Entertaining (but Lengthy AF) | The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

Title: The Priory of the Orange Tree
Author: Samantha Shannon
Published: February 26, 2019
Genre(s): Fantasy
Page Count: 846
Rating:

Summary from Goodreads:

The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction--but assassins are getting closer to her door.

Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic.

Across the dark sea, Tané has trained all her life to be a dragonrider, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel.

Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.

When a reader undertakes the task of reading a lengthy book such as The Priory of the Orange Tree, the hope is that the reader’s time and effort will be rewarded. There is added pressure on long books, I think. Nobody complains if a 300-page novel was “good, but not excellent”—yet when we read something that’s 500, 700, 900 pages long, we expect Greatness. But not all books are great; not all books want to be groundbreaking examples of exceptional literature. (Nor, might I add, should all books be The Greatest Book Ever.)

And so: The Priory of the Orange Tree is not a great book; it’s not a cutting-edge fantasy novel that boldly redefines the genre. It simply isn’t—but I also doubt that Samantha Shannon was attempting to write that kind of book here. I suspect she wanted to tell a good story, with dragons and secret societies of magical women. And for all this book’s faults, I cannot deny that this is a good story.

Shannon’s vision here is born out of several Big Ideas. What if the existence of the known world lay balanced between starlight and fire? What if the balance was disrupted? What if, a thousand years ago, a great enemy was born from the bowels of the earth and threatened to destroy everything good in the world? What if the Nameless One was stopped, put to sleep at the bottom of the ocean? What if every myth about how the Nameless One was defeated is wrong, lost to time, perverted by self-serving rulers and religious zealots? And what if…the Nameless One wakes again?

As you can read above, the stakes in The Priory of the Orange Tree couldn’t be higher. An all-powerful, dark power is coming back to destroy the world, and it must be stopped. It’s a good story. It’s also a familiar one, and Shannon doesn’t stray too far from familiar tropes and genre traditions. The Big Bad must be defeated before a Foretold Date, but we don’t know how; so we send people on a Quest, convince other nations to overcome our differences, fight together for the Good of All, etc., etc.

The problem is that the stakes are high, but they don’t feel high. There’s no moment where it truly seems that all hope is lost, no question in your mind that each of the four narrators are assured a life in the world after evil is defeated. Every obstacle Shannon throws in the path of her characters is defeated easily, sometimes within paragraphs. I understand that we live in a post-GRRM world, and that my perception of “danger” may be skewed by the way grimdark fantasy authors like to torture their protagonists. I also understand that Priory is not trying to be that kind of book. But the narrative here felt so hopelessly safe and tame. If the author isn’t willing to kill off her beloved characters, that’s fine; but at least let me see them struggle a bit before you give them the tools they need to succeed.

For instance: the vast majority of the book hinges on a series of several “riddles” that lead the characters, acting alone and without knowledge of the others, to find the weapons necessary to defeat the Nameless One. (As a brief aside—the “weapons” here are gems full of star-magic, which, uh…Silmarils. They’re just Silmarils; you point them at the Big Bad and he dies. Magic!) But the characters solve the riddles with ridiculous ease—often through a conveniently timed “epiphany.” Actually, coincidences and epiphanies serve as Shannon’s primary method of moving the plot forward. Two characters will coincidentally be on board the same ship, facilitating an exchange of important information from one side of the globe to the other before they go on their separate ways. A character will nick herself with a knife, study her bloody finger, and then suddenly know how to open an unopenable box. And so on and so forth. As I said, there isn’t much of a struggle present in this book—either to obtain knowledge or to battle the enemy.

And overall, Priory is just too simplistic. There is Good, and there is Evil. The evil guys are irredeemably bad. The good guys are good, and even when they do bad things, you know Shannon is waiting in the wings to give them a redemption arc. The lack of nuance and—dare I say—humanity evidenced in the four narrators tended to undercut the effect of their choices. Not only did these people never have to struggle through adversity, neither did their choices have long-term consequences that affected their Happily Ever After. The frustrating thing is that Shannon clearly tried to give these characters emotional complexity and to paint them in shades of gray…it’s just that she couldn’t stick the landing.

In light of the above, my overall impression is that Samatha Shannon simply doesn’t have the range to write heavy-hitting, intricate fantasy fiction. She has a great imagination, but her grasp on the mechanics of storytelling seems amateurish. The Priory of the Orange Tree shows that when this author writes herself into a corner, she takes the easiest way out, and often sacrifices the integrity of her story’s logical progression in the process. This novel feels almost like a story that was intended for much younger readers, but was dressed up in order to appeal to adults. (This is not to crap on young adult fantasy, by the way—YA authors can and absolutely do bring complexity and subtlety to the genre.)

For these reasons, I do not think that Priory is a great book. Yet neither do I think it is a bad one. Above all else, this is an exciting and entertaining novel. Shannon created an interesting universe with a depth of history and tradition that clearly took some thought. And although “slaying the evil monster” plotlines are common, that doesn’t mean they’re not worth reading. The book is lengthy, but considering all of the moving pieces and the scope of the plot, I didn’t feel that things dragged on unnecessarily. Indeed, because of the simplicity (see above), I thought that the pace was fairly quick for a high fantasy novel.

Honestly, I liked this! The Priory of the Orange Tree is the fantasy equivalent of the quick and breezy romance novel that you read for the purpose of entertainment. You don’t expect the romance novel to blow your mind, and you come away satisfied with having read a good story that kept you flipping pages for a period of time. Priory may have dragons, but otherwise, it’s just that: a good story.