Review: The Obelisk Gate, by N.K. Jemisin

[Russ Allbery]

The Obelisk Gate
by N.K. Jemisin

Series:    The Broken Earth #2
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: August 2016
ISBN:      0-316-22928-8
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     448

The Obelisk Gate is the sequel to The Fifth Season and picks up right
where it left off. This is not a series to read out of order.

The complexity of The Fifth Season's three entwined stories narrows
down to two here, which stay mostly distinct. One follows Essun, who
found at least a temporary refuge at the end of the previous book and
now is split between learning a new community and learning more about
the nature of the world and orogeny. The second follows Essun's
daughter, whose fate had been left a mystery in the first book. This is
the middle book of a trilogy, and it's arguably less packed with major
events than the first book, but the echoing ramifications of those
events are vast and provide plenty to fill a novel. The Obelisk Gate
never felt slow. The space between major events is filled with
emotional processing and revelations about the (excellent) underlying
world-building.

We do finally learn at least something about the stone-eaters, although
many of the details remain murky. We also learn something about
Alabaster's goals, which were the constant but mysterious undercurrent
of the first book. Mixed with this is the nature of the Guardians
(still not quite explicit, but much clearer now than before), the
purpose of the obelisks, something of the history that made this world
such a hostile place, and the underlying nature of orogeny.

The last might be a touch disappointing to some readers (I admit it was
a touch disappointing to me). There are enough glimmers of forgotten
technology and alternative explanations that I was wondering if Jemisin
was setting up a quasi-technological explanation for orogeny. This book
makes it firmly clear that she's not: this is a fantasy, and it
involves magic. I have a soft spot in my heart for apparent magic
that's some form of technology, so I was a bit sad, but I do appreciate
the clarity. The Obelisk Gate is far more open with details and
underlying systems (largely because Essun is learning more), which
provides a lot of meat for the reader to dig into and understand. And
it remains a magitech world that creates artifacts with that magic and
uses them (or, more accurately, used them) to build advanced
civilizations. I still see some potential pitfalls for the third book,
depending on how Jemisin reconciles this background with one
quasi-spiritual force she's introduced, but the world building has been
so good that I have high hopes those pitfalls will be avoided.

The world-building is not the best part of this book, though. That's
the characters, and specifically the characters' emotions. Jemisin
manages the feat of both giving protagonists enough agency that the
story doesn't feel helpless while still capturing the submerged rage
and cautious suspicion that develops when the world is not on your
side. As with the first book of this series, Jemisin captures the
nuances, variations, and consequences of anger in a way that makes most
of fiction feel shallow.

I realized, while reading this book, that so many action-oriented and
plot-driven novels show anger in only two ways, which I'll call "HULK
SMASH!" and "dark side" anger. The first is the righteous anger when
the protagonist has finally had enough, taps some heretofore unknown
reservoir of power, and brings the hurt to people who greatly deserved
it. The second is the Star Wars cliche: anger that leads to hate and
suffering, which the protagonist has to learn to control and the
villain gives into. I hadn't realized how rarely one sees any other
type of anger until Jemisin so vividly showed me the vast range of
human reaction that this dichotomy leaves out.

The most obvious missing piece is that both of those modes of anger are
active and empowered. Both are the anger of someone who can change the
world. The argument between them is whether anger changes the world in
a good way or a bad way, but the ability of the angry person to act on
that anger and for that anger to be respected in some way by the world
is left unquestioned. One might, rarely, see helpless anger, but it's
usually just the build-up to a "HULK SMASH!" moment (or, sometimes,
leads to a depressing sort of futility that makes me not want to read
the book at all).

The Obelisk Gate felt like a vast opening-up of emotional depth that
has a more complicated relationship to power: hard-earned bitterness
that brings necessary caution, angry cynicism that's sometimes wrong
but sometimes right, controlled anger, anger redirected as energy into
other actions, anger that flares and subsides but doesn't disappear.
Anger that one has to live with, and work around, and understand,
instead of getting an easy catharsis. Anger with tradeoffs and
sacrifices that the character makes consciously, affected by emotion
but not driven by it. There is a moment in this book where one
character experiences anger as an overwhelming wave of tiredness, a
sharp realization that they're just so utterly done with being angry
all the time, where the emotion suddenly shifts into something more
introspective. It was a beautifully-captured moment of character depth
that I don't remember seeing in another book.

This may sound like it would be depressing and exhausting to read, but
at least for me it wasn't at all. I didn't feel like I was drowning in
negative emotions — largely, I think, because Jemisin is so good at
giving her characters agency without having the world give it to them
by default. The protagonists are self-aware. They know what they're
angry about, they know when anger can be useful and when it isn't, and
they know how to guide it and live with it. It feels more empowering
because it has to be fought for, carved out of a hostile world, earned
with knowledge and practice and stubborn determination. Particularly in
Essun, Jemisin is writing an adult whose life is full of joys and
miseries, who doesn't forget her emotions but also isn't controlled by
them, and who doesn't have the luxury of either being swept away by
anger or reaching some zen state of unperturbed calm.

I think one key to how Jemisin pulls this off is the second-person
perspective used for Essun's part of the book (and carried over into
the other strand, which has the same narrator but a different
perspective since this story is being told to Essun). That's another
surprise, since normally this style strikes me as affected and
artificial, but here it serves the vital purpose of giving the reader a
bit of additional distance from Essun's emotions. Following an
emotionally calmer retelling of someone else's perspective on Essun
made it easier to admire what Jemisin is doing with the nuances of
anger without getting too caught up in it.

It helps considerably that the second-person perspective here has a
solid in-story justification (not explicitly explained here, but
reasonably obvious by the end of the book), and is not simply a
gimmick. The answers to who is telling this story and why they're
telling it to a protagonist inside the story are important, intriguing,
and relevant.

This series is doing something very special, and I'm glad I stuck to it
through the confusing and difficult parts in the first book. There's a
reason why every book in it was nominated for the Hugo and The Obelisk
Gate won in 2017 (and The Fifth Season in 2016). Despite being the
middle book of a trilogy, and therefore still leaving unresolved
questions, this book was even better than The Fifth Season, which
already set a high bar. This is very skillful and very original work
and well worth the investment of time (and emotion).

Followed by The Stone Sky.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-06-04

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>