The Fifth Season
by N K Jemisin
Normally the book that I review for the end of the newsletter is one that’s come out in the last month or so. For this final one for the year however, I’m doing a book that came out in July. The reason for this comes in the form of a confession. When N K Jemisin’s book The Fifth Season first arrived in the store, I put in immediately onto my to-read pile. It had received very good reviews and there were more than a few folks who were suggesting that it stood a good chance of winning awards. By the time it had won the Hugo Award for best new novel in September. I had to my shame still not read it. I resolved again to make time to read my copy, and once again got distracted by other things and forgot. This week I finally got to do what I promised in July and read it. I enjoyed it so much that, had I read it in July, it would certainly have been reviewed for the newsletter, so better late than never I’m including it now.
At first glance the blurb of the book may make it sound like fantasy, and while there are some fantasy-like ideas it really is a science fiction story once you delve into it. It’s set on a world where almost all the land is part of one huge supercontinent called The Stillness. This is more hopeful than accurate because it is plagued by constant tectonic and volcanic turmoil. So frequent and dramatic are the conditions caused by this that the people of the Stillness have spent millennia building societies only to have them smashed to nothing by the next global disaster, where upon the begin all over again. They call these disasters ‘Seasons’ and the whole of their culture is geared towards trying to survive them. Two things aid them in this. The first is the Stone Lore, which everyone learns from childhood. How to prepare, how to respond to each type of Season and how to make the brutally efficient decisions that are required. The second are the Orogenes, who have the ability to draw and channel the forces of the earth and stone and minimise the effects of the Seasons. They might have been people once, and in truth you could not tell an Orogene by sight. They are born to normal parents, but Stone Lore says they are not people but monsters and only those controlled by the Guardians are allowed to live.
Thus it has been for centuries, but as the narrator tells you at the beginning of the book you are about to see how the world ends. This is done through the eyes of three characters. Damaya is a child who is handed over to the Guardians by her parents realise she is an Orogene. With her we explore The Fulcrum, the training centre where dangerous Orogenes are turned into pliable servants and learn that there is a secret at the heart of the Fulcrum that even the Guardians fear. Syenite is trained Orogene sent by the Fulcrum to a harbour town to use her power to clear a blockage of coral in the bay, but in the process inadvertently awakens something incomprehensible and immensely powerful. Essun is a middle aged woman who comes home one day to find her young son dead. While she falls into herself, oblivious to everything around her, days pass and the world begins to die as well. The journey to restore it to a state that no-one even remembers is one that will take a lifetime and be walked by these women in turn, and even after all they have suffered and sacrificed may still fail.
There are a couple of other things about this book that I think I should mention. It’s got an unusual structure and the author deliberately confuses your sense of time and chronology. By the end of the book though, it all becomes clear and I thought it was pretty effective. There are also sections where the book is written in second person present tense (‘you’ rather than ‘I’ first person or ‘they’ third person). It’s unusual, and not a technique that I would normally like. In this instance I think it adds intensity to that character and I found myself particularly enjoying those parts of the book. Finally, this is a book about people in desperate survival situations in a scarcity influenced society. There is a lot of death and other dark stuff in the book, and because Jemisin has written so intimately from her characters perspectives some of it is pretty confronting. This is an amazing book, but it’s set in a dangerous and unforgiving world written so skilfully that you don’t just know it, but feel it too. I highly recommend it, but it’s not for the faint-hearted.