by Jason Heller
In N. K. Jemisin’s new novel, The Fifth Season, the payoff
is astounding. Sure, there’s a whopping glossary at the end of the book —
two of them, actually — but that simply underscores how much sumptuous
detail and dimensionality she’s packed into her premise. The story takes
place in a land called the Stillness, a tragically ironic name, seeing
as how the geography is in constant, violent flux. The entire world
undergoes apocalypses on a periodic basis, as regular as weather
patterns. In the fractured landscape that houses the sprawling city of
Yumenes, that instability has given civilization an equally volatile
reality. A caste system scars it. Science and magic have uneasily mixed.
And Essun is a small-town schoolteacher whose family has been brutally
ripped apart from within.
Jemisin has built similarly complex worlds before, most notably in her multiple-award-nominated The Inheritance Trilogy. The Fifth Season
is the first book in Jemisin’s latest series, The Broken Earth, and
it’s already off to an equally promising start. Essun — grief-stricken
after her husband suddenly kills their small son and flees with their
daughter — begins a quest that starts out as a rescue but becomes
something else entirely, as a horrific new cataclysm bears down on the
Stillness.
Whether volcanic, seismic, atmospheric, geomagnetic,
or manmade, each new disaster is called a Season, and the next one
threatens to be the most devastating in recent history. History itself
has gone through numerous disruptions, creating an ambiguity about the
ancient era that comes to bear on Essun’s own shadow-shrouded past and
present. Not to mention those of Syen and Damaya, characters of varying
castes whose storylines overlap with Essun’s in a deeply clever and
affecting way that drives home the mechanisms of power and oppression at
work in vast backdrop of The Stillness. The Fifth Season isn’t
a straightforward book any more than it’s an upbeat one, but it’s
stronger for that. And Jemisin maintains a gripping voice and an
emotional core that not only carries the story through its complicated
setting, but sets things up for even more staggering revelations to come
in future installments of the series.
Read More at NPR.org
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