It oughta be a movie: The Priory of the Orange Tree, by Samantha Shannon

       

        This book is on the “it oughta be a movie” list for two reasons. First, it is a very “visual” story, with lots of cool imagery. Second, it seems like every producer is (or was for a while) trying to find the next “Game of Thrones”. No need to look farther, guys! This has a lot of features viewers of GOTs enjoyed - dragons and big furry beasts, court intrigue, multiple cultures with tense international politics, sort-of pirates, awesome outfits, mysterious sexy witches – while fixing some of the things we complained about. While this wasn’t my favorite fantasy books of 2021, it could absolutely be adapted into a very enjoyable TV or movie series.  At the very least, it has an ending, and that ending is fairly satisfying.

            There are four POV characters in this book plus a fifth character who is central but whose head we never inhabit, and the three most important are all women. Queen Sabran Berethnet the ninth is that non-POV character. Her homeland, Inys, has been a queendom for many generations. Each queen has had exactly one daughter, and they all look uncannily like one another. Sabran, though, has been putting off marriage, which worries her people because it is said that it is her line being on the throne that keeps “the nameless one”  - a huge western fire dragon - from returning to wreak havoc. Ead Duryan (actually Eadaz du Zala uq-Nara) is a lady-in-waiting to Sabran with secret magic and fighting skills who was sent by the titular Priory of the Orange Tree to protect her. The Inyish say Cleolind Onjenyu was “the damsel”, Sabran’s forebearer, and married the Saint Galian who defeated the Nameless One a thousand years ago. The Red Sisters of the priory call her “the mother” and say she defeated the dragon and founded their order…but, just in case, and since a stable Inys helps keep peace, Sabran should stay alive. After eight years, though, Ead finds herself taking a more personal interest in the queen than she is meant to! Tané is an orphan training to be a rider of the peaceable eastern water dragons, but the discovery of an Inyish stranger on the beach threatens to destroy that dream. The two other characters are men whose travels show us more of the world and help tie all the story threads together. Arteloth Beck, AKA ‘Loth’, is a close friend of Queen Sabran – too close, according to some, which is why he gets sent off on a suicide mission near the start of the book. Finally, Niclays Roos is an alchemist banished by Sabran for promising and failing to make her an elixir of immortality who is living in an outpost of Tané’s homeland.

            There are a lot of things I really liked about the story:

*Refreshingly, for a medieval-ish fantasy setting, there is no sexism or racism in this book. There is no real homophobia either (“companions,” the general term for spouses in Inys, can evidently be of any gender), although there does seem to be a bias in favor of noble marriages that can produce heirs – which makes logical sense given that noble marriages are about consolidating power and wealth in a lineage. BUT there is classism and rank-based limitations even within the nobility, as well as religious prejudice. These both fit with the quasi-medieval setting and ensure there are still some conflicts to overcome.

*The cultures in the book are clearly inspired by real ones but have unique details that make them feel like they aren’t just a knock-off of an existing country. For instance, Tané’s country of Seiiki has a lot of Japanese elements – people dress in silk robes and eat beancurd and fish roe, for instance – but there are unique species like the “season trees” that have different colored leaves in different seasons, and we spend most of our time with the Sea Guard, a book-only military and scholarly organization.

*The brown people aren’t all savages, slaves, or slavers. In fact…no one was, which is possibly overkill in cleaning up the world, but not an issue for this specific story. And the gay characters don't all die.

*Characters learn and grow through the course of the book, and while some have a hair too much “protagonist plot armor”, there are prices to be paid and scars that don’t heal.

*The romance between Sabran and Ead is pretty well-developed and believable, and realistic about the difficulties it would entail. It’s not the most swoon-worthy Sapphic pairing I’ve ever read, but that’s down to personal taste.

*The action scenes, especially those involving dragons and/or Ead doing her Bedouin/ninja-assassin thing, are generally really exciting – though there were a few points in the rather chaotic final battle where I got confused as to where characters were relative to one another and what they were doing.

*There are pirates! We don’t actually see them doing much actual piracy – although I guess kidnapping a dragon counts? – but any time on these ships was a fun break from rather rigid, rule-based court life. 

*Giant talking mongooses! They are called ichneumons, and they eat small dragons. I’ve never seen that before, and it was a fun touch.

            There were some elements that made this not work as well as it might have, though. I’ll get into that when I talk about adaptation issues but, since that will involve **spoilers**, I’ll just give a quick summary here for those who would prefer to stop here: some under-developed character dynamics, lack of motivation for the villain, and some aspects of the magic system that don’t make sense. However, most of those issues would be fixable in an adaptation. I can’t believe I’m saying this 800-page book was too short (I could barely pick it up with one hand), but if it had been split into two 420-450 page books, that extra 40-100 pages would have been sufficient to flesh those gaps out.

 

Adaptation issues:

This would be a dream for costumers and special effects artists. I’d hire everything who worked in those areas on “Game of Thrones” if I could, since they clearly know how to design pretty gowns and make dragons and giant hairy beasts look real. The book itself – while EXTREMELY long - is divided into six sections, which would make it simple to split into 3 movies or TV seasons. The latter would probably give a bit more time to fix some issues with the story that made this not-quite a 5-star read for me. The first three are character-writing things, and the rest all have to do with the dragons in one way or another. The dragons, plus maybe the promise of a Sapphic love story, are probably why most of us are here, so we can’t help paying close attention to them!

Problem #1: Characters getting killed off before we have a chance to care. Every one of the five main characters loses someone close to them, but in most cases it doesn’t really land like it might because WE don’t know that person. The one that works best is Roos’ lover Jannart, because we get some extensive flashbacks, and Jannart is a charismatic person who died seeking knowledge that turns out to be important to the plot. The next-best is Loth’s friend Kit. We see enough of their interactions to start liking Kit, who is funny and dramatic, before he gets crushed by falling plot…er, rocks. But their interactions were still scant enough that my reaction was more “Damn it! There goes the comic relief!” rather than heartbreak. The treatment of Sabran’s husband was similar: “This guy seems like he has interesting new ideas that might push the queen to…whoops, he’s dead. Oh well.” The death of Tané’s friend Susa and Ead’s (biological?) sister Jondu made me feel almost nothing because the snippets of flashbacks are so limited that I have almost no idea what kind of people they were. Also, given the way Loth and Tané are written, I was rather unclear on whether Kit and Susa were friends or love interests. I think purely the former…but because we see so little of the relationships other than that they are clearly very close, it was a tad confusing. Suggested fix: Just give these characters, Susa especially, some extra screen time – preferably before killing them off, but in a flashback or dream if necessary – just to better establish who they were and why we, as well as the main character, should be sad that they are dead.

Problem #2: Underdeveloped straight romances. So, yes, I was one of those people who picked up this book on the promise of a f/f romance, and it delivered that AND a pretty compelling m/m one between Roos and Jannart (albeit in past-tense). And I often complain about straight romance subplots being terrible. But the ones in this book weren’t bad, they were just under-written, weirdly repeating the tendency of straight writers to go: “Well, they’re two attractive people of opposite genders! Obviously they’re in love!” That is a shame given that we need more non-toxic m/f romances, especially in fantasy! We get to know Margaret, Loth’s sister and Ead’s friend, pretty well, and her love interest seems like a good dude (he’s the loyal captain of the queen’s guard)…but we barely see them interact before the point where they get engaged. Likewise, Loth falls for a foreign princess, who is indeed pretty badass. But does she like him? Who knows! Also, I spent Loth’s first few chapters wondering if he was in love with Kit, and then assuming he was asexual and/or aromantic because not only was he confused that people thought he was having an affair with Sabran but he’d never courted anyone or seemed to take note of their attractiveness. So that’s a bit of a problem if we’re supposed to believe in his actual romance subplot!  Suggested fix: As with the characters who die, just show us more interactions between the lovebirds!

Problem #3: Did Tané die? If so, why? How? At the end of the book, the last we see of Tané is her going to see the statue of an ancestor, then falling asleep, and then in the morning lying on the grass with blood on the side of her tunic and a butterfly in her hand. This may be a reference to a story about a girl who sacrificed herself for a dragon, but it’s been long enough since any battle that her wounds should have scabbed over. Why is she bleeding? Suggested fix: Either cut the scene or explain WTF it is supposed to mean.

Problem #4: Contradictory meanings of the fire/water dichotomy. On the one hand, the magic system suggests a yin-and-yang relationship between siden (fire-related, arises from the earth) and sterren (water-related, comes from the heavens). Both can be used for a variety of purposes by human mages and neither is inherently good or bad. Fire dragons run on the former and water dragons on the latter, and there is a recurring cycle whereby one side of the magic strengthens and the other weakens. However, ALL the fire dragons are bad and ALL the water dragons are good, which seems to reflect a more Western idea of evil things being linked to the underworld and good things to the sky. These two types of dualism don’t play nicely together. Suggested fix: These dragons are intelligent and can talk. They can still have an inherent link to one type of magic or the other, but just let them have independent and complex characters and motivations like the humans do. That would also help address…

Problem #5: The big bad has zero motivation. The Nameless One is basically a mashup of Sauron and Smaug. But that’s weird, because it is never addressed why a dragon wants to rule the world. Mythological dragons generally come off as rather solitary beasts who probably wouldn’t want the bother of being king of anything. Both species of dragons in this world have hierarchical power structures – which also seems weird to me, but whatever - yet one dragon-emperor is inherently benevolent and the other isn’t? Suggested fix: Once we establish that dragons are individuals who can be good or bad, we can give the Nameless One a motivation to be a dark lord. Western dragons traditionally like gold – maybe he wants tribute to build the best hoard ever. Maybe he’s a dragon-supremacist, who thinks humans are lesser beings who should bow to him. It doesn’t have to be super deep or be discussed extensively, it just has to be something that explains why he’s bothering to be a threat to civilization.

Problem #6: What’s with the draconic plague? This is an illness that seems to strike when fire dragons are around. But…why? If the nameless one wants to rule, killing off his potential subjects this way seems counter-productive; it even makes humans unpalatable as meals to draconic creatures. So maybe it is an accidental side effect? Suggested fix: This is actually quite tricky, because any solution alters key plot points. You could have it be an overdose of siden, and therefore water-dragon magic a potential cure, but then the East wouldn’t fear it and that would change their international policy. You could have it be part of the draconic control of humans – as it is in one extremely specific case - but then it shouldn’t be spread randomly. Personally, I might just make the plague either unrelated to dragons or related to them but unrelated to their magic (maybe just stemming from too much dragon dung or something); that way it can still be a reason for the East’s quarantine, but it doesn’t raise too many weird questions.

Problem #7: Fighting giant dragons with swords. A big plot point involves trying to find or get back the magic sword Ascalon to fight the nameless one. But…you can’t effectively fight something the size of a house with a sword! At one point one of the characters is clinging onto him and levering up a belly-scale with a non-magical sword, before another actually stabs him. The nameless one isn’t a wyvern – he has front claws - so why doesn’t he just smack them away? Even if you could stick him, would even a 5-foot-long sword actually hit anything vital? Suggested fix: Early on, any wyverns or other draconic beasts that are killed get taken out by long-range weapons like arrows; that makes sense. However, since that isn’t quite as “heroic”, I suggest just making Ascalon a long spear instead of a sword – kind of like the one shown in paintings of ‘St. George and the Dragon’ (a dragon that is usually smaller than a horse, BTW). Heck, the Saint George legend was supposed to be the inspiration for this story! Alternately, they could stick Ascalon the sword in his eye and jab him in the brain. That would probably work too, though only if you could drop down from above.