Review: The Obelisk Gate

The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If I’m being entirely candid, this one slips a couple hairs from the standards of the first one. Where that one had an abiding interest in how the less powerful – the enslaved, really – reflect on their status in the world, this one gives us Essun as a fully empowered citizen of the “comm” where she finds herself in the midst of the post-apocalyptic fifth season.

Where that one also merely hinted at the system of magic underlying the world, this one is often more expository, letting us overhear some of the lectures Essun gets from Alabaster or that Nessun gets from Schaffa. The teacher/student lesson has become a trope of fantasy at least since Harry Potter – and it generally works – but I preferred the more indirect osmosis through which we intuited the word in the first one.

That said, by the standards of the genre, this is still way up there. Middle volumes of trilogies often have a hard time finding their pace and often feel as if they’re filling space, but this is a book that – though dependent on what happens in the preceding and succeeding volumes – tells a story with its own clear arc.

Essun is forced to grapple with the terrifying Guardians here, and we see the mysterious stone eaters – who, in Hoa, are the very first characters we meet and who, again in Hoa, actually narrate the novel – become more central to the story as well. What felt originally like a powerless woman struggling against a faceless system of oppression evolves into a now-powerful woman trying to find her place among the competing factions. Some want to repair the world, some want to destroy it, and some want it to remain in its in-between wounded state so they can exploit others. It’s not clear what Essun wants, nor how Hoa is pushing her.

In the same way, we can’t tell how Nessun is being groomed by Schaffa. It feels as if the mother and daughter are on a collision course, as if they will somehow connect as the two most powerful orogenes alive.

I have to laugh a bit at the fan-boy detail of what I’ve just found myself writing. The point is that, while this seems to me to lose some of the potential “big ideas” of the first volume, it picks up in its action.

And, as a topper, it results in a climax that is as much a battle scene as it is the realization of multiple lines of instruction coming together. When [SPOILER:] Essun finally learns how to yoke multiple orogenes together, to weave magic alongside her orogene power, and to draw upon the mysterious obelisks, it feels like the freeing of several of her otherwise checked impulses. Just as the first volume climaxed with Essun discovering the strength to resist Schaffa, this one shows her learning to use power beyond what she’d previously imagined. And, when she uses it create a horde of vicious bugs to sweep across her comm’s enemy’s camp, it comes with a kind of exhilaration.

I am still very much enjoying this, and there’s a good chance I’ll start the final volume before the night is over. Looking forward to it.


View all my reviews