In which there is no orange tree for like 200 pages

 At the last BSpec book club a friend recommended Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree, which sounded great except for the bit where it was 800 pages and we’d just read a 700-page book, and I was worried I would not have time to read something else that gigantic. This turns out to have been dumb of me, as I have now already read both Mexican Gothic, the book we did decide on, and this one, which I had floated the idea of doing as the read after Mexican Gothic so I’d have the time, and we haven’t even had the book club for Mexican Gothic yet. 

 

Anyway, The Priory of the Orange Tree is about dragons, and also about lesbians, and a bit about plague, because apparently now everything I pick up for escapism reasons winds up being about either plague or fascists. Go figure. Anyway, the plague is related to the dragons. Who the lesbians are related to is, in time-honored fantasy novel fashion, a great mystery that it takes 800 pages to answer.

 

Overall, this is a big sprawling story that justifies most of its page space. It covers three continents plus some oceans, including a cursed one with an evil demon-dragon bound in it, and it involves unraveling myths and riddles that go back a thousand years, much to the chagrin of certain characters who hilariously hate riddles. There are four viewpoint characters, a dozen or so important secondary characters, and a few dozen more reasonably important tertiary characters, not all of which are people. Many of the people and countries in this universe are provincial as hell, working off wildly different versions of what were possibly at one point the same stories and prophecies, and getting really offended that other countries tell the stories differently. The worst offender here is Inys, the pseudo-England country, where one of our viewpoint characters, Ead, has been sent to guard the queen. Ead is from one of the ~heretic~ countries that does ~heretical~ stuff like use magic and actually understand medicine, which the Inysh find sus, because the Inysh hate cool things. The queen, Sabran, is arrogant and moody, but basically alright considering that her entire life is built on an edifice of patently self-serving divine-right-of-kings (or in this case, queens) bullshit. Sabran has one (1) job, which is to birth exactly one (1) daughter to be queen after herself. Somehow, her house has reigned for a thousand years with each queen only having exactly one daughter, who then became queen, which seems to be one way to do without all the sibling murders that plague larger royal families. Sabran doesn’t want to get pregnant because that shit is terrifying and dangerous, and the way people in Inys deal with that is to just sort of pretend it isn’t. 

 

Our other viewpoint characters are Tané, a young lady in the East whose only ambition is to become a dragonrider; Loth, a pious young courtier (and close friend of Sabran and Ead’s) who, being the piousest character, gets forced to expand his horizons by having to have all sorts of adventures that bring him to a billion scary foreign lands and also some pirates; and Niclays Roos, anatomist, alchemist, and sad old guy who has gotten himself banished to the East due to poor decision-making induced by the loss of his longtime lover Jannart. Two of these people do not have any romantic subplots at all, and the third doesn’t have any new ones, so that’s a nice change of pace. 

 

The worldbuilding is fun--the magic system and mythology is at the heart of it, and figuring out how that *actually* works being part of the story, instead of having it be understood and established, is a good time, and the rest of it is just aesthetically pleasingly history-flavored so you don’t feel too lost and it’s easy to imagine what stuff looks like. 

 

The story is too big and sprawling for me to really sum it up here, which is not necessarily a problem, but I will say that while most of it was fun it at times did end up just a tad too big and sprawling. The beginning was a bit slow, which I usually don’t mind, but in this case it was a bit slow in the sort of way that had me nitpicking any kind of slack or stilted language, which tends to abound in books that are attempting to sound old-fashioned. Later on there were a couple twists/developments/plot points that just felt like Too Many points per subplot and felt a bit episodic, especially the ones (yes, ones, plural) where Character does Quest to find Important Artifact, and then they find/acquire it, and then it is promptly lost/stolen/damaged again, and I was just like “Oh for God’s sake can we be somewhat closer to the end of the book now please.” So I think a few things could have been pruned, even though overall I enjoyed having many characters go on many quests to assorted interesting places chasing a wide variety of magical MacGuffins, including but not limited to magic fruit, a magic sword, various magic trees, two magic jewels, an assortment of other people (some magic, some not), bits of old legends, some wyrms, some dragons, and, on one memorable occasion, the plague. 

 

So would I recommend it? Well, if you, like me, are interested in just sort of rolling around in 800 pages of Fantasy Novel but with no heterosexual romantic plotlines of any import, then definitely. If that is not your jam, it is not going to be the book that suddenly makes you like reading dragon stories; you really sort of have to like all the stuff in it already because you’re in for quite a lot of it.