A novel so heavily hyped, when you open the front cover a little Hype Pixie jumps out and sings the word ‘hype!’ over and over to the tune of Wings’s “Hi! Hi! Hi!” Of course, it’s always a good idea to keep in mind Public Enemy’s wise words on the question of hype. So: this is the first of a Rowling-y seven novels set in an alt-future 2059 England. The country is ruled by a Dark-Materials-esque anti-magic regime called Scion. Our spiky teenage heroine Paige Mahoney lives amongst the criminal underworld at Seven Dials, hiding her clairvoyant powers from Scion’s gestapo. The main burden of the book is: fans are slans. Has anyone ever written a book with that theme before, I wonder? Actually I was never sure why the evil Scion are persecuting the clairvoyants, unless it is out of sheer annoyance at the bewildering multiplicity of kinds of them: Soothsayers (including cottabomancers, cryomancers, catoptromancers, hydromancers, crystalists, axinomancers, bibliomancers, macharomancers, cartomancers, cyathomancers, cleidomancers, astragalomancers, aichomancers, acultomancers, arewehumanorarewemancer? and adamandtheantcers. Not those last two, obviously); Mediums (including trance mediums, restive mediums, speaking mediums, physical mediums, automatistes and psychographers); Sensors (Gustants, Sniffers, Polyglots and Whisperers); Augurs (20 sub-types of these buggers); Guardians (Binders, Simmoners, Necromancer, Exorcists), Furies (Sibyls, Unreadables and Berserkers) and Jumpers (Woolly, Oracles and Dreamwalkers—our heroine is one of these latter). It’s all eye-stingingly intricate and complex, without ever managing to accrue any deeper resonance or weight; and Shannon can find no better way of laying it out for the reader than by infodump followed by infodump, with a side-order of infodump. Stomping foot of nerdism: it stomps. Then Paige is kidnapped by people from a whole other filigree-intricate magical system to be trained up by her captors for complicated, uninvolving reasons. The Bone Season is nearly 500 pages long, but it’s half over before we get past the ‘try to keep all this abstract data in your head, you’ll need it if you’re going to appreciate or even understand the remaining six novels’ worldbuilding stuff. Finally a story gets going, but alas it’s a sub-Twilight love yarn between Paige and a golden-eyed sort-of vampire lad called (perhaps after the Trollope novel) Warden (of course not after the Trollope novel). Warden is one of the Rephaim, immortal-ish, ruthless magical types who feed off humans. Paige and Warden’s courtship develops after the standard model for these things. ‘With a flick of his wrist he brought the blade against my throat. My body hummed with adrenalin. Warden leaned in very close to me. “This blade has been used to draw human blood,” he said, very softly. “Blood like that of your friend Sebastian.” I trembled.’ [141]. Natch, the two of them end up falling for one another.
This sounds not to much like a novel as all the author's notes on the novel's background, characters, etc. Is that what authors are doing now instead of writing an actual story?
ReplyDeleteWell, to give the (young) author credit for her ambition: she's very evidently setting up a whole long sequence of novels here, and putting in place lots of the stuff she'll need for later. It's just that it's quite hard going.
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