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Reading: The Fifth Season
Apr. 7th, 2018 02:30 pmI had been putting off reading N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season for a while: partly because I was quite ambivalent about her The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and both that book and a short story of hers I read included some body-horror elements which I found pinged a lot of really uncomfortable buttons for me, and partly because I'd heard that it was bleak and emotionally draining and I was a bit wary of reading something potentially upsetting. However, when the Hugo Award shortlist was announced and the third book in the trilogy was shortlisted for Best Novel after the first and second books won the 2016 and 2017 Hugos, I thought I really needed to at least give it a try.
The Fifth Season is set in a world beset by tectonic activity. The single continent is fractured and faulted; earthquakes are a regular occurence and every so often there are cataclysms powerful enough to fill the air with dust and ash, disrupting the flow of the seasons with a "Fifth Season", when the sunlight is cut off, crops fail and winter lasts for anything from six months to millenia. Despite a large body of "stonelore" offering guidance on how to survive a Season, these events can end civilisations, although at the time when the novel is set the Sanzed Empire has survived several Seasons over the course of around three thousand years, harnessing the power of the "orogenes", people with special abilities that allow them to sense tectonic activity and telekinetically manipulate rock and stone. The orogenes are hated and feared by the general population and kept carefully controlled by the central government via an organisation known as the Fulcrum; "feral" orogenes are brought to the Fulcrum to be trained if they are discovered as children, or killed if they are adults.
The novel consists of three interlocking stories. First, there's Essun, an orogene who's been living in hiding with a husband and children until her husband, discovering that their son is also an orogene, reacts with violence and then leaves their community, taking their daughter. Essun sets out on foot to follow them in the days immediately following a major geoglogical catastrophe which has triggered a new Season. Then, there's Syenite, a young orogene working for the Fulcrum who is sent on a mission to a coastal community along with an older, more experienced orogene, and Damaya, a young girl from an isolated rural community who is brought to the Fulcrum to be trained when her orogeny is discovered. Through these three stories, Jemisin builds up a vivid picture of a civilisation built on the ruins of other, vanished civilisations it doesn't quite understand, and which has at its centre the oppression and de facto enslavement of a whole section of its population, seen from the perspective of the oppressed, alongside the end of that civilisation. I was also particularly struck by the writing style, which has a real immediacy and which even manages to incorporate a second-person narrative in a way that doesn't feel forced or clunky.
I thought The Fifth Season was powerful and compelling. It's certainly not a happy book, but I didn't find it as emotionally wringing as other books I've read (although that may be because I don't have a maternal bone in my body, and the book should probably come with a trigger warning for parents of young children), and I was utterly drawn in by the story and will certainly be reading the rest of the trilogy very soon.
The Fifth Season is set in a world beset by tectonic activity. The single continent is fractured and faulted; earthquakes are a regular occurence and every so often there are cataclysms powerful enough to fill the air with dust and ash, disrupting the flow of the seasons with a "Fifth Season", when the sunlight is cut off, crops fail and winter lasts for anything from six months to millenia. Despite a large body of "stonelore" offering guidance on how to survive a Season, these events can end civilisations, although at the time when the novel is set the Sanzed Empire has survived several Seasons over the course of around three thousand years, harnessing the power of the "orogenes", people with special abilities that allow them to sense tectonic activity and telekinetically manipulate rock and stone. The orogenes are hated and feared by the general population and kept carefully controlled by the central government via an organisation known as the Fulcrum; "feral" orogenes are brought to the Fulcrum to be trained if they are discovered as children, or killed if they are adults.
The novel consists of three interlocking stories. First, there's Essun, an orogene who's been living in hiding with a husband and children until her husband, discovering that their son is also an orogene, reacts with violence and then leaves their community, taking their daughter. Essun sets out on foot to follow them in the days immediately following a major geoglogical catastrophe which has triggered a new Season. Then, there's Syenite, a young orogene working for the Fulcrum who is sent on a mission to a coastal community along with an older, more experienced orogene, and Damaya, a young girl from an isolated rural community who is brought to the Fulcrum to be trained when her orogeny is discovered. Through these three stories, Jemisin builds up a vivid picture of a civilisation built on the ruins of other, vanished civilisations it doesn't quite understand, and which has at its centre the oppression and de facto enslavement of a whole section of its population, seen from the perspective of the oppressed, alongside the end of that civilisation. I was also particularly struck by the writing style, which has a real immediacy and which even manages to incorporate a second-person narrative in a way that doesn't feel forced or clunky.
I thought The Fifth Season was powerful and compelling. It's certainly not a happy book, but I didn't find it as emotionally wringing as other books I've read (although that may be because I don't have a maternal bone in my body, and the book should probably come with a trigger warning for parents of young children), and I was utterly drawn in by the story and will certainly be reading the rest of the trilogy very soon.
