You know what it's like, living along fault lines of pain?

Isn't the cover gorgeous? It's another trilogy I want to own just so I can show it off.

Review:

In the world of The Obelisk Gate (2016) there is a large continent known as the Stillness. Beyond it, all dead waters. Contrary to its own name, the Stillness is never still. Like in our world, tectonic plates shift along the fault lines. Sometimes, a shift is big enough to produce atmospherical change that lasts several hundred years which is known as a ‘Season’. At the end of The Fifth Season, Alabaster uses his orogene skills to open the Gate, which gives him enough tectonic power to rip apart the continent. The Obelisk Gate is about the consequences of that single cataclysmic event. As we see through Essun’s eyes, the earthquake that tore through the Stillness was physical as much as symbolic. Centuries of fear and injustice can no longer be suppressed. There is so much pain. The grief is endless and the tears have run dry. Essun is ready for change. But she doesn’t have much time to decide what that means. After all, the world is ending and that puts a time limit on things.

I have to admit I struggled with reading The Obelisk Gate in the beginning because it’s been years since I last read The Fifth Season. The first book didn’t give us a lot of information to go on and it was a masterful stroke to knit together the multi-POV narrative by showing that all the different characters are in fact the same person at different times of her life. It brought the much needed emotional depth to our protagonist who, frankly, seemed dead inside when the world was collapsing around her. So it was a huge contrast to see Essun in The Obelisk Gate as the one who dared to show her anger in front of others, intervened in public affairs because she cared, and last but not lest, allowed us to see the agony that existed between her and Alabaster in all its facets of hurt.

So there is nothing of that middle book syndrome that must be discussed when the book at hand is, well, the middle book. The Obelisk Gate was excellent stuff. In the first book The Fifth Season, Essun spent too much time pretending everything was normal when it wasn’t. So when we get to The Obelisk Gate, her character’s journey is only just about to begin and gosh there is so much learning and unlearning to be done here. You can sense Jemisin’s keen intuition everywhere as to when the emotional chaos needs to be contained and when some steam needs to be let off, when exposition would be useful and when it’s important to create mystery that urges us to read on. So even though I struggled in the beginning, as I familiarised myself with the world and its characters, I was quick to remember how Jemisin is an expert in this and I just allowed the story to carry me along.

Which brings me to talking about what I believe is remarkable about The Obelisk Gate—the subtlety with which pain is shown at the end of the world. In a lot of apocalyptic fiction, especially those written for teens, it’s common to see that superimposition of personal trauma over global crisis, so that saving the world becomes a matter of personal redemption. You know what? I’m over it. I want to see a different kind of apocalypse. I want to read about someone who knows that little deaths happen everyday and that the real fight is not against the oppressive state but the wearing down and the indifference. I want to see that person’s reconciliation with the world as an ongoing matter of survival and not some final resolution that brings in their happily- ever-after. At the same time, I want to see irreconcilable paradoxes that are as organic as they are problematic, morphing, fragmenting, integrating, dissolving...And you see that here. You see all of that here in The Obelisk Gate. Her pain is not your usual fare. There is so much...flavour in it. Kind of like...appreciating the astringent taste of red wine. You like it all the while realising you don’t typically like bitter things. But I think sometimes a little bitterness is what our soul needs. For life can’t be all candy sweet.

I’ve got the last book The Stone Sky on my tbr. I was hoping to read it right after The Obelisk Gate but since I picked up Qualityland instead, The Stone Sky will have to wait. Till then.