Excessive hype before the release of any book could be a daunting prospect for any debut author, and being compared to the creator of an iconic boy wizard, overwhelmingly so! The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon has to be the most awaited book to hit the shelves in recent times. The question is does Shannon deliver Well, yes and no. Without wasting any time on unnecessary fripperies, the reader is taken right into a futuristic landscape. The year is 2059. The powerful city of Scion London condemns spirits and all activities connected with the spirit world. Clairvoyance is prohibited, and the kind done for money is considered an absolute sin. Anyone suspected of being “unnatural” is immediately arrested and whisked away to unknown destinations. Nineteen-year-old Paige Mahoney, a clairvoyant, poses as an assistant in an oxygen bar while secretly working for Jaxon Hall, a mime-lord in the criminal underworld. Paige is a rare clairvoyant, a dreamwalker, and her job is to scout for information by breaking into people’s minds. Paige has succeeded in keeping her extra-sensory gifts hidden from the authorities for years till one fateful day when, to avoid detection while travelling, she kills an underguard in a train and stuns another into madness with her telepathic powers. She is quickly hunted down by the powerful NVD (Night Vigilant Division), imprisoned and sent to a sinister place where life changes drastically for her and other inmates. Sheol I is a strange and surrealistic land ruled by the Rephaim, creatures of the netherworld. Nashira Sargas, their leader (called the blood-sovereign), claims that the Rephaim are a buffer system who protect humans from the bestial flesh-eating Emim, who regularly attack from the other side of the ether, the ether being the spirit realm or the source, accessible by clairvoyants. A mentor is allotted to each human possessing telepathic powers on arriving, and Paige is chosen to be the prodigy of the mighty Arcturus Mesarthim (the Warden), the blood-consort of Nashira Sargas. Paige is ordered to display her powers as a dreamwalker and prove her loyalty to her captors. Thrown entirely at the mercy of her dangerous mentor, the ruthless red-jackets who man the place and the terrible Nashira, Paige finds herself thrown into one endless test of endurance after another where her powers are stretched to their limit. Though often broken in body, her spirit perennially revives and she continues to perform feats as even a single failure could result in death. The amaurotics or human captives who lack special powers live like beggars on the streets of Sheol I and are regularly beaten up by the red-jackets and brutalised by the Emim. Paige maintains a fierce protectiveness towards her amaurotic companions, though this loyalty often comes at a cost. She discovers new limits to her talents under the mentoring of the Warden and succeeds, for the first time, in penetrating the dreamscapes of a butterfly and Nuala, the Warden’s pet deer. “I closed my eyes and let my spirit drift. Nuala had a permeable dreamscape, thin and frail as a bubble. Humans built up layers of resistance over the years, but animals didn’t have all that emotional armour. In theory, I could control her. I gave Nuala’s dreamscape the lightest of nudges. Nuala let out a snort of alarm.” But secretly, Paige craves for an opportunity to escape and return to her old life. When a rebellion erupts in this brutal land, she finds herself at the helm. Samantha Shannon’s prose is of the swiftly-moving, easy kind that connects instantly with the reader, no matter his/her age. Like most other big works of fantasy fiction, this one too uses an intricate body of imaginary details in creating a dystopian canvas. Various kinds of creatures inhabit this novel — human, sub-human and alien, who could be alive, dead or half-dead. The tiniest details have been pondered over and there are just so many of them! The overload of alien-sounding terms could be a bit intimidating, particularly for those who have a low threshold for metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. But in all fairness, they are skilfully introduced in such small doses. Words like “bone-grubber”, “busking”, “dollymop”, “ecto”, “floxy” etc. abound but one rarely needs to flip to the glossary for a dekko. The combination of dark fantasy and science-fiction is particularly likely to appeal to teenagers who are on the lookout for a novel that evokes delicious goose pimples. Paige as the clairvoyant protagonist is spunky and upright, maybe a bit too much to be credible. A few strokes of grey would have helped in making her more real. Arcturus Mesarthim, as her tall, dark and handsome mentor is unabashed mush material. Enigmatic and taciturn, he comes across as a man with many layers to his personality, one who wins the reader over with ease. Nashira Sargas as the cruel sovereign is the stereotypical villainess, while Nick, Liss, Seb and other tertiary characters ring true. Mime-lord Jaxson Hall in particular, with his wheedling terms of endearment and unique knack for pushing his prodigy near the edge in his zeal to get her to realise her full potential, is vaguely reminiscent of Fagin (from Dickens’ Oliver Twist) and is a memorable character. As Paige is thrown into one violent situation after another, graphic descriptions of gore and pain take precedence in the story-telling. After a while, this repeated and mindless violence could bog down the reader. A major part of this 400-page novel revolves around physical and spiritual skirmishes and one wishes the author would get on with the story. Shannon handles the metaphysical ideas with competence. The concepts of the “ether” as the ultimate plane beyond all existence, the different schools of extra-sensory powers, the phenomenon of dream-walking and entering another’s dream space are explained with a commendable degree of credibility. Certain discrepancies could jar, like cupboards always stocking fresh linen and tables being laid out with gourmet food in a terrain which is wild, primitive and lacks electricity, but these are generally of a minor nature. There is a lot of sensational stuff like aster-chomping, blood-sucking, aura-gobbling to make for an exotic reading experience, even a first-time amorous encounter (totally unnecessary) in a parking lot. But using every ingredient in the kitchen does not a tasty dish make. If one pauses to put a name to the niggling problem that ails this book, it would probably be “overkill”. The soft, silvery thread of a serious romance blossoming amidst all the violence, however, is thoroughly charming in its simplicity. Descriptions of early childhood, encounters of the spooky kind and Paige waking up to her own powers are well etched. “I’d known I was different well before the poppy field, even as a child I’d been sensitive to people. Sometimes I’d felt tremors when they passed me, like my fingers had brushed a live wire. But things had changed since that day. Now I couldn’t just sense people — I could hurt them. I could make people bleed, make their heads ache and their eyes blur,” says Paige about her childhood awakening. For the reader who is perplexed about the name of the book — there is a great deal of blood but no sign of bones — an interesting explanation pops up in the latter part of the novel. A solid, fascinating and detailed work of imaginative fiction on the whole, that would have been further enhanced with a little more romance and a little less bloodshed. Kankana Basu is the author of Vinegar Sunday, Cappuccino Dusk and the soon-to-be released, Lamplight: Paranormal Stories from the Hinterlands. Visit www.kankanabasu.com
