The Priory of the Orange Tree (Samantha Shannon)

The Priory of the Orange Tree
Samantha Shannon
Bloomsbury
Fiction, Fantasy
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: One thousand years ago, the unquiet fires in the womb of the world birthed the Nameless One, a great dragon of chaos. His minions, the High Westerns, spread armies of monsters - wyverns, cockatrices, and worse - through all the lands of men, carrying death and destruction and the plague of the red sickness, until the brave knight Galian struck the beast down with the mighty blade Ascalon. Taking to wife the lovely Cleolind, Galian then founded a new religion, Virtudom, based on the six virtues of knighthood and becoming the revered Saint. Their descendants of the line Berethnet have ruled from the Inysh capital of Ascalon ever since, mother to daughter down through the ages, and so long as their bloodline endures, the Nameless One can never return from where he was bound away beneath the earth... or so it is said in the West. In the South, Galian was a greedy deceiver who sought to usurp Cleolind's victory over the dragon for his own gains; she spurned him and fled to found a sect devoted to harnessing ancient powers to hunt the monsters created by the Nameless One. And in the East, where dragons are creatures of sea and starfire, they are honored companions and revered repositories of ancient wisdom.
In the reign of Sabran the Ninth, trouble seems to be stirring. Yscalin, long an ally in Virtudom, has cast off the religion to worship Draconic forces. Wyverns stir from their long slumber to prowl the countryside. And some even report sightings of the feared High Westerns, minions of the Nameless One. Many begin to fear that the ancient evil may return - and that a Berethnet on the throne may not be enough to stop the world from falling into chaos. A sheltered Western queen, a Southern sorceress on a secret mission to a hostile land, an exiled alchemist, an Eastern orphan who aspires to become a dragonrider despite her low birth, and others find themselves caught up in the coming chaos. The truths behind the myths of Galian and Cleolind and the very nature of dragons - East and West - must be discovered, a task that requires breaking ancient taboos and challenging traditions that have reigned for close to a thousand years.

REVIEW: Sometimes I wonder if it's just me. I pick up stories that look great, I read glowing praise from those with far greater knowledge, experience, and general intelligence, and I wonder if it's just me when the story I read fails to live up to more than the faintest glimmer of promise. Am I reading the same book? Am I not trying hard enough? Am I too stupid to see what others see? Am I utterly lacking in literary taste? (I probably don't want answers, here...)
The Priory of the Orange Tree has what should be a great premise, plus dragons. The dragons alone should've kept me turning pages... but I saw far too little of the Eastern ones, and the Western ones did too much monologuing. Characters were largely distant and unlikable, always too aware that they were in an epic fantasy and only rarely feeling like real people. (There was also an unsubtle subtext that the only way a woman can be both good and strong is to eschew men, either by not having romantic interests at all or being bisexual or lesbian... and, frankly, the sorceress Ead could've done a lot better than who she chooses - plus she should've figured out the attraction about two hundred pages earlier. I picked up some weird vibes on relationships all around, here... but, I digress) The writing style was tooth-grindingly aware of its genre; Shannon could not resist throwing around obsolete, medieval terms in the stiff narrative and dialog, often without sufficient context to define them, giving me the impression that the author was showing off research without concern over whether the reader could (or would) follow along. How hard is it to imply that a virginal is like a harpsichord? Why wait multiple pages and instances to bother mentioning that an attifet is a headdress? There's a glossary at the back of the book, but by then it felt like a condescending head-pat. As for the worldbuilding, when I'm over halfway through the book and characters and places are still mostly opaque name soup, something's not right - and I've read numerous epics, so I'm used to mentally juggling large casts spread across vast maps. I also couldn't help feeling that, for all the effort that went into building the Virtudom religion and other story elements, falling back on the old East/West labels for regions and dragons felt a bit lazy. A few elements never quite clicked together with the rest; the technology seems scattershot, and there's a character who is essentially a giant talking mongoose, but - not counting dragons, because dragons are their own thing in fantasy - there's no other hint of nonhuman cultures. ("'Cause magic" feels like an insufficient excuse, when it's implied there's a whole race of them... plus not much ultimately comes of him, so it feels like a waste anyway.) The plot takes some time to get moving, and never quite comes together like it feels it wants to, though the final battle is sufficiently epic (more or less; I still hadn't connected sufficiently with any of the characters to be truly invested in whether their world lived or died.) More than once, I felt the string-jerking of "Divine Forces" at work, twisting events and warping character intelligence and generally making many events feel more scripted than spontaneous. Though the story wraps up in this volume, there's every hint that sequels, spinoffs, or prequels could potentially be a thing (sales figures pending, I suppose.)
There were hints and gleams of promise in the intricacies of seemingly contradictory myths and traditions that ultimately have a similar root. I liked some of the imagery and ideas. And it really, really looked like a story I should've loved. Unfortunately, I was prevented from immersing by general lack of caring about anyone or anywhere in the book. But I suppose that's just me.

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