Book Review: The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

A fantasy novel on the heels of wildly successful sagas like Lord of the Rings, Eragon, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones needs to be creative to stand out. Samantha Shannon achieves this, weaving an epic tale through an elaborate universe loosely based on our own. The story engages you from the beginning to the end.

I really enjoyed slowly uncovering the reality of what was believed to be canon for generations - different regions of the world believed different versions of what transpired a thousand years ago and this difference in belief led to the estrangement of the societies. Sounds familiar? We discover in bits and pieces that the truth was a lot more complex than what any culture believed in - all of them knew only a part of the reality, but transformed it into divergent full-fledged doctrines and desperately clinged to their versions. We see this motif of unearthing old truths in other fantasy novels - Gandalf investigating the origins of the one ring, the discovery of Glabtorix’s powers, the horror of Voldermot’s horcruxes - but the magnitude of the revelation and extent and number of adventures needed to uncover the full story are unparalleled. This novelty - the epic bringing together of secrets spread across the world, in diverse cultures, its pieces discovered, sometimes accidentally, by commoners and warriors alike - is what makes the book stand out. The rest - the battles, the dragons, the kinds of magic, the bigotry and the eventual unity against a common enemy - are established tropes, and feel correspondingly perfunctory.

The characters are very relatable. Unlike in high fantasy, with typically noble and heroic characters who can do no wrong, the protagonists here are realistically flawed. The author doesn’t hold back for anyone - neither the queen of a realm nor a revered warrior nor an exiled alchemist. However, while some characters convincingly transform incrementally from being zealous to broad minded over the course of the novel, for most characters there is either little development or a rapid transition, both of which are hard to believe.

Many reviews call the book the “feminist Lord of the Rings.” While I wouldn’t quite put it on par with the series that launched fantasy as a genre, it comes close and is unquestionably feminist. While female characters are ridiculously few in Tolkien’s books, here they are front and center. The “queendom” has the most powerful navy, warrior priestesses guard ancient secrets, the dreaded pirate-lord is a woman and so on. I discovered my own prejudices through the book - for instance, when a knight rescued someone, I expected a “he” to rescue a “she”, was surprised by the reversal and wondered at my expectations - doubtless an outcome of male preponderance in other fantasy novels.

I see the book as the author’s optimistic hope for our own world. Can we overcome our differences to work together to avoid a major catastrophe? In this sense, I feel the problem is solved fairly easily in the book - alliances are easily formed between nations estranged for hundreds of years, religious doctrines are altered in the face of new evidence and wars are brief but decisive. I can only hope some of the good sense spills over into the real world!