The Obelisk Gate: Booktrack Edition

The sequel to the Hugo Award winning The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate returns to the Stillness as the aftermath of its latest natural disaster takes hold. Essun, the earth-manipulating orogene from TFS, has chosen to stay in the settlement of Castrima to help them with (for lack of a better word) “doomsday preparations” and to train with her former mentor Alabaster Tenring. What is Alabaster’s mission for her? A staggering feat that, if successful, could seal the fate of their world. Meanwhile, Essun’s 10-year-old daughter Nassun, who was kidnapped in TFS, journeys with her volatile father to a community rumored to “cleanse” orogenes of their powers. Yet Nassun’s gifts rapidly mature, and she learns to use them in unimaginable ways – with consequences that could weigh just as heavy as those from her mother’s task.

I’m sure that summary will confuse people who haven’t read this series yet. But it’s difficult to say more without revealing too much of The Obelisk Gate’s incredible world-building and the story itself. We learn much more about the Stillness, especially the obelisks and the stone eaters. Questions that were posed during TFS are answered, and more mysteries arise. There were also moments when I ached for Essun, Nassun, Alabaster, and Essun’s stone-eater friend Hoa. (That Hoa scene in particular nearly made me cry.) All the emotional investment and immersion made The Obelisk Gate impossible to put down – and when I was forced to put it down, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Normally I’d use this space for criticisms… But I have none. Sure, The Obelisk Gate is intricate in its plotting and unorthodox in structure (e.g., Jemisin still uses second-person narration for Essun’s chapters). But after reading TFS and other novels by Jemisin over the past year, I’ve learned she has reasons for her unconventional choices – and those reasons always reveal themselves in time. So I sat back, absorbed each chapter’s events and the characters’ choices, and let my speculations percolate. And based on The Obelisk Gate’s climax… Oh my word. The Broken Earth is shaping up to be an outstanding trilogy, and I’m so nervous-yet-scared-to-death for its finale next year. Fantasy readers who haven’t started this series need to get on it – but make sure you start with The Fifth Season, because The Obelisk Gate won’t make sense otherwise.

I purchased this book because I really enjoyed the previous in the series, and wanted to know more about the world it narrated. I thought the first one had put enough balls in the air so to speak that the second would expand and explain them. Instead it threw even more balls in the air, which in my opinion created only confusion. So while orogeny was the big “superpower” of the first book, now we are introduced to another ability (magic), which makes less sense than orogeny. We had Fulcrum and Guardians, but now we have factions among guardians, and it’s not entirely clear why. We had stills, orogenes and stone eaters before, but now we have factions of stone eaters with different agendas. The motivations for choosing an agenda are also muddled. And since we didn’t have enough to talk about, now we have humans doing war to each other.
Why? Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed the book enough to finish it quickly and order the next, but why? All the author needed to do was stick to what she had presented in the first book, just explain it in greater depth. Sure some of the new themes are intriguing, which is why I keep reading, but I am starting to have some trouble keeping it all straight.

If you’ve read the Fifth Season, you have been waiting on pins and needles for this sequel. If you haven’t read The Fifth Season, go do that NOW. Don’t worry, we’ll wait.

The Obelisk Gate further develops the world we began to see int he first book. We learn more about the Fulcrum, the Guardians, the obelisks–and even more importantly–about the lives and motivations of characters we have come to love/hate/fear. Essun, as a woman in her mid forties is not your average protagonist. But she is someone who feels a million times more human and relatable than the cardboard cut out perfect princesses of urban fantasy. She is both powerful and humble, kind and cruel, she makes mistakes and has victories. She is in short, a person. And you can feel her blood, sweat and fears throughout the novel.

We finally get to meet Nassun, and understand what is like to be the daughter of such a strong and damaged woman like Essun. We learn more about Hoa. And the dark adversary that Alabaster fights is finally revealed.

This is not a novel that suffers from Second Book Syndrome. So much happens and yet nothing feels rushed. Another brilliant entry into an epic and unforgettable series.

What the hell am I supposed to do with myself until the next book is released?

A new Fifth Season has fallen on the world, the worst one in history. It may last a thousand years and forever end what vestiges of civilisation remain in the Stillness. One orogene, battered and dying, has a plan to end the Season and indeed all of the Seasons: to recapture the Moon, which was moved out of its traditional orbit more than a thousand generations ago, unbalancing the world. Recapturing the Moon requires that Essun find and harness the powers of the Obelisk Gate. But this may be harder than she thought, as enemies are moving against her new-found home and, in the distant south, her daughter discovers that she herself has an unforeseen destiny.

The Obelisk Gate is the sequel to the excellent The Fifth Season and the middle volume of the Broken Earth trilogy, N.K. Jemisin’s critically-acclaimed take on the venerable Dying Earth subgenre. The Fifth Season was a highly accomplished novel, describing a brand new world with skill and intelligence and blending together elements of fantasy, post-apocalyptic fiction and a dash of the weird to create something compelling and interesting.

The Fifth Season was also helped by its structure, in which we follow the same character at three different points in her life. The story rotated through each version of the character in term, gradually giving the readers all the pieces to assemble the full narrative. It was a great literary conceit, well-conceived and executed, which allowed the reader to really get to grips with the character.

The Obelisk Gate can’t use the same structure, so instead adapts it by moving between Essun’s story and that of her daughter Nassun. Whilst the first book was an extended road trip, the second book alternates between Essun’s static story and Nassun’s long journey across thousands of miles into the far south. This changes things up nicely and means that Essun, now a guest of the community of Castrima, has to actually stay put, learn what’s going on from Alabaster and help defend the community.

It does mean a slightly more uneven book than The Fifth Season. Not actually a huge amount happens in this novel, especially for Essun’s storyline, and some implausibility creeps in when you realise she is spending months and months hanging around in Castrima (to allow Nassun to travel many, many thousands of miles from almost the equator into the Antarctic region) but doesn’t seem to really learn a lot of new information despite Alabaster being right there. That said, there is quite a decent amount of character building and atmosphere here and Castrima, a subterranean city suspended in a giant geode, is a terrific piece of worldbuilding.

Nassun’s storyline is more dynamic and disturbing, as her father tries to take her to safety but instead brings her into an even more dangerous and unstable situation, with her own burgeoning powers to contend with. There’s a dark mirror here to Essun’s childhood upbringing as related in the previous novel, with the feeling that Nassun is what Essun could have become if she was indulged more instead of tortured.

The result is a sequel which expands on the world and the story but, in a common failing of middle volumes of trilogies, can’t quite match the relentless pace and sense of discovery from the first book. There’s a lot of introspection in this novel which is beautifully written, but risks redundancy later on. However, the book ends with an explosive confrontation between Castrima and a rival community which once again shakes things up and leaves them in an interesting place for the final book in the series to pick up on.

The Obelisk Gate (****) is a readable and strong sequel to The Broken Sky, if a slightly less original and relentless one. It is available now in the UK and USA. The story concludes in The Stone Sky.

I absolutely loved the first book in this trilogy. I went straight on to Book 2, but was nervous about how it would compare – partly because it would be hard to top or match such a strong opening, partly because sequels often tend to fall flat, and above all, because the structure of book one made it feel very self-contained and I was unsure how that could be replicated. Specifically, I loved the way that all three, seemingly different narrators turned out to be the same girl/woman at different points in her life and her journey. But with that surprise out, and the past sections having caught up to the present section, I wondered how this instalment could possibly achieve the same sort of effect. I turned out still to have three narrative strands, but while one was still “you” (aka Essun), there was also Nassun (her daughter, more of a plot device than a character in book one), and Schaffa, Essun’s former teacher/mentor/father figure and villain of the first book.

I didn’t find the structure quite as compelling as in the previous one, but it made up for it by giving a wider spread of points of view, to help readers better understand the characters and the world.The previous book felt rather like a character study, and while those elements were still maintained, this broadened out the focus. There was a lot more about the history of the world, the mysterious obelisks and stoneeaters, and the causes, nature and limits of oregeny, and I really liked this deeper world building.

In some respects – perhaps because of the greater variety of narrators, perhaps because of the more fantastical focus – it felt like quite a different book to its predecessor, but ultimately, it maintained most of what made that special and added some great new elements, so is definitely a worthwhile sequel.

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