This is a transcript of my most recent podcast episode – you can listen to it here.
Hello and welcome to Resurrected Reviews Revisited, part of the Will You Still Love It Tomorrow podcast. I’m Annie and, in each Reviews episode, I pick something I’ve reviewed sometime since 2005, reread or rewatch it, and then compare my reactions. Fair warning: there will be spoilers.
This month, my pick is The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon.
Before revisiting it, my recollections of my original experience of encountering this book are as follows:
I think the first time I came across Samantha Shannon was at a book event at the Bloomsbury offices in Bedford Square, I think in the mid-2010s – maybe 2015? It was a pretty small event, with Samantha Shannon and Natasha Pulley (whose work will feature in a future Reviews Revisited episode) giving a talk about their writing and then doing a Q&A. It was a great event and I really liked both authors, so I looked up what they’d written and decided to give them a try.
The Bone Season is the first in quite a lengthy YA fantasy series by Samantha Shannon, as far as I remember – and I also think I gave up on it not that far through it. So, it’ll be interesting to see if I can make it further this time! I believe my main problem was the now all-too-familiar trope of a teenage female protagonist getting into a romantic relationship with a centuries-old supernatural male mentor character. But it remains to be seen if a) that’s even remotely what happened and b) if that strikes me as an issue this time around.
I definitely listened to the audiobook version, which I’m going to do again, as I still have access to all my purchased titles in the library on my phone. It’s quite a long book (14+ hours) but I’m going to try and avoid the temptation of speeding it up if I’m not enjoying it all that much…
Anyway, the GoodReads blurb reads as follows:
“The year is 2059. Nineteen-year-old Paige Mahoney is working in the criminal underworld of Scion London, based at Seven Dials, employed by a man named Jaxon Hall. Her job: is to scout for information by breaking into people’s minds. For Paige is a dreamwalker, a clairvoyant, and, in the world of Scion, she commits treason simply by breathing.
It is raining the day her life changes forever. Attacked, drugged, and kidnapped, Paige is transported to Oxford – a city kept secret for two hundred years, controlled by a powerful, otherworldly race. Paige is assigned to Warden, a Rephaite with mysterious motives. He is her master. Her trainer. Her natural enemy. But if Paige wants to regain her freedom she must allow herself to be nurtured in this prison where she is meant to die.”
Here’s what I thought on revisiting it this year.
Since my first attempt at reading Samantha Shannon’s work, I’ve very much enjoyed her adult fantasy duology – The Priory of the Orange Tree and The Day of Fallen Night, so I’m intrigued to go back to her earlier YA series now. I heard recently that, instead of continuing with writing book five in the series (of a planned seven), she’s planning to use her ten years of writing experience to rewrite and improve the first four and release them in new versions before carrying on! I’m not sure if her fans will be pleased about that or not. But, as a successful writer, it’s certainly a good way to make a ton of money by getting existing fans to buy all the books again! And I can actually understand the impulse, assuming it’s genuine – since I know if I went back to stuff I wrote ten years ago, I’d probably cringe.
Anyway, on to my analysis of The Bone Season, which is the first in the series and which I’m listening to in its originally published version.
Well, the opening proves yet again how faulty my memory is because I thought the book was set in contemporary times – not 2059! The first few pages are entirely exposition, setting up the world of futuristic London, but in a way that’s more baffling than it is informative. It’s all unfamiliar terms and references to day-to-day life with no real explanation.
It’s all very melodramatic at the start:
“My father didn’t know that I belonged with the criminals more than I belonged with him.”
“I couldn’t answer his questions. The truth was dangerous. He might have sent me to Tower Hill himself if he knew what I really did.”
“I committed high treason just by breathing.”
“Maybe I should have told him the truth. But maybe it would have killed him.”
“But I didn’t regret joining the Syndicate. As Jacks always said, better an outlaw than a stiff.”
Ooh, so our teenage female protagonist is – edgy – badass – part of the shadowy criminal underworld!
But it’s also all ‘telling’ so it’s very difficult to connect to the protagonist emotionally. It’s also over half an hour into the audiobook before we learn her name – Paige. And when she starts having a conversation with another character, there’s so little context that the significance of what they’re talking about is lost in translation.
The first thing that really caught my interest was Eliza allowing the spirit of a really talented painter to possess her for several hours a day so she can produce masterpieces for the gang to sell – which is quite an original idea. Some of the other aspects of the worldbuilding do become clearer in intriguing ways as the book goes on, but it’s a bit of a struggle to begin with.
So, it’s set in the future but most of the speculative elements are more paranormal than science – communing with spirits, astral projection, clairvoyance. And of course there’s a Grand Inquisitor who has declared anyone with paranormal abilities to be illegal and abhorrent, which is why the protagonist and her colleagues all have to hide and be criminals. And equally of course, there are clairvoyants working for the government, conscripted into enforced service for 30 years before being euthanised. So, setting the clairvoyants against each other.
I do like all the references to parts of London I know quite well. It’s always nice to be able visualise familiar places in a book and imagine the characters existing there.
But apparently, the introduction of clairvoyants to British society has reduced it to a totalitarian dictatorship with alcohol outlawed (replaced by ‘flavoured oxygen – huh?) and public hangings – the space of less than fifty years…
Or not, since it later says Britain hasn’t had a monarch since Victoria. But that doesn’t track with it saying Scion claims Edward VII ‘opened a door to evil’, introducing clairvoyance to the world, because he came after Victoria…
The narrator of the audiobook is good, but her voice is very soft and breathy, which doesn’t necessarily fit when the story gets dark and violent. It almost slips past without you noticing – though the protagonist does kill one government agent and send another mad by the end of the first chapter. And then she’s on the run – so the action definitely ramps up pretty quickly after the opening trawl through all the exposition.
And then she gets captured and it stops dead again, as she’s left for a while alone in a cell.
Then, in Chapter 4, the whole book takes a completely batshit turn with the introduction of beings from a world beyond ‘the rift’, who are fighting against parasitic entities that have overrun their world, and they want the captured voyants to train to be able to defeat them… And they’ve been living in and controlling the London government for two hundred years from the supposedly quarantined city of Oxford!
I mean, what? The exposition is delivered by one of the beings and contains a lot of new terms that were difficult to parse in the audiobook version. And it’s all quite overwhelming, as I’m sure it was for Paige, as well…
She takes notice of one of the Rephaim and thinks he’s the most beautiful being she’s ever seen – and of course, he is Arctorus, her Keeper and, as she is told at the induction session, ‘her keeper is her master in all things…’ The first thing he says to her is, of course, “I lay claim to you.” And here we go…
His title is the Blood Consort and he tells her they sleep by day – so it’s basically vampires? This is pretty much confirmed when it’s revealed that the Rephaim feed on human auras.
And then Arctorus, or Warden as he is more generally known, says, “We are stationed at the residence at Magdalen.” !!
So, that’s kind of round the corner from where I was ‘stationed’ when I was at Oxford! It’s even more fun imagining the characters in Oxford than it was in London. There seems to be rivalry between the people living in the different colleges, just like there is between the students in our world, which is fun.
There’s more inconsistency when Paige considers it likely the arrival of the Rephaim in 1859 was the real source of ‘unnatural’ abilities in humans – but earlier it said it was meant to be something Edward VII did, but he didn’t become king until 1901.
And of course Warden is fiance to the Blood Sovereign, Nishira, who wants Paige because she suspects she’s a dreamwalker – but if she finds out that’s the case, she’ll kill Paige to add her to her coterie of slave spirits.
Paige interacts with the other Bone Season recruits for about half an hour before the oration ceremony where they’re all claimed, but she somehow connects really strongly to two of them – Seb and Julian – and we’re supposed to accept this without any information about them or any time spent getting to know them. So, when Seb is then killed as part of Paige’s initial test, it’s sad, yes, but Paige’s reaction to it specifically being him seems overblown and isn’t passed on successfully to the reader because there’s been no time to forge a connection to him.
She also wants to risk her own life to warn Jax that the Rephaim are after him, too, even though she’s never previously expressed any loyalty or liking towards him, other than being resigned to the fact that working for him is her best option. She does think, early on, that he might come and rescue her – but then later says, “Even here, where he could never get to me, I felt that he watched my every move.” So her attitude towards him is very inconsistent, as are her thoughts about her previous life in general. At one point, she says, “I might have been a criminal before, but at least I chose to be a criminal and I was among friends.” But then, I suppose her old life of crime with the people she was never presented as considering friends would likely seem a lot more attractive, compared to enslavement to the Rephaim.
The book is pretty grim all round, what with the physical abuse, the forced draining of auras, the torture, the enslavement and the murdering…
After Warden helps subdue Paige during the test by feeding on her, he insists on treating her wounds and calls her by her name, rather than her number.
The Chapter ends with the words – “That was the first time he used my name.”
I initially wondered if we’re supposed to find that romantic?
But Paige’s attitude to Warden is consistently one of hatred and revulsion up to this point (apart from thinking he’s beautiful at first sight, which she denies later when asked her opinion of him), so my memories of how their relationship develops are starting to look a bit dodgy…
It’s well known that voyants are asked to betray or hurt other humans as part of their first test so, when Paige goes to talk to Liss (a girl she met in the shanty town community outside the college system in Oxford) afterwards, wearing the pink tunic that tells everyone she passed, she approaches the conversation in the most idiotic way.
When Liss asks her what she had to do to pass, Paige says, “They tried to get me to kill Seb. And now he’s dead…”
So, of course, Liss assumes Paige killed him and then refuses to listen when Paige tries to explain further… Though that miscommunication does get resolved pretty quickly.
Earlier on, Liss tells Paige that Nishira has been looking to add a dreamwalker to her coterie of slave spirits and that she’ll kill Paige as soon as she finds out that’s her ability. But, after that’s revealed to all the Rephaim in Paige’s first test, she’s sent back to Warden’s quarters and he then starts training her to fight the parasites. Though, later, it’s explained that Nishira is waiting for Paige to fully come into her power before killing her and stealing it, so that kind of makes sense.
I had to look up the word ‘Rephaim’ online because in the audiobook, the narrator says it in three different ways – Rephain, Rephaite, and Rephayem – at different times for apparently no reason. On the GoodReads summary, it’s listed as Rephaite, but other summaries I looked at used Rephaim or a mixture of both, so that’s confusing. It’s possible Rephaim is plural and Rephaite is singular, but that isn’t made clear.
By halfway through, I have to admit I was getting a bit bored. Because, despite the beings from another dimension, the threat of the parasites, the abuse/torture/murdering, nothing much actually happens.
Paige accidentally kills someone, gets captured, is sent to Oxford and lives under the abusive rule of the Rephaim – so she never actually does anything with intention and the events of the book just happen to her, without any real plot progression.
And then I just decided I couldn’t take it any more… I tried upping the speed of the audio but that just made it harder to listen to and I really didn’t care what was going to happen in the rest of the book. So, I stopped.
I read an in-depth summary of the rest of the book online – and it was very difficult to follow. There seem to be an awful lot of twists and turns and long discussions of background information and reveals of different things – not least Warden and Paige becoming bonded for life by ‘the Golden Cord’ after saving each other’s lives on three separate occasions – major eye roll…
Regarding the development of the relationship between Warden and Paige – regardless of her finding out that he was one of the Rephaim who helped the humans in the Bone Season twenty years before – he enslaved her, never gave her any food, was complicit in murdering Seb during her first test, forcibly fed off her aura and invaded her mind to manipulate her dreams.
Plus, she’s nineteen and he’s possibly two hundred years older, and the power imbalance between them is extreme, so them getting together romantically is just icky to me. However, that doesn’t seem to happen until very late on in the book, just before the climax, and I certainly don’t remember getting that far before, even though I thought it was their relationship that made me stop the first time around. In the summary I read, them making out seems to come absolutely out of nowhere, but I imagine there must have been at least a bit more of a lead-up in the book.
Apparently, right at the end, some of the humans escape but Warden decides to send Paige on ahead, back to Scion, and go back to try and defeat Nishira. He tells her, “If I never return — if you never see me again — it will mean that everything is all right. That I have ended her. But if I return, it will mean that I have failed. That there is still danger. And then I will find you.”
Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, because if he kills Nishira and the danger is over, surely that would be the reason to come and find her. And if he doesn’t, surely it would make sense for him to stay away and keep trying???
And then, Paige apparently gets on the train and watches Warden fade into the distance. She then tells the reader, “I would never see him again.” Which seems extremely unlikely, given it’s only book one in a supposedly seven-book series… And, looking at summaries for the later books, it seems like they actually get back together and spend most of the books working together against Scion and the other Rephaim. So the end of this book is apparently nonsense…
Paige does at least manage to find Seb’s spirit and release him from haunting the human realm, so that’s something. It’s a shame Liss dies, though.
Overall – I just found this book really boring. It seems like quite a lot of exciting stuff happens towards the end, but I just didn’t care about Paige as a character, or find the whole dynamic between the Rephaim and the humans interesting at all. I’m going to give it two stars because, even though I didn’t finish it, I’ve definitely read worse books!
Looking back to my original review, it turns out it was in January 2015, so I was exactly right about guessing that!
Here’s what I thought the first time around:
“The next audiobook I tried was The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon. I heard about this through Empire, as Andy Serkis’ new studio is making a film version. It was described on the internet as “a lot like Harry Potter”, with Shannon being heralded as “the next J K Rowling”, but I wouldn’t agree with that summary at all. I found it to be much more like a cross between Divergent and Twilight, and not in a good way. The premise was interesting to begin with, but it soon got very tiresome, and I could just see where it was going with the ancient, creepy but strangely compelling male alien who takes the teenage girl protagonist under his protection… Yeuch! I’m afraid I gave up about halfway through and have no desire to find out what happens in the end.”
Wow – I really can’t imagine how anyone could compare this with Harry Potter. But it seems my previous attempt to read this book went pretty much the same as this time around and I gave up at about the same point.
I clearly didn’t correctly remember where I first heard about Samantha Shannon, though, because it turns out that the event I went to with her doing a Q&A wasn’t until 2017.
Subsequent to me giving up on listening to The Bone Season this time around, I did listen to both episodes of Novel Predictions about the book. Alison picked it to reread and for Kales to read for the first time
In the predictions episode, after reading six chapters, Kales had a similar reaction to me to a lot of things. The fact that you get three chapters of intense world-building for one setup and then Paige gets captured and given to the Rephain, and you get three more chapters of intense world-building for a completely different setup. She also said she found Paige very bland, and was confused by her loyalty both to Jax, who seemed very toxic, and also the other Bone Season recruits, after only spending a very short amount of time with them. So that was all the same.
They also talk about the references to Paige’s dad from way back in the beginning – and by halfway through and then reading a summary of the rest of the book, I’d completely forgotten he was even a character. And he’s quite important in the totalitarian government back in London, so I assume he maybe comes back into it in later instalments – though it’ll have been a really, really long time since he’s appeared by that point, given the length of this book and how he seemingly doesn’t come back before the end of this first one.
In the wrap-up episode on Novel Predictions, Kales’ views definitely diverge from mine – she gives it four stars and then reads the next two books in the series straight off. She calls it visceral and intense, with an impressive number of layers, and praises Samantha Shannon as an excellent writer (which I think she is, given Priory of the Orange Tree).
So yeah, a very different experience!
Kales and Alison also talk about moving on from YA fantasy and not wanting to read about teen angst any more. So they categorise The Bone Season as adult – though it felt very YA to me. Is Paige being 19 what makes it adult? They do acknowledge that it has a lot of YA tropes and acts like kind of a bridge from YA to adult – but still, it didn’t feel that adult to me. I totally get what they’re saying about being weary of teen angst – but Paige doesn’t feel authentically emotional to me – her experiences didn’t touch me at all, while I remember The Hunger Games definitely being very intense and emotional, even though I first experienced it as an adult still.
Well, I’m planning on revisiting The Hunger Games as part of this podcast series – though I haven’t decided whether to go with the audiobooks or get text versions, because I’ve read that series in both formats before now. We shall see…
And that’s it for this episode of Reviews Revisited.
Next month, I’m going to be revisiting This Is How You Lose The Time War, which I have a physical copy of. I’m still not sure what to do about my selected audiobooks, because it hasn’t been great format for deep analysis of books so far – but then, the two audiobooks I’ve tried have been of books I wasn’t all that keen on in the first place, so it may still work for books I’m sure I liked the first time around.
Anyway, many thanks to Cambo for our theme music. And thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it wherever you get your podcasts.
And if you have any comments, or if you want to tell me about a time you revisited some media, and whether or not you still loved it afterwards, you can email me at willyoustillloveit@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you.
Lastly, please join us for the next main episode of Will You Still Love It Tomorrow in two weeks to hear what happens when Dave gets me to watch the 1983 film, The Dead Zone, which is an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, and is directed by David Cronenberg…. Will I like it at all? Based on that description, I’m pretty apprehensive about it… Will Dave still love it after our discussion? And why on earth did he love it in the first place? I’m looking forward to finding out!
Bye for now!