The Bone Season

[sawyl]

In a happy coincidence I've finished Samantha Shannon's very heavily hyped debut The Bone Season just as Gwyneth Jones has reviewed it for the Guardian. And while the book definitely has its flaws, I found it an enjoyable read with definite potential.

Paige Mahoney is mollisher to Jaxon Hall, the criminal overlord of Seven Dials, and the gem of his stable of clairvoyants. But when Paige almost accidentally kills a Night Vigilance office on the underground, she finds herself captured and shipped off to the closed city of Oxford. Here she learns that the government, a sinister group of fascists called Scion, have agreed to allow a group called the Rephaim to turn the place into a gulag for people with unnatural powers where the tractable are turned into combat troops and sent to fight an otherworldly menace, with the remainder living lives of servitude and squalor.

Upon arrival in Oxford the clairvoyants rounded in the Raphaim's once-per-decade Bone Season are each assigned to a master and dispatched to live in one of the decaying college buildings. While most of the Rephs select several clairvoyants Paige finds herself becoming the only charge of Arcturus, the gothic organ-playing Warden and consort of the Rephaim leader, whose motives are anything but clear. As the story unfolds Paige struggles to understand what the Warden wants of her — he seems to be moulding her for something, maybe to better suit the requirements of his sovereign or possibly to fit some agenda of his own — and whether she can trust him or whether his actions are part of a deeper agenda.

On the one hand, The Bone Season is definitely a book with problems. Some of the writing is rather choppy in places and the first couple of pages are really terrible — packed full of info-dumps that are enough to make you doubt the next 400+ pages — but things very quickly pick up once the book has the confidence to shift from tell to show mode. Additionally the pacing doesn't really work and the passage of time feels muddled: some things dragged out and reiterated; others are casually jammed together, with months passing in a single sentence.

On the other hand, the book is an engaging read and Paige, although not precisely likeable, is an intriguing character — part mouthy mobster, part gothic heroine with father figure problems — while The Warden, meanwhile, does a nice job of being tormented and brooding and unable to to say what he actually thinks or feels. Plus I really like the pseudo-Victorian feel of a lot of the street slang — Paige mentions that cities tend to freeze themselves at the point where they get taken over by Scion — and I suspect that many of the problems are attributable to its being a first novel.

So, pace Gwyneth Jones, I'm definitely going to read the sequel...