The Rightful Heir to George RR Martin’s Throne: Samantha Shannon’s ‘The Priory of the Orange Tree’

Her voice was war conch and whale song and the distant rumble of a storm, all smoothed into words like glass shaped by the sea.

YOU BETTER BELIEVE THAT IS THE DESCRIPTION OF A DRAGON’S VOICE.

BIBLIOPHILES ASSEMBLE

Ok… so, know that I speak as a galactic supernerd with two Tolkien tattoos who hails from a household of SFF fanatics when I say THIS TOME IS ONE OF THE GREATEST FANTASY BOOKS EVER WRITTEN. I finished it last night by candlelight and HARDLY KNOW WHERE TO BEGIN IN THE EXPRESSION OF MY ADORATION.

I first heard about Priory at the London event for The Song Rising (Book 3 in The Bone Season series, see my review here) when Samantha Shannon said she was working on a story about dragons and I was like “omgomg me too dragonsdragonsdragons”. Months later, I attended the launch of Melinda Salisbury’s State of Sorrow, in which she gave the most impassioned recommendation of this draconic tome I had heard yet, pitching it as a book that would truly revolutionise modern fantasy. I then got to see an early version of the cover at the launch of Kevin and Katie Tsang’s MG series (Sam Wu is Not Afraid of Ghosts). THEN through various dark magic enchantments I managed to get my claws on a PROOF, which has been my constant companion for the last few weeks.

Reader, it is sensational. A perfect characterisation of this saga, I think, is as an Elizabethan Game of Thrones meets an f/f Pride & Prejudice meets Pirates of the Caribbean, utterly brimming with wyrms, wyverns, and all manner of draconic things (and we’re talking ALL manner, from jaculi and basilisks to amphipteres and ophitaurs). It is MYTHIC in its magnitude.

The story follows magic-wielding warrior Ead Duryan and dragonrider Tané of Seiiki in their Homeric quest to quell the forces of darkness broiling deep within the oceanic Abyss that splits East from West now spilling out across the world from the forests of Inys to the shores of Orisima. It’s a truly symphonic epic that takes as its foundation stones the legend of St George and the Dragon and the apocalyptic imagery of Revelation 20:

And I saw an angel coming down out of heaven, having the key to the Abyss and holding in his hand a great chain. He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years. He threw him into the Abyss, and locked and sealed it over him, to keep him from deceiving the nations anymore until the thousand years were ended. After that, he must be set free for a short time.

Woven with these most patriarchal of English myths is the ancient tale of Hohodemi immortalised in Kojiki and Nihongi, the oldest chronicles of Japanese history, dating to the 710s (right around the same time the Venerable Bede was compiling his seminal Ecclesiastical History, the Kojiki of England, if you will). Other central influences include Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, and the Codex Romanus Angelicus. When you start perusing these sources you’ll see just how intricate the world of Priory is in everything from its place names to its origin myths.

It’s literally as glorious as it sounds. Hyperbole is impossible. From a court seething with secrets whispered in starlit alcoves and a plague-ridden volcanic fortress lost to the fires of the enemy, to a magical sanctuary wreathed in golden fruit and the storm-wracked island at the edge of the world where the sea dragons roam, this world will bewitch you body and soul.

It’s 800 hecking pages long but the pace is so fast you can honestly devour it in a handful of sittings. It’s hard to comprehend just how much happens in this saga, not to mention the gorgeous osmosis of Tolkienesque world-building we get throughout the course of the story, a light year from the moments of flash flood exposition that make The Bone Season ever so slightly top-heavy. I was basically drooling over every page. It’s also about 12,000% more feminist and diverse than the vast majority of other high fantasy tomes that have come before it (fun fact, there are more named horses than named women in LOTR). And shout-out to the first positive mention of periods and how they were managed I have ever read in this genre.

Honestly, so often when you read a fat fantasy book from literally any time before the last couple of years, you have to do some serious de-toxing in its wake to cleanse yourself of the pages and pages of violently racist, misogynistic, homophobic, heteronormative, white supremacist, medieval European patriarchies that utterly dominate just about every single one (and I spend a LOT of professional time trawling through the murkiest backwaters of out of print 70s, 80s, 90s fantasy searching for forgotten gems). No words, therefore, can quite capture the giddy, soul-soothing splendour of a high fantasy epic that doesn’t just break that caste but utterly eviscerate it.

At the risk of even hinting at potential spoilers, I do just want to steal a second or two to gush about that f/f Pride and Prejudice ship I teased (or Sabradaz, as I have now coined them). I’ve literally never been so invested in a book romance before, from their first scene together to the eye contact to the HAND contact to everything after. I died a death in the reading of this opus. How do I send it back in time to my little anxious self groping blindly and desperately in the dark for the kind of rampant feminism raging in every line of this intoxicating book? Also, I just about spontaneously combusted when Ead first did something at the top of a certain tower, and that was only about 100 pages in. Seriously, we’re talking a Fawkes-in-his-final-seconds degree of conflagration, that’s how shooketh. It was the moment though, the page where I had that vertiginous realisation that this was going to be a soul book. Trust me, you’ll know it when you read it.

There were twists and turns I never saw coming, glorious resolutions and consolidations of narrative arcs across multiple continents and perspectives, and that acceleration in the last 100 pages… I had the entire battle playing out cinematically in my head, it was so epically wrought. Think the end of At World’s End meets the Battle of Pelennor Fields. No. Joke. Also, look closely at the details of Dranghien’s lost love anecdote and you’ll be able to work out who it was…

On a brief side note, this is a Shannon book, so of course it is teeming with philological gems at every turn. One of my favourite discoveries was the poetry of Lu Qingzi. The epigraph to Part IV, Thine is the Queendom (be still, beating heart), is the following quote:

Why do you not inhale

essences of moon and stars,

Con your spirit texts of gold?

Isn’t that stunning? Now, it took some digging to find her – poignant, given a line from this book is literally: “In the story, she had no name, like too many women in stories of old” – but it seems she lived in the late 16th century, the daughter of a government official. At the age of 15 she was married off to a scholar from Taicang, who eventually enabled her to publish her first collection of poetry in her mid-twenties. She did see literary recognition in her time, becoming known along with her friend Xu Yuan as one of the Masters of Suzhou (in Jiangsu Province), and she also wrote that “poetry is certainly not restricted to the domain of men (da zhang fu), it is actually part of the world of women” (more here).

We were lacquer and glue; who could come between?

We were metal and stone, enduring to the end.

Then a mere word, by chance caused the ruin of all my hopes;

Your angry glance was the first sign of ill will.

The lady’s beauty gradually faded away;

The shining mirror took leave of the soaring phoenix.

I mounted the carriage, went out the gate and left.

The knot of our bond for a thousand miles unravelled.

– “Hardships of the Road” by Lu Qingzi (from Women Writers of Traditional China, p 256)

So yes, short of marrying this book, I can do no more than beg all those I meet for the rest of forever to read it.

As well as dragons, and do you actually need more than “dragons” to dive into this world (the only other answer I’ll accept is “dragons + sapphic queens and mages”), there is also an enormous fluffy friend called Aralaq. He is an ichneumon, which is something of a wolf-bear, closest in appearance to a massive possum. Here’s Prospero the husky attempting a wee cosplay…

Bless him.

I cannot physically wait to see the glorious maps, the fan art that will inevitably be created when it hits shelves in February (though I think we’ve nabbed the prize for being first out of the gate with our bespoke Priory pumpkins), the epic HBO series that simply HAS to be made, the special illustrated editions, the prequels, the sequels…

TEN YEARS LATER PLEASE THANK YOU UNIVERSE MAKE IT HAPPEN SPEAK IT INTO EXISTENCE.

In short, preorder it RIGHT NOW if you have somehow yet to do so, cherubs.

“To be kin to a dragon,” Nayimathun said, “you must not only have a soul of water. You must have the blood of the sea, and the sea is not always pure. It is not any one thing. There is darkness in it, and danger, and cruelty. It can raze great cities with its rage. Its depths are unknowable; they do not see the touch of the sun. To be a Miduchi – to be human – is not to be pure, Tané. It is to be the living sea. That is why I chose you. You have a dragon’s heart.”