Abbigale Kernya: Admittedly, I don’t remember much about this book. All I know is that it has lesbians and dragons in it.

On March 5th, 2022 I first read this beast. Beast not in terms of quality or content, but rather in the amount of room it takes up on my bookshelf. Size doesn’t matter when it comes to high fantasy, so I’ve come to discover. The Priory of the Orange Tree was circling the internet at its peak a few years ago with book reviewers alike commenting on its size and complex storytelling—majority also capitalizing on the selling feature of the book’s sapphics and dragon vibes.

During Covid lockdown I had a somewhat successful Bookstagram account that I took all too seriously. A couple of thousand followers and a few fabricated book reviews later, I finally hopped on the Priory trend that was circling my timeline until the FOMO became unbearable. 

Written by UK author Samantha Shannon, I hadn’t had too much experience with fantasy save for the mass market romance that lured me back into reading after a childhood hiatus. 

Five days after I placed my order I was officially in business and no later did it show up on my Instagram story. I remember my followers coming to my dms with mixed messages of “good luck” or “omg so excited 4 u.” I was scared, somewhat intimidated, but honestly just happy to be there

I really wanted to like this book. In theory, I think I did. It's a whopping 800 pages and no fewer intertwining point of views that all lead to one all-consuming legendary dragon battle. There's plagues (ill-timing, I know), betrayals, dragon school, a sleeping fire-breathing reptilian myth threatening to wake and wreak havoc on the world once again, and yeah, lesbians. 

I think what was so compelling was the challenge this book brought. The plot, sure, sounded fire (literally). When I cracked open the spine, my knuckles, and a can of Diet Coke, I knew there was only one way out of this: finish or die trying.

The size of this book being bigger than most people’s heads did bring in motivated readers, though less interested in the complexity of high fantasy queer dragon riders and seductive Queens than the bragging rights that they defeated the beast.

I came in as one of those readers. 

I think, however, something can be said that while I do not remember what the fuck I read and I certainly did not have time this month to re-read it, I do remember being entertained. Is that not all one can really ask of a book? I can recall a dragon school and secret bedroom passageways and a sleazy alchemist whose POV I particularly did not enjoy reading, but everything else is sort of mashed together like a sparsely curated Pinterest Board of “dark academia + dragons.”

If you were to ask me now writing this before I read Evan’s review, if I thought this was a book she would enjoy, I would ask her again in a year when only the vague premise of lesbians and dragons is left over from this monstrosity. It’s the one thing this book does really well: a lesbian hangover for straight people.

Though my memory fails me on every detail within this book, it did come front of mind when Evan proposed revamping our book club to be about dragons. 

If nothing else, this hits the criteria.

Evan Robins: In the abstract, there is a lot I should like about this book.

I wrote that sentence when first jotting down my thoughts a meagre hundred or so pages into The Priory of the Orange Tree, forgetting that it so happened to be the very thing I’d said about our first ever Book Club pick. Whoops!

But yes, as my co-worker pointed out, there are a lot of parts in this book that individually I’m inclined to like. I like lesbians. I like dragons. I like long books. Lesbians and dragons, therefore, in a downright sprawling epic about warring empires in decline, conflicting religions and philosophies, and an all-encompassing evil overshadowing it all sounds on paper like it should be my thing.

Hell, I’m basically describing a Fire Emblem narrative, and if you know anything about me, it’s that I LOVE Fire Emblem. 

I went into this book with three hopes: lesbian angst, cool dragon sequences, and a justification for its superficially immense length.

I got like one-and-a-half of those things.

Let’s talk about what I mean by that.

It takes 386 pages for “The Priory of the Orange Tree” to deliver on the promise of lesbians. 

I counted.

In that time you have to put up with a lot of chaff—not just within that thread of the narrative, though within that thread of the narrative you do have to deal with a weird comphet plot about one of the people involved in the lesbianism, which I imagine is not going to land with every reader.

Not that every lesbian story needs a gold star, let alone that it needs to feel good, but the lead up to that payoff is charitably Not a Good Time™.

The first (named) dragon takes almost as long to show up, for the record. The first dragon shows up on page 27. No dragon gets a name until Part 2, on page 279, when—and I cannot emphasize this enough—a background character tells us Tane’s dragon partner is called Nayimathun of the Deep Snows.

Not to be this girl but in certain books the dragons show up in chapter one. Whoops.

Okay, so I’ll give full points for lesbians if only because we’re so starving, and I’ll grant dragons a half point cause they get a little more central in the second half. If you’re keeping score, you’ll know what I’m going to say about length.

There’s no two ways around this: this book is too long.

I mean this as much in terms of actual content as in presentation; this book did not literally have to be 800-some pages. Considering the margins and font size you could have cut this down to a 600–page paperback pretty easily, which I imagine would have been easier to stomach for a lot of people.

I’m by no means the first person to say this! Creators on #BookTok are quick to point out that several of the community’s staple reads sport a longer word count than Priory despite having a smaller number of pages.

Personally, I hate this. I own the paperback of Priory and despite my best efforts still wound up cracking its spine, a thing I hate doing to books.

Like many contemporary YA/Fantasy authors, Shannon also suffers from a dearth of structural editing. There’s a ton of stuff that is extraneous to the narrative at hand, all of which serves to bloat the narrative and absolutely gut the pacing.

It bodes ill for a book, in my opinion, when the first chapter has no fewer than three scene breaks in the first three pages. I don't like a dinkus at the best of times but they're absolutely insufferable here.

Perhaps the greatest asset, and simultaneously the thing most working against Priory, is that it's a lore novel. This a book slavishly devoted (for the most part) to its own internal consistency. It has histories, politics, magic systems, dynasties, and other hallmarks of high fantasy classics.

Exposition tends to make or break a fantasy story, and while it’s commendable that Priory commits to a high fantasy narrative effectively sans audience surrogate characters, it’s also self-evidently the biggest problem it faces as a narrative.

Take for instance the dragons—the thing which draws A LOT of people (and me specifically) to this series. There’s a lot of dragon lore, most of which is very cool but none of which is presented in a way that is in any way compelling. It’s mostly just told to us during the portions from Dragon Rider Tané’s perspective.

Diegetically this makes sense—she’s been training to be a dragon rider her whole life, she knows these things—but it’s really boring, as a reader, to simply be told all the relevant information in dry, descriptive paragraphs bookending large spans of NOTHING ACTUALLY HAPPENING. Simply telling a reader about something cool without illustrating its coolness is not compelling.

Compare this to ahem another dragon book—which we may-or-may-not be reading next—in which the primary dragon rider starts as a fish-out-of-the-proverbial-water knowing next to nothing about dragons who has to repeatedly learn and have his biases challenged throughout the course of the narrative, and you begin to get a sense of where this book could have been exponentially better.

Tane’s narrative is boring. She’s a poor audience surrogate, because she exists in a context of familiarity with all of the otherwise extraordinary elements of her narrative. As such, it feels hard for the book to muster any sense of wonder at the idea of dragon school because, well, it’s par for Tane’s course; the thing she’s been working towards this whole time.

No one would play Fire Emblem: Three Houses if your introduction to Garreg Mach Monastery was as a veteran prof intimately familiar with the religion and politics of the setting, because that would defeat the whole joy of acquainting yourself with it. This is, in effect, what Priory seems to lack—a sense of wonder at its own setting.

Shannon is a talented worldbuilder, but a world in and of itself is not a story. Priory has no shortage of ideas. Rather, what it seems to lack is the confidence that any of them are any good.

The thing that sets The Priory of the Orange Tree apart from something like…I don’t know, The Lord of the Rings, is the extent to which it tries to prop up its narrative on its own lore. 

The Lord of the Rings understands that at its core it is a very simple narrative, and the world of Middle-Earth, rich and lived in as it is, is merely the place in which the narrative takes place. Tolkien does not expect you to go into the Hobbit of even the Ring saga with an intimate familiarity with “The Silmarillion,” because that backstory—if compelling in its own right—is incidental to the quest to destroy the ring, enough so that it can be neatly summed up in a neat little Cate Blanchett monologue before leading the audience to figure out the rest as they go along.

Shannon, meanwhile, leaves no room for inference; never exercises the basic principle of “show, don’t tell.” Whenever a new character is introduced the author tells you bluntly who they are and what their deal is, applying them names and labels despite showing no interest in displaying how said labels reveal their interiority or inform their comportment. Every concept is couched in reams and reams of bland exposition, every person laden with ancestral baggage with little to no bearings on the matter at hand.

Instead of using the considerable real estate her novel is afforded to show the thoughts and feelings of the characters in response to the existential threat to their world, Shannon mostly reserves exposition to simply tell you that “[so and so] was sad.” 

At times, it reminds me of Hideaki Anno’s 2016 Shin Godzilla in a bad way.

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Shin Godzilla. If you liked this book, watch Shin Godzilla. Maybe. Like Priory, Shin Godzilla concerns the efforts of an ensemble cast to thwart a cataclysm wrought by a giant, dragonic-ish monster (though in this case instead of fire, the monster breathes atomic bombs).

However, in Shin Godzilla the overwhelming size of the cast is itself a narrative device used to criticize the impotence and redundancy of the Japanese government. Anno chooses to repeatedly flash one-off characters’ names and titles on-screen (sometimes before killing them unceremoniously) not in a sincere attempt to get you to remember them, but rather as a sensorial bombardment meant specifically to impart the scales of incompetence and bureaucracy that act as impediment to the government and military’s disaster response.

It’s clever, clever stuff.

Not so in Priory. This book will remind you of a character you have not seen for multiple chapters and fully expect you to remember who they are and how exactly they slot into this incredibly convoluted plot. On page 338, a character literally says the words “you are in the Priory of the Orange Tree.” (That’s the name of the novel!)

If you forget who anyone is (you will), however, fear not: there’s a glossary of persons and their allegiances at the end of the book for your reference.

I think this should go without saying but THE GLOSSARY IS A BAD SIGN.

You know what books don’t have a dramatis personnae? War and Peace. The Count of Monte Cristo. Infinite Jest. Moby fucking Dick.

I’ll grant that Priory is neither a great American nor Classical novel (nor is it trying to be), and that having a list of characters prefiguring or postscripting your book doesn’t automatically preclude the quality of its writing, though I will say that I don’t think you should ever write a story with the mind that it will be a necessary point of reference.

Imagine if the beginning of each episode of Game of Thrones was a five-minute PowerPoint recap on each character, their family, and their motivations. I think at that point I’d turn it off and go watch Long Vacation. 

It’s not even that the story is all that complex; fundamentally there’s only one big thing going on (the inevitable world-consuming dragon battle that is telegraphed from page 35). The crux of the narrative is simple—save the world from the bad dragon—but complication arises from the excess of cruft which produces narrative friction.

This is something of a recurring problem throughout the book, borne in part of its four unwieldy points-of-view.

Priory ricochets between these drastic changes in tone—often ever-so-slightly out of chronological sync with one another—sometimes even within the confines of a single chapter. The result is enough to induce literary whiplash in even a more seasoned reader.

The balance of these perspectives always feels off. You get, like, a long section in the West with lots of intrigue and multiple POVs that ends on a nail-biting cliffhanger, only to cut to a short, boring check-in on Tané where she spends three pages doing homework. 

This makes it all the more frustrating when the book withholds crucial information from the reader despite its limited-omniscient narration. Why, for instance, is Ead’s Allegiance to the Priory not made clearer initially despite us having ready access to her thoughts? Why do we not get to see her join the court of Inys? 

Why don’t we actually get to see Tané MEETING HER FUCKING DRAGON? WHY SHOULD WE CARE? WHY IS ALL THE COOLEST SHIT ONLY EVEN MENTIONED TO HAVE HAPPENED OFF-SCREEN?

Okay, I take that slightly back, if only because there are almost two whole POVs I genuinely love.

Number one: Kit and Loth, my himbo kings. 

These guys are just two bros broing. They’re on an adventure! They’re hanging out with pirates! Hell yeah! These guys are actually the funniest.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE—because I know someone right now is sitting in a boardroom casting the Priory of the Orange Tree prestige TV series—Theo Solomon as Arteloth and Tim Downie as Kit. Make it happen. 

However, for as much as I love Loth as the straight (yeah right) man to his and Kit’s swashbuckling comedy duo, he immediately becomes a stock blank-slate heroic type the minute Kit (SPOILER) kicks the bucket in supremely underwhelming fashion, upon which I found Loth’s sections excruciatingly, painfully boring. A do-gooder who never has his morals meaningfully challenged (even if his beliefs kind of are) is a very uninteresting person.

It also does get a bit distracting when we cut from tortured courtly romance yuri to #TwoGuysChilling. Points off for tonal whiplash.

Oh, and Abby? Forgive me, I am going to say something controversial. 

You remember that alchemist you said you hated? Yeah, well he’s my favourite character.

Niclays Roos is, by no stretch of the imagination, the most interesting character in The Priory of the Orange Tree. He is the character who displays the greatest amount of depth if only because he seems the only one truly capable of self-reflection. 

Tane is boring because we never get the sense that she really ever feels guilt—that she’s internalized literally any of her flaws. Sure, she admits to being self-serving, but she winds up externalizing what could be a personal conflict between her honour and her ambition into blaming Niclays for what are (at least in part) the consequences of her own actions.

Sabran suffers from this same problem of believing that she is the most righteous person in any given situation, a trait which is only more exemplified by Ead, who is vindicated at every term by the plot bending to the notion of her own supreme overcompetence and extreme badassery.

Every character in this story is a Mary Sue, if not by the strictest metric of universal adoration, then at least by virtue of their seeming exceptional talent and uniquely existential importance to life, the universe, and everything.

Niclays—adulterer, snitch, and miserable, pathetic, wet man—is the only character who ever feels like he possesses an emotional register, and even if those emotions are only sass and self-loathing, it’s refreshing in a book that seems hard pressed to offer anything else.

While I could talk about my sopping wet boy at length, I’ll refrain, mostly because I know half of you are checked the fuck out by now.

For those of you still here: permit me one historical nitpick, if you will. 

There’s a lot you could debate as to the specific technologies (i.e. clocks/horologes, ironclad ships, pistols) presented within Priory, though a lot of them I have to forgive by virtue of it being a fantasy novel. That said, one thing with which I take issue has nothing to do with anachronism and everything to do with linguistics: Why are the Seiikinese polearms called “halberds?” 

Technically, yes, the thing Shannon describes, could be called a halberd, but the specification that its blade is curved makes it clear she’s describing a naginata.

I get that you might not trust your readers to have an intimate familiarity with the nomenclature of Japanese polearms, but it would be easier for all involved if you did. Hell, Rick Riordan taught a generation of children how to pronounce the word “khopesh.”

A lot of people have watched a Kurosawa movie or played a Japanese Roleplaying game by this point in current year, and I think if you want to do diligence in making an expansive, detailed, and (crucially) diverse high fantasy historical allegory, it pays to be specific about the points from which you’re actually drawing reference lest it not come off as superficial.

I mean, at the risk of being that one friend who’s too woke, this whole thing smacks just a little of Orientalism, no? Shannon flattens a lot of the political friction and culture of the period she’s drawing on into a simplistic “us vs. them” compass wherein the East and South exist as these countries mired in Noble Savage imagery—politically or culturally stunted but mystically enlightened through their connections to the dragons and titular Orange Tree, respectively.

This is, of course, a massively reductive view of East Asian and Middle Eastern history, but it becomes somewhat necessary for the nations to be able to put aside their respective differences for the sake of the inevitable Four Nations Dragon Battle at the end. 

It makes it feel less like Shannon has anything meaningful to say about Japanese–European political and trade relations than that she’s using Japanese signifiers as a shortcut to vaguely “exotic” worldbuiding in the way made popular by Cyberpunk tropes.

Even in the points of relative cultural and historic familiarity, this book has a lot of weird semiotic problems. Words like “venery” are thrown around to help it sound “old-timey,” though to me they always introduce the friction of having to suspend my disbelief as to where these words come from in a culture without an idea of the Roman goddess Venus. In the most extreme cases, you get terms with considerable symbolic baggage (i.e. “the Sign of the Sword”…DO YOU GET IT?) presented divorced from their actual meaning to be appropriated in service of some ineffectual allegory.

I recognize that I might be the only person who cares about stuff like this, but I do think it’s important, mostly because I believe these sorts of nitpicks can be made part of a broader broader criticism: I don’t think that The Priory of the Orange Tree functions as a feminist critique of its source material.

So yeah, let’s talk about the lesbians…

Priory is possessive of what I might call a “fanfiction approach” to queerness—that is to say it exists and is rarely, if ever, commented upon in the context of the story itself. 

In the abstract I’m fine with this. Baldur’s Gate 3 gets away with this approach at no detriment to its own worldbuilding or narrative. A couple Fire Emblem games do this, at least in the North American localizations (the depictions of queerness in the original Japanese text are…another can of worms).

And yet, Priory’s apparent sexual agnosticism stands in sharp contrast to a number of rather heteronormative assumptions the text seems to make, not least of which concerning the succession of its Queendom.

You see, the integrity of one of the principal governments in this narrative wrests upon the assumption that every queen of Inys for over ONE THOUSAND YEARS has been a HETEROSEXUAL WOMAN.

On the face of it this seems statistically unlikely. Hell, the number of English succession crises born of the fact that certain kings were a little bit limp in the wrist should show us as much. However the converse (and markedly worse) inference one can draw from the persistence of the house of Berethnet, is that this “feminist” “matriarchy” is the product of ~a millenia of coercive rape.

You’ll never guess which interpretation the text explicitly endorses.

This is what I mean when I say that the build up to the lesbianism is a capital-B “Bad Time.” Despite Shannon presenting Inys as a country governed by the authority of a matrilineal lineage, the Queendom nonetheless exists within the cultural framework of what we would understand as Western Patriarchy.

The people of Inys worship a male religious figurehead, follow mostly heteropatriarchal conventions of courting and marriage, and generally expect their female head of state to show deference to male suitors for the purpose of procreation.

There’s a sort of creeping horror in picking up a book expecting it to be about a queer relationship only for it to spend the page count of other novels having one of those characters be coerced into a marriage against her will, get knocked up under duress, and only then get into a (secret) lesbian relationship after her cardboard cutout husband has been conveniently dispatched and she has been rendered infertile for the sake of advancing the plot.

Even writing this I can slowly feel myself turning into Andrea Dworkin.

I’ll grant there is an interesting story to be told in examining the question of women’s agency in the face of patriarchal institutions which confine and dehumanize them. It’s called Portrait of a Lady on Fire. That film is a thoughtful exploration of a relationship between two women whose union is doomed by class and circumstance; a tragic, biting criticism of the classism and misogyny of the regency era that affords its subjects the dignity of a quiet rebellion against the ties which otherwise bind them.

That is not a story that Priory is interested in telling. Instead, Priory is a “feminist” story in which most of its women don’t possess much in the way of agency. Ead is sent to the court of Inys under someone else’s orders and against her own will. Marosa Vetalda is a puppet ruler with barely any influence on the plot. Tané has her goals prescribed to her by her superiors.

Tane’s “best friend” Susa has nothing to do. She’s barely even a character. She is a woman who exists to fill a plot device, get killed, and be functionally replaced by a series of other women who are equally uninteresting. 

Even Sabran’s eventual relationship with Ead is not a product of a decisive choice on her part to love in the face of a coercive system, but a thing permitted of her after she has failed to fulfill the role demanded of her as a reproductive object.

In a way this serves to undercut the whole Berethnet bloodline conspiracy. It’s less compelling, in my opinion, to tell a story about a woman who resigns herself to having to fight for her country after exhausting the weird, coercive, and largely passive options at her disposal than it is to tell a story about that woman same woman taking decisive control of her destiny despite her being faced with a shitty hand and impossible odds.

Maybe I’ve just played too much Fire Emblem Awakening, but if this lezzer was told a dragon was going to end the world in a matter of years I’d rather take up the sword than sleep with some sap.

So it is that I don’t think that Priory is a truly feminist text, despite ostensibly having women at its centre. Merely peppering its world with women in positions of relative power doesn’t actually change the patriarchal conditions to which Priory’s characters are subject, and further, it doesn’t really offer any substantive commentary on how said conditions affect them.

There are progressive ideas at play to be sure, but as a feminist, reading Priory makes me see the bones of a better mook with more to say about the conditions to which women are or have historically been subjected.

It’d be easy to dismiss this book as merely “bad,” but it’s not bad, and I don’t want you to think that I think that it is. That it didn’t fully engage me is not to say that it was worthless, merely that the prose was not to my taste, its ideas—though interesting—tended to fall flat, and it fails to pay off the things it markets itself on. Perhaps it's a case of my expectations being misguided, but for a book that promised dragons and lesbians Priory seems to contain precious little of either.

The things that make me dislike Priory are at the very least interesting, however, and of all of the things we could have read for a Book Club about dragons, I think Priory was a sound choice.

This is by every measure a better book than most of the “romantasy” with which it tends to get lopped in, and I don’t think you’re a bad person or a literary rube if you find yourself enjoying it. Priory is a piece of popular fiction, so it's hard to take it to task for not satisfying my demands which tend towards niche in their genre.

That said, I think if you do enjoy Priory, then there’s a world of much better fiction for you to discover. 

If you like this book FOR THE LESBIANS you should check out: Portrait of a Lady on Fire. 

If you like this book FOR THE HISTORICAL DRAMA you should check out: FX’s Shōgun (2024), Fire Emblem Three Houses. 

If you like this book FOR THE WAR BETWEEN TWO NATIONS you should check out: Fire Emblem Fates

If you like this book FOR THE DRAGONS you should check out: Dungeons & Dragons, Fire Emblem Awakening, the next book we’re reading.

Arthur Book Club returns in a matter of days (we hope) to discuss Naomi Novik’s historical fantasy interspecies bromance war epic, His Majesty’s Dragon, the best(?) book of all time about Napoleon being master of Europe and only the British fleet standing in his way.

Incidentally, also the book that got me (briefly) Tumblr famous.

Until that time, Arthur Book Club out.

Oh, FUCK M—