I Read "Priory of the Orange Tree"

Look out, it's a narrative cul de sac!

Prioriy of the Orange Tree, by Samantha Shannon, is a hefty, aspirational book full of complex characters and a dense world, all which shifts and cracks as a millennium of supernatural debts finally come to fruition into a moment of crisis that will change the universe forever. It wants to be a labyrinthine saga of humans and gods and dragons, sprawling and majestic and gripping, and it probably could have succeeded at those lofty ambitions if it didn’t hack every single bit of meat off of its bones, stuff the carcass into an anthill, and leave it to bleach in the desert sun for forty days and forty nights.

I have never read a book this so totally reduced purely so it can blow through plot elements before. It’s not a Brian Clevinger novel — nothing is a Brian Clevinger novel — but it’s genuinely stunning to behold just how little time Shannon spends on things that aren’t the absolute bare minimum. She wrote an epic that would span six books and then gutted everything except the core characters, the objects of power, and the primary antagonist.

The first fifty or so pages sets up a really stacked cast and a very promising world. Tane is a very obsessive workaholic warrior from a thinly veiled Chinese nation, fixated solely on becoming a dragon rider but breaks a rule because of her good heart and it haunts her. Ead is a desert nomad magi who got herself into the good graces of Queen Sabran’s inner circle through intense subterfuge to must keep her safe but develops feelings which are reciprocated. Niclays is an aging, bitter, disgraced alchemist stranded in fake Okinawa for his failures working under Sabran.

All of these characters (and more) are incredibly well realized, and the book does a great job of juggling cultures and power structures and religious orthodoxy all fighting for space. Ead and Sabran begin to have romantic feelings towards one another, and their religion mandates Sabran bear a child even though she’s still a virgin (the story implies she might even not be attracted to men at all). Niclays is a total prick out for his immortality elixir so he can go home, and starts to lean on Tane’s secret crime to harvest her dragon’s scales and blood. Characters in the exterior are shouting that the apocalypse is coming soon and they need to prepare, and are laughed at. This is some good foundation for a complex storied political drama with knives and magic and dragons.

Then Priory just stops bothering with a lot of it — once the table is set, we’re just blowing past silly things like “setup” and “payoff”, because who’s got that kind of time? This is a universal complaint that drapes over the entire book. Everything serves the plot — literally, cumulatively everything.

Characters I enjoy are given little to do that isn’t directly the main plot, and when they are, the tasks end almost immediately so the character doesn’t linger. New and interesting locations are given lavish descriptions and cultures then moved through immediately. If you ever ask yourself, “is this person or place ever going to show up again,” the answer is usually, “No.” It doesn’t serve the plot, so it will be over as fast as possible.

Loth is on the boat going to the foreign country because he needs to bring the magic box out of it. The country exists to give him the box; Kit, his companion, exists so he has someone to talk to. The trip itself is brief and they meet a handful of sailors and arrive the next time we see them. The foreign country is dangerous and hostile to them, but before they can do anything as characters with agency, Kit and Loth immediately meet the princess, who is an ally and ushers them to their next destination.

The country nor the princess ever show up again. Their purpose was served, so no one cares any longer.

Treating your locations and people like this makes the world feel so small and meaningless. These are great nations, vaguely in the outline of various Chinese regions, empires in Europe, etc, but cultural divides and travel distance and power structures never matter. Characters aligned with the heroes will just kind of stand in a foreign country, a large “A” prompt hovering over their head, so they can be spoken to to advance the plot, then become irrelevant forever.

Thanks to this “plot over characters” momentum, characters end up being shrunk down to serve the plot, not the other way around. Kit assists Loth in his mission, a close friend who speaks softly of his love he has yet to confess to. Once Loth has the box and is moving to the next destination he is killed because — I shit you not — rocks fall on him and he dies.

This is not some kind of supernatural event either. It is sheer coincidence. His narrative purpose is served, just like the woman who gave Loth the box, or the husband Sabran takes to produce an heir, or the dragon that showed up to attack her, and dozens of others. Shannon seems to have no idea what to do with them, so they are disposed of unceremoniously. Sometimes death, other times just leaving the plot and standing off screen doing nothing valuable. No one has ambitions of their own, and if they do, they are central antagonists only.

With a dinky and ramshackle world, no place ever feels fun to hang out in, and the objects of power are just plot devices. To do anything else would pad out the time, and we can’t do that because we gotta wrap this shit up! Nobody’s got time for dungeon spelunking or trap evasion, more people have to loudly inform one another about their backstories!

(As a side note; you can’t actually lampshade your plot being weirdly forced and stilted by having characters comment on, “And now here we are, just like it happened a thousand years ago, as though through fate’s intervention.” Divine intervention to conspire events requires some mystique, it doesn’t count just because there’s a lot of coincidences.)

By committing the cardinal sin of — quite literally, in several cases — ‘sacrificing character for plot’, Priory totally damns itself. It’s too long and stuffed to be something as charming as a Ursula le Guin fable, but none of the characters really get much to do besides their role already outlined for them. Sabran and Ead’s forbidden relationship is fun, but they barely have to hide it since it’s revealed immediately after they first have sex and Ead is run out of the city. What’s the point of a forbidden relationship if you never have to spend time hiding it?

You would think a story so ready to kill characters who have done their job and can be cast aside would have more teeth to it, but there’s tendrils of squeecore latched onto Priory because it has entirely too much oh isn’t that nice resolutions to problems. I’m fine with Niclays casting aside his bitterness and resentment, he earned that. But I’m very surprised at how many kings and princes and lords are perfectly nice people and good rulers. We just saw someone try to take Sabran’s throne for herself! Why is this seemingly the only self-interested party in the entire book?

It makes the mourning of minor character deaths all the more hilarious that so many of them have nothing to do other than one task then immediately get run over by a bus — oh no, not her! Anything but her! Uhhh…what was her name again?

It was impactful when Loth and Sabran had to confront and deal with the heresy they grew up being the actual truth, but it never seems to come up politically afterwards or before, which feels like more missed opportunity. We saw Sabran struggling with Virtudom being fake, but at no point does a schism or a fanatic come into play? Do we ever examine fundamentalist chapters or other schisms in the religion? Why is this book spending so much time on religious friction and political power if it doesn’t want to actually address those things?

George RR Martin gets a lot of guff for his violence and horniness (most of that is the show’s choices blamed on him, but that’s another topic). But it serves a purpose of making the characters constantly struggle against boundaries, give the world some danger and realism and make the victories feel earned. Everything just kind of works out nicely, there are no pyrric victories and sorrow is always tacked on with a pinch of “but it’ll work out in the end.” Characters have plot armor, and you learn quickly that there is not and will never be a Ned Stark execution moment of, “There’s no way they would actually — oh shit!!!”

Sure, the spymaster discovers and outs Ead’s magic and her affair with Sabran, but she’s immediately whisked away back home and the book isn’t even half over yet. It might be comforting to some that there can never be tension that’s not diffused, but by the 60% in the book I had fully checked out. Nothing bad can happen to any of the characters, no scene is allowed to really marinate in conflict, no one shows up to make problems, and new locations never have anything cool happen in them.

Sure, Niclays gets over his resentment and bitterness and obsessions and lives as his true self and is rewarded for it, but of course he did. If he actually tried to kill Sabran, it might disrupt the plot.