I’m here to collect on that debt.”

As ever, Holborn’s prose shimmers like quicksilver with so many elegant lines and deftly captured images.

When we meet Havemercy, we instantly know something is awry with her day, but have half a book’s wait to find out what.

I gripped the handlebars hard to keep it steady, hands stinging as the toxic dust worked its way into my skin, into the blisters that rawed each palm, my quick pink flesh weeping the tears my eyes wouldn’t.

Or looking up at an orbiting space station

The red lights of its vast ring structure gleamed dully, like beads of blood on a wound that never healed, a hole torn into the flesh of space.

Or drained of snark when trying to probe a new travelling companion

“You were a droger?” I meant it to come out as an insult – he was skinnier than any droger I’d ever seen – but it must have been the exhaustion because it came out flat, like a real question.

Or back in the Edge on Factus

Being in the Edge does something to you, makes reality seem…thin. There’s that constant feeling that of you tilt your head at just the right angle, you’ll see right through the skin of the world to every other version of it, existing side by side.

While I have commented on the nested/Russian doll nature of the story’s three protagonists, there is much more to Holborn’s latest structural experiment than the onion layering of framing stories. This is not simply The Wayfarer Inn framing Kvothe’s backstory, or even the opening confrontation of Red Sister framing Nona’s ninja-nun education. The outer layer of Ninth Life, Blake’s story – the book that the reader is reading – is not so much a book as an archive which contains, rather than merely surrounding the other layers.

A friend of mine is exploring epistolary crime fiction as his PhD thesis and I had the pleasure of reading an early draft of his creative piece. It is presented as an archive, prepared by an archivist, cataloguing a famed journalist’s work and focussing on his writing of one particular true crime story. That archive includes photographs, text message exchanges, receipts and other non-conventional story forms.

In a similar vein, Holborn’s Blake peppers the text with transcripts of media broadcasts, records of interviews, reports on prison conditions, and even at one point a screenplay extract for a planned biopic of Gabi, all inserted between chronologically relevant sections of Havemercy’s testimony and her record of Gabi’s words.  But the archivist is more than just a passive collator of facts. There are decisions to be made in how it is presented, what is retained, what is discarded, and what dangers will be discovered. Blake’s careful documentation is interspersed with increasingly anxious messages to himself and the reader about the stalled or compromised nature of his research. While Blake’s story lies an indeterminate number of years beyond Gabi’s it seems that the Ifs can reach across time as well as space and are determined to have a say in what stories should be told.

As ever, I find myself reading any book through the lens of my own contemporary experiences and fashioning resonances that may, or may not, have been Holborn’s intention.

For example, one observation Blake makes about a battle record “Well, soldiers have done worse, but to kill a medic – it’s taboo indeed, no matter which side you fight for.” reminded me of an account from the 2008 war in Georgia – a surgeon in scrubs on a rest break targeted by a Russian sniper – and of other atrocities against providers of essential health care.

Then there is the besieged quasi-legal state of Factus – denied supplies and subjected to ruthless bombardment which sounds horribly familiar in the Spring/Summer of 2024.

Despite Holborn’s customary breathlessly pacey account of action, war and conflict, there is no glorying in it. This is desperate bloody stuff done by flawed, desperate, bloody – but still all too human – people.

For example, when Havemercy rebukes Gabi about potential victims of the piracy Gabi committed to feed Factus

“It wasn’t a war. You didn’t have to kill them.”

“The Accord might not have called it one, but that’s what it was, make no mistake. Until you’ve stood in the dust of a settlement and seen children dying from thirst and illness and starvation, see bodies piled high in the maggot farm, because there’s nothing to treat the yellowrot but medicines that are more poison than the water, you can’t tell me what is or isn’t justified. You can’t say what we had to do.”

And at the heart of Ninth Life, is the imperative that stories need to be told, witnesses need to be heard, legends must not be forgotten. Which is why Gabi is so determined to talk and why –  notwithstanding everyone else’s admonition of “Don’t let her talk” – Havemercy listens.

Ninth Life is out tomorrow from Titan! You can order your copy HERE