Review: "The Bone Season," by Samantha Shannon

In the first volume of 21-year-old Samantha Shannon's projected seven-book series, heroine Paige Mahoney is 19, lives in central London and works as anossista in an Oxygen bar. Since caffeine and alcohol are illegal mind-altering drugs, in 2059, "flavoured oxygen" is the convivial social lubricant of choice. Little does her nice, dull father know that his unambitious daughter has a shocking secret life. Talent-spotted as a schoolgirl by a sweet-talking procurer, groomed by one of London's most vicious mime-lords, she's one of the Seven Seals, the stars of a criminal syndicate: grifting a living in the forbidden realm of psychic powers. Paige, whose special talent is for dream-walking in the aether, runs the gang's surveillance: thrilling but dangerous work, since she tends to stop breathing when she's out of her body. One night her luck runs out, and she's forced to use her powers to kill. Arrested, drugged, brutalised and brainwashed, she expects nothing less than torture and public execution – the Scion regime is savage in its persecution of "unnaturals". Instead she's shipped off to Oxford, a city abandoned and off‑limits since it was mysteriously "destroyed by fire", around the time Scion suddenly emerged, 200 years ago. Soon she discovers that everything she thought she knew about her world is a monstrous lie. Scion is a puppet government. The real rulers of the UK are the Rephaim, sombre-gowned, divinely tall, humanoid but inhuman beings from another dimension. who are plotting to take over the world. The derelict University of Oxford is their HQ, from whence they wage war on another set of invaders from the astral plane, disgusting, flesh-eating monsters called Emim.

In decadal sweeps known as bone seasons, Scion has been collecting and delivering human clairvoyants, to be used as Rephaite cannon fodder. Casualty rates are high, and the Rephaites are unpleasant commanders; manipulative, cruel and petty. Paige isn't due to be hung, drawn and quartered, but she's still in deep trouble – until Warden Arcturus, the gorgeous, brooding, blood-consort of the Rephaite leader, Suzerain Nashira, decides to make her his protegee.

It's in the nature of fantasy fiction to be derivative: woven from many strands of pre-loved narrative, some of them very ancient; cobbled together from a fertile jumble of well-used magical and spooky elements, in old and new combinations.The Bone Season is certainly no exception to this rule. In the early chapters, as Paige, the cynical cyberpunk antihero, sulks her way around a grungy, alternate-reality London or darts disembodied through the silvery flickers of the aether, we're in the familiar steampunk territory of modern urban fantasy, where Matrix-style digital trickery has shaded into magic. The revelation that pulp sci-fi villains are secretly running the show brings a disconcerting change of tone, and made me think of Doctor Who. But once Warden Arcturus appears – with his craggy presence, his odd habit of insisting on off-duty conversations with a lowly human girl, his mysterious midnight injuries and the mad, repellent consort from whom he cannot escape – it's clear that we've reached the heartland. Paige, who has spent her young life clinging to one flawed father-figure after another, has finally met her Mr Rochester. Quite literally Mr Rochester, as Shannon boldly recasts incidents and actual dialogue from Jane Eyre in the language and colours of dark fantasy. This is fine, in itself – it is the most interesting development in the book, and seems a sincere homage to a writer Shannon obviously reveres (Charlotte Brontë provides the novel's epigraph). But as the gothic love story reaches a climax, other issues are overwhelmed. The first-episode finale gets very muddled, and I was left with a feeling of too many secrets reserved and too many details poorly worked out. What's going to happen next? Will Warden be a recurring character, or will there be another drastic shift? Where exactly is this very long story heading?

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