Books I Didn't Finish: The Priory Of The Orange Tree

But Ronan, I hear you ask, you don’t finish most of the books you review! Why make a seperate series for it now? Shut up, that’s why!

For today’s entry in my acclaimed and popular review column we’re looking at last year’s The Priory Of The Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon, a book I got about 20% of the way through before giving up. Why did I give up? Because it wasn’t very good.

See you all next time.

Seriously though, Priory got a fair bit of attention when it came out, partially because it’s a single-volume fantasy novel--something that’s never been the norm for the genre and is increasingly unusual now--and partially because it was frequently and breathlessly compared to Game Of Thrones, to which it in fact has basically no resemblance whatsoever except that both of them involve dragons (Shannon herself has described the book as “a feminist retelling of the story of St. George and the dragon”).

The book takes place in your fairly standard fantasy continent where areas are nebulously defined by cardinal directions and you can map the various regions onto obvious historical analogues; thus “the East” is a mish-mash of Japan and China, the South is based on Africa (at least going by the names), the West is renaissance faire sparkle-Europe and I didn’t get far enough to see what’s up North but I assume they’re Vikings or something. None of it is terribly interesting, although I will say that Shannon is good at making the various cultural and historical connections between the different regions and kingdoms easy to understand.

Unfortunately she does this with extremely clunky exposition, including several literal “as you know…” conversations. The plot also arranges itself to deliver crucial information to point of view characters whether it makes sense or not, such as when a diplomat conveys an offer of marriage to a queen in front of her entire court--something you’d think would take place behind closed doors--solely so that one of the main characters can be around to witness it. 

One of the frequent comments made about Shannon’s previous work, the multi-book series that started with The Bone Season, is that although it was marketed as adult fantasy it felt very much like a YA novel. Whether or not this was a criticism or merely an observation depended on who was making the comment. I felt the same way about The Priory Of The Orange Tree: if you gave me the book and asked me to guess which market demographic it was being aimed at I would have 100% gone for YA, and not just because most of the characters are barely into adulthood and it starts off with a young woman preparing for something called “the Choosing.”

It’s also due to the writing. I’m going to make some people mad in this part so strap in: Shannon’s writing is very basic and overly simplified.

Now, before anyone jumps to conclusions, I am not saying “lol Shannon uses simplistic baby-language for immature YA readers”. What I mean is that, based on my infrequent dips into the demographic, there seems to be a trend recently in YA genre novels towards prose that in my opinion is lacking in complexity or artistry. This wasn’t always the case; during the post Twilight and Hunger Games booms YA novels tended to go the other direction, towards overly ornate writing. I’m assuming something popular came out using the latest style and caused a shift among publishers and authors (I first noticed it in books by Sarah J Maas and Marie Lu, but I don’t know if they were the originators).

Simple writing isn’t necessarily bad writing, but The Priory Of The Orange Tree is simple to the point of being flat and lifeless. Scenery description is either non-existant or so perfunctory that it gives the reader very little sense of what physical spaces look like (if the different settings weren’t clearly based on historical analogues they’d mostly be blank voids), as in this example where one of our protagonists sees a big city for the first time:

“Her imagination had not failed her. The shrines were larger than any in Cape Hisan, the streets glistened like sand under the sun, and petals drifted along the canals. Still, more people meant more noise and commotion. Charcoal smoke thickened the air. Oxen pulled carts of goods, messengers ran or rode between buildings, stray hounds nosed at scraps of food, and here and there, a drunkard ranted at the crowds. 

And such crowds. Tané had thought Cape Hisan busy, but a hundred thousand people jostled in Ginura, and for the first time in her life, she realised how little of the world she had seen.”

It’s...big! And there’s…lots of people! Doesn’t it just feel like you’re there? 

Events that should be exciting or awe-inspiring are narrated in the same flat tone as mundane trivialities. An elder dragon awakening from its slumber and going on a rampage through a city has the same cadence and pacing as two characters going for a walk in a garden; when someone sees a living dragon for the first time, there’s no sense of wonder or awe conveyed to the reader at all, merely an assertion that the character is feeling those things. 

Actually, that last point might be partially my fault. See, The Priory Of The Orange Tree is all about dragons, as you can see from that nice cover art, and I have a bad case of dragon fatigue. The Nameless One has returned from his ancient prison and I’ve contracted the draconic plague; after a decade’s worth of Game of Thrones and How To Drain Your Dragon and all the dragon-based books aimed at various age groups that (entirely coincidentally, I’m sure) sprang up in their wake, dragons have taken on the same status as vampires in the post-Twilight years: they’ve been played straight, messed around with, parodied and deconstructed to hell and back, and they’re simply not interesting to me any more.

At this point, there are only two approaches to dragons I can tolerate: either make them incredibly rare and lacking any major impact on the setting, or have them be an incidental background feature where people are like “oh by the way, sometimes there’s dragons.” Priory’s approach where we’re supposed to be bowled over by the concept just because the book uses a slightly different spin on the idea (there’s two kinds and one lives in water and the fire-breathing ones are evil, isn’t that unique!) simply isn’t interesting. No, I don’t care how many toes the High Westerns have compared to the other species. Come up with a new fantasy monster.

I’ve been ripping into this book for several paragraphs now, so in the name of fairness I guess I should compliment it on being very fast-paced for a big chunky fantasy novel; especially considering it’s a single-volume one-and-done story (supposedly--that’s also what An Ember In The Ashes was meant to be), the story gets going very quickly and didn’t show any signs of slowing down during the part I read.

That’s... pretty much the only thing I liked about it. If you have any experience reading fantasy at all, nothing here is going to excite you and a lot of it is going to bore you (I originally wrote “maybe it will be more interesting to its less-jaded intended audience” here; that’s how much the book feels like a YA novel). I haven’t read The Bone Season, but the synopses of the three published books make them sound pretty out-there so it’s disappointing to see Shannon put out such an uninteresting fantasy novel.