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Right, so, the thing is, if I had known that Samantha Shannon's Priory of the Orange Tree, which I have seen variously recced, was eight hundred pages long, I probably would have acquired the ebook. But in fact I did not know and therefore spent a week stubbornly hauling the the eight hundred page library hardback with me all around the city of Boston, and that ... may have impacted my feelings about the book ....
I mean, it's a perfectly reasonable Epic Fantasy, with worldbuilding that draws specifically on Spenser and the chivalric ideal in some unusual ways; also, I was reliably informed that there were lesbians and indeed there turn out to be so. I just found myself wishing quite often at times that it was a few hundred pages shorter.
The plot: on one side of the world, in Chivalric Fantasy Europe, undercover battle nun Ead Duryan is posing as a lady-in-waiting to QueenElizabeth I Sabine, part of a hereditary line of monarchy that according to the religion of Chivalric Fantasy Europe) holds off the rise of the evil dragons of absolute evil just by existing. The rest of the world largely thinks this is bullshit, but since they also, would nonetheless prefer the evil dragons not rise, Ead's nunnery has sent her to keep the queen alive in the spirit of "eh, can't hurt."
On the other side of the world, in Fantasy Japan Has Dragons (But Not The Evil Kind) (But Try Telling That To Chivalric Fantasy Europe), dragonrider hopeful Tané buries a secret in order not to miss her chance to take part in dragonrider trials, that unsurprisingly ends up biting her in the ass as well as the local exiled Fantasy Dutch alchemist who's gotten accidentally caught up in it.
Meanwhile, the evil dragons are indeed rising, so sooner or later everyone's going to have to work together to find the right combination of MacGuffins to get them to stop -- and sooner or later everybody does, but it takes about four hundred pages of maneuvering people into position before anyone starts to do much that is useful. So that's part of it; and part of it, also, is that, while I appreciate complicating national myth and memory, and I get the temptation to have Fantasy Europe be very emphatically wrong, I wish it had turned out to be a little more complicated than Their Religion Is Based On A Lie Whereas Ours Is Based On A Feminist Truth...
But mostly, I think, this is just a perfectly reasonable example of a kind of book that just doesn't do as much for me anymore as it would have ten or fifteen years ago. There's nothing inherently wrong with a plot about bringing the world together to defeat the evil dragons of absolute evil, but it takes a lot of really good character work to make that plot feel interesting to me, personally, and character work is just not the thing that Samantha Shannon seems interested in.
(... I say, sheepishly looking at my holds on the Mallorean books at the library; but a.) nostalgia, b.) intentionally or unintentionally the David Eddings books are definitely funny, whereas only two people in the entire cast of Priory of the Orange Tree ever give any evidence of possessing a sense of humor, in the whole enormous cast of the book, and one of them dies two hundred pages in, and neither of them is the author.)
I mean, it's a perfectly reasonable Epic Fantasy, with worldbuilding that draws specifically on Spenser and the chivalric ideal in some unusual ways; also, I was reliably informed that there were lesbians and indeed there turn out to be so. I just found myself wishing quite often at times that it was a few hundred pages shorter.
The plot: on one side of the world, in Chivalric Fantasy Europe, undercover battle nun Ead Duryan is posing as a lady-in-waiting to Queen
On the other side of the world, in Fantasy Japan Has Dragons (But Not The Evil Kind) (But Try Telling That To Chivalric Fantasy Europe), dragonrider hopeful Tané buries a secret in order not to miss her chance to take part in dragonrider trials, that unsurprisingly ends up biting her in the ass as well as the local exiled Fantasy Dutch alchemist who's gotten accidentally caught up in it.
Meanwhile, the evil dragons are indeed rising, so sooner or later everyone's going to have to work together to find the right combination of MacGuffins to get them to stop -- and sooner or later everybody does, but it takes about four hundred pages of maneuvering people into position before anyone starts to do much that is useful. So that's part of it; and part of it, also, is that, while I appreciate complicating national myth and memory, and I get the temptation to have Fantasy Europe be very emphatically wrong, I wish it had turned out to be a little more complicated than Their Religion Is Based On A Lie Whereas Ours Is Based On A Feminist Truth...
But mostly, I think, this is just a perfectly reasonable example of a kind of book that just doesn't do as much for me anymore as it would have ten or fifteen years ago. There's nothing inherently wrong with a plot about bringing the world together to defeat the evil dragons of absolute evil, but it takes a lot of really good character work to make that plot feel interesting to me, personally, and character work is just not the thing that Samantha Shannon seems interested in.
(... I say, sheepishly looking at my holds on the Mallorean books at the library; but a.) nostalgia, b.) intentionally or unintentionally the David Eddings books are definitely funny, whereas only two people in the entire cast of Priory of the Orange Tree ever give any evidence of possessing a sense of humor, in the whole enormous cast of the book, and one of them dies two hundred pages in, and neither of them is the author.)
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