What it’s about: In the midst of the worst Fifth Season in generations, Essun searches for home while her daughter, Nassun, runs from it.
Notes:
- This is a rather different book than The Fifth Season, smaller in scope, more raw, intimate but just as emotionally scathing. Rather than telling the story of how things came to be, The Obelisk Gate brings the story forward, as Essun, the orogene protagonist of the three narrative strands in book 1, tries to survive in the apocalypse while trying to find her daughter, Nassun, and trying to find a way to set things right with the world.
- But we also see the story unfold from Nassuns’ point of view, and with it, the story takes a slightly darker tinge, if it were possible. Essun was not a particularly nurturing parent, working Nassun to the bone in a bid to make her control her fledgling orogenic powers, in the process showing her little of the love she needed. And now, abducted by her father and taken to lands far south, other forces begin to craft her a new destiny.
- The weird machinations of the Obelisks start to slowly unravel in meaning and significance, and that mystery of their true purpose and power is a driving force in the book. Of course, the book slowly, deliberately draws out the bequeathing of its secrets, not in the most elegant of ways: Essun basically spends days and months learning the truth from her once-mentor, once-lover Alabaster, who is so weak that he can only divulge a few Truth nuggets to her (and the reader by extension) every chapter. But it’s a revelation as strange and innovative as any fantasy out there, a technology tied to the very Earth itself, an Earth not depicted in the typical Gaia fashion, but as an ancient masculine being full of abject malice and cruelty.
- Does it suffer from middle-book syndrome? I think it does, a little. While it has its share of high-octane suspense and its moments of transcendent and magnificent catastrophe, very little actually happens, with much of the book devoted to fleshing out Essun and Nassun as characters. Cursed with a power that makes them killing machines, they are both angels of death and destruction, dealing havoc at every turn almost as a natural response to the threats around them. It’s a common fantasy conceit for one to not be in control of their powers, but what Jemisin shows is a situation in which the very fact of one’s powers creates a path dependency that leads to inevitable destruction and heartbreak in its wake – in a world that almost demands that one’s powers be used, at great emotional cost. That, more than anything, is what typifies this series to me. It almost reminds me of The Wheel of Time.
Verdict: Slower and smaller than the magisterial first volume, The Obelisk Gate nevertheless demands to be read, and has its share of the magnificent desolation and deep mystery that so characterises this series.
I give this book: 4/5 toruses
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