Review: N.K. Jemisin’s “The Obelisk Gate”

We review “The Obelisk Gate,” the just released second installment of N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy.

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The last time I was evangelical about a fantasy series it was Christmas of 1996, and Ned Stark had just lost his head. I was damn near insufferable for the rest of the 1990s. I bought everyone copies of A Game of Thrones for their birthdays, and refused to tell them anything about it. (Spoiler culture was a thing then too, even if we didn’t have a word for it.) and when they came to me cursed after Ned’s demise I grinned and said “See? It’s amazing! What if the hero dies?”

Fantasy was such an entrenched and formulaic genre at that point that such a thing was mindblowingly unheard of. And yet–so much about the series was so deeply embedded and indebted to those genre tropes that even years later, when the show began this decade and I reread the series fully, my brain never questioned those details.  In fact, it wasn’t until Christmas of 2015 that my next wake up call, in the form on N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, arrived.

I picked it up much the same way I had Martin all those years ago, basing my choice on blurb and cover art and not much else. But once I sat down, and proceeded to swallow the entire thing in a single sitting, my mind was once again blown.

“What if you took that same cataclysmic end of the world type fantasy genre, and instead of populating the entire thing with a bunch of sword wielding, hetero-normative white dudes, it was all black women? (And the occasional semi-closeted gay mentor, or random transgender homeless lady?)” The concept should not be so mindblowing in the 21st century. And yet it both shows how far we come since the mid-1990s (and how far we go.)

“What if you took that same cataclysmic end of the world type fantasy genre, and instead of populating the entire thing with a bunch of sword wielding, hetero-normative white dudes, it was all black women? “

Not only because of the gender and race flip. But because of the radical experience of seeing these same tropes through different eyes. So many of the tropes here follow the formula. And with the release of The Obelisk Gate, the middle installment of the trilogy, it is clear how the story will end years before we get there. The hero who does not understand how powerful they are, or the scope of what they must undertake, or even what the mission is, until their mentor dies. The child who hates their parent and through whom love twisted will become their foil in the final act. A world where city states battle over precious resources as the cataclysm lays waste to the world around them.

The Obelisk Gate even features a major battle set piece on par with the Battle of Helm’s Deep. (Or the more recent “Battle of the Bastards” on Game of Thrones.) But there are no groups of white dudes shoving wooden pieces around a map, or saddling up their horses to ride out. Instead our heroine Essun prepares for siege warfare in the center of the underground town on an area called Flat Top, where the divans have been set up and city leader Ykka, her advisor Hjarka and Hjarka’s transgender scientist lover Tonkee plan their defenses out in the open. It is at once both utterly familiar and utterly foreign. Not to mention utterly amazing to realize how much poorer your life has been for not having this in it until now.

As with The Fifth Season, we the reader are addresses as if we are Essun. In the first installment it worked as a trick to keep the reader from guessing that the chapter perspectives of the young girl Damaya and the young woman Syenite were all Essun. These chapters were flashbacks to her former lives and former selves she had left behind. In The Obelisk Gate there are no flashbacks to those lives. So the choice to force the reader so thoroughly into her perspective is more obviously one to ensure that fantasy readers will not dissociate from such a different type of perspective on the Hero’s Journey.

Instead Essun’s chapters (your chapters) are now interspersed with that of daughter Nassun. In The Fifth Season, Essun (you) were on a quest to find that last living child, taken hours before the disaster hit, by violent and unpredictable husband Jija. Now Essun (you) are holed up underground to complete training with dying former lover Alabaster. And we discover that Nassun is doing just fine without anyone’s rescue. A tribute to how well her mother taught her. Even if the memory of those lessons left the girl to grow up regarding her as an object of hate.

At the end of the installment, mother and daughter have both committed acts of violence that cement their colliding paths. Both have competing Stonemen guardians who want them to do the same things for opposite reasons. And both have discovered their that what was originally introduced as earthquake stilling “orogene” abilities, which they were taught would make them monsters, are far beyond what anyone imagined they could be. It ties them in to the powerful Obelisk system remnants of a powerful technological civilization that originally broke the world. They are the key to saving the dying lands of the Stillness and all life on it.

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The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin is available now from book retailers or on e-readers everywhere.