I heard about this book when Shannon originally signed her seven-book deal (!!), and it was all over the publishing news. The fantasy nerd in me got very excited, and now the first book has landed. This was the book I took on the plane to New York with me; I was convinced it would be perfect plane reading.
I was half right. The premise is intriguing; Paige Mahoney is a dreamwalker, a mental ‘hacker of sorts’ who can read the ‘dreamscapes’ of non-clairvoyants – here called amaurotics. She lives in the London of 2067, which is governed by an anti-clairvoyant institution called Scion. Scion seeks and captures clairvoyants – or ‘voyants’ – like Paige just as a police force does criminals, and puts them to work against other voyants, or disappears them. Ironically, the only way Paige can feel like she belongs in this oppressive society is as part of London’s underground voyant crime syndicate. By day, she tells her Scion-employed father she works at an oxygen bar, but after hours she surveils voyants in her precinct for a crime lord. Soon, though, she discovers that Scion is just one layer of a deeper, more nefarious plan.
Broadly speaking, this book is structurally sound. There is plenty of tension and action to keep the reader turning the pages, and some sympathetic characters to root for along the way. The narrative retains integrity even though not far into the book Paige’s circumstances, and her understanding of the world around her, changes dramatically. I know this has irritated some readers, but in principle I had no issue with this; it is rather a dizzying turn of events that gives you the tight-chested ‘what on earth is she going to do?’ feeling.
But my main issue with this book is that it felt undercooked. The finer details of the world-building, in particular, needed more attention. For example, Shannon has created an extremely granular and complex taxonomy of voyants, given as a family-tree-style chart at the beginning of the book. It’s an overwhelming introduction, so it’s puzzling that many of these divisions are inconsequential, story-wise. In fact – and I admit I was reading this in holiday mode, so I may have just missed it – there are some terms that I can’t even remember being used. (I also realise this is a seven-book series, so there’s an argument for including everything, but I’m not sure it works here.)
This may seem like a minor quibble but, on the flipside, weirdly, there’s some vagueness around what Paige’s dreamwalker abilities are. To some extent, there are plot reasons for this, but if a protagonist’s powers are so desirable and fascinating to everyone around her that she forms a kind of centrifugal plot force, as Paige does in The Bone Season, they should be as plain as could be for the reader. Similarly, two races that are introduced later in the book could have been handled more confidently; their clairvoyant qualities are not that well elucidated, and this makes the ending feel rushed and sloppy.
All this is not to be discouraging or horrid. I’m really talking about finessing and general tightening rather than integral problems. I did, though, feel that there were enough elements requiring polishing or rethinking that I came out of the reading experience a bit confused and not quite satisfied. Yet the pacing and action kept me going. So for the purposes of being distracted on a long trip, The Bone Season worked. I didn’t even write any notes as I was having a nice old time with it. But reading a book that isn’t quite ready for publication really makes it clear what kind of genius writers like Tolkien and Martin have (or perhaps reflects the time they’ve spent with their manuscripts, or the time allowed by a less pressure-cooker publishing process): absolute control over and knowledge of their worlds; and the understanding of what parts of it the reader needs to know about, and when.
