Sunday Funday: The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon
October 31, 2016
Today in Sunday Funday, I stepped outside of my comfort zone and delved into a genre I don’t normally appreciate: Dystopian Fiction. I’m not normally a fan of the genre, and there are far too many examples for me to count of how the genre can be done extremely poorly. However, Samantha hit the British novel scene with an extraordinary amount of pomp and circumstance. She was touted as the next J. K. Rowling, and signed an enormous contract right out of the gate. She’s been inked for a movie deal, and has six sequels to The Bone Season scheduled and in the works. So, I decided to take a risk, and see what all the fuss was about.
The Bone Season
By Samantha Shannon (@say_shannon)
The opening chapter of this novel is some of the most well sculpted writing I’ve ever had the privilege to read. Action, adventure, mystery, and a wealth of world which is built with a taut momentum which does not relent from the start of the chapter to the end of it. The whole book is not quite as action packed as that first chapter, which would be almost impossible given the nature of printed words, but it is a remarkable opening salvo for any book. It also leads to what has to be the absolute best part of the book: The world the characters inhabit. Everything about the world-building in The Bone Season is absolutely phenomenal. The world is engaging and deep in ways that I have hardly ever seen. Think Neuromancer or Otherworld, a world which is like ours, but so vastly different that it is unrecognizable, alien. I cannot fully express just how much I love diving into these vast worlds, leaving behind all that is known to explore the imagination of another. It is addictive, and The Bone Season delivers a powerful hit of purest fantasy. The work put into the landscape is obviously very deep, and the layers upon which it is crafted and reinforced throughout show that there is a vast ocean of potential available for Ms. Shannon to draw on as she goes forward.
This brings me to the sad downside of the rest of the book: It is not crafted with such deep attention to unique elegance. The Bone Season tries to upend the genre of dystopian fiction, yet in the attempt falls into some of the most rote traps possible. Buildup, followed by disaster and breakdown. Imprisonment, followed by eventual love of the captor. A final confrontation which resolves nothing. Granted, there are already six separate sequels already in the works, and I knew that coming into the novel, but the methodology in which nothing is resolved leaves a lot to be desired. In the end, no amount of fantastic world building saves the book from itself. Samantha Shannon is obviously an incredibly gifted author, which shines through significant portions of the book. At the same time, the pitfalls become that much more glaring because of the obvious skill which is on display elsewhere. Maybe I’m being overly harsh of the first work of a very young author. However, the promise of the incredible world of The Bone Season will need to be worked with much better mastery the next time around in order to avoid the same disappointment that I felt as the final words were consumed.
