We’ve seen the contingency dealt with by J.K. Rowling, G.R.R. Martin, Christopher Paolini, or any author who attempts to tell a lengthy story in multiple instalments. It takes a special literary skill on the part of an author to prevent their familiarity with their books’ world from leading them to presume a similar conversance on the part of the reader. What if the first Harry Potter novel you picked up was The Goblet of Fire ? Would you have appreciated the true horror of Voldemort’s resurrection without having followed the author as she cultivated the dread over the first three books? And if you did get it so easily without being abreast, what would it say about all the world-building and context-setting Rowling slaved over up to TGoF?
With The Song Rising , the third book in the seven-part urban fantasy The Bone Season series, Samantha Shannon faces that challenge; of balancing smooth continuity with the task of bringing an uninitiated set of readers up to speed—a challenge compounded by the book having resumed the story at the precarious culmination of two prequels filled with a bevy of fictitious details. She handles it in the most cunningly effective—although perhaps not best—way: by seducing the uninitiated with suspense and sublimating the information gaps into intrigue.
If world-building is a prized skill in a writer, so is world-proffering. Yes, you wonder what in the world an ‘Archon’ is and feel irked that such esoteric terms are dropped so freely sans immediate explanation. But Shannon supports you—with the simmering sexual tension between Warden and Paige, the pacy back-and-forth of the Mime Order huddles—as you try to find your bearings in a London’s underworld dynamics.
Distracting pace
It’s 2059, a dystopian world where a rebel syndicate of paranormally-gifted humans is struggling to survive against an authoritarian anti-mutant regime that always seems to be a step ahead. Paige Mahoney, the Queen of this Mime Order, is up to her Irish neck in political intrigue, burgeoning conflict, and an indecorous romance. A bunch of characters, each of whom the reader understands only sporadically, populate the cast and lend the story a distracting pace.
And while you’re trying to work out whose allegiance lies with whom, and whether section ‘II-4’ is pronounced ‘2-4’, Shannon holds you wrapped tight in Paige’s muddled subjectivity. Her first-person narration is a mix of solemnity and wry self-criticality, which can strike you as annoyingly self-absorbed and gives you the odd feeling of being coaxed. But there are enough moral conflicts—inner tussles between the onus of leadership, the pull of infatuation, the greater good, and the guilt of sacrifice, the feverish clutching of survival in the face of profound torture—for you to enjoy seeing Paige fight through even as you struggle to subscribe to the gravity of her cause.
Paige Mahoney is an ambitious, precocious youngster with her heart in the right place. Which is more than can be said of most leaders. Is that what makes her daft decisions—for instance, risking a hasty infiltration armed with horribly unverified information, endangering all concerned—so endearing? Is it because she actually cares about the people she is leading and governing and has the courage to stand up for her decisions? Or is it simply because she is a first-person protagonist, whose winning foibles seldom arouse the reader’s contempt? These are just questions you’ll have to answer for yourself.
Another engaging facet is the book’s delicious Englishness. The blend of syntactically sound language and absurd jargon, some of which, when used by the characters in serious discussion, can tickle you—Toshers, Mudlarks, vile augurs, the Rag and Bone Man, Spring Heeled Jacks. But the read is a pleasure for that, as any fantasy set in the real world. It could be called urban fiction, but the darkness of its back-alley city ambience is adulterated by the coexisting unreality of the supernatural and pitiable powerlessness of the Mime Order.
Shannon’s world may seem shrunken in its almost modest country-wide—if not continent-wide—scale. But it depicts, in the microcosm of a rebel society, a manifestation of the spectre of totalitarianism that our world is increasingly on the brink of. How might you, as much an individual as Paige, handle crises that affect those you love or feel responsible for? How might you unite a diverse community under a common banner? How might you hold up spearheading a cause that always seems lost?
