The world begins to break
“This is what you must remember: the ending of one story is just the beginning of another. This has happened before, after all. People die. Old orders pass. New societies are born. When we say ‘the world has ended’, it’s usually a lie, because the planet is just fine.
But this is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
For the last time.”
The world is ending. Again. As it has done many times before. Multiple apocalypses, seasons of destruction that have lasted any number of years or even decades, occur again and again in the Stillness, a place where geography and the land’s physical instability is the world’s own worst enemy. In N.K. Jemisin’s latest novel The Fifth Season, survival has only been possible because of the orogenes, people with an innate ability to “manipulate thermal, kinetic, and related forms of energy”. They are an oppressed, controlled people, essentially colonised, ostensibly for the benefit of the greater good of the entire world. But the cost of the world’s survival is highest for the orogenes — they are captured as children or ‘bred’ into captivity, trained, controlled and forced to reproduce as adults in order to create more of their kind for the use of the Fulcrum, the rulers of which use them to calm the earth. It’s an unending cycle of vicious violence, the earth against its inhabitants, the inhabitants against each other. The imperialism of the Fulcrum is explained away as something necessary, the subjugation of the orogenes as duty, when they are told they “serve the world … From birth, an orogene child can stop a shake; even without training … with training, however, and with the guidance of other skilled orogenes at the Fulcrum, [they] can be useful not merely to a single comm, but all the Stillness”.
The Fifth Season’s narrative is that of three main characters: Damaya, Syenite and Essun, each a female orogene at a different phase of her life. Their narratives are temporally disconnected but eventually link up in a skilled, perfect way. Damaya is a child in a small village, a rogue orogene whose abilities have just been discovered by her parents and so she is taken away from her family by Schaffa, her new Guardian from the Fulcrum who takes her to the city of Yumenes to essentially break her, train her and make her compliant to the system and emotionally dependant on him in a warped, frightening relationship. Damaya discovers a strange secret hidden within the Fulcrum but is made to not question it, because within the life of the Fulcrum, if an orogene has not displeased the Guardians, they “are the closest thing to safety a rogue will ever have … Schaffa loves her, in his tender and terrifying way. She does not pay attention to the bloody print his right hand leaves on her hip, or the press of his fingers — fingers strong enough to kill — against the bases of her skull. Such things are irrelevant, in the grand scale.”
Some years later, we meet Syenite, a young woman orogene at the Fulcrum who is being set on a path that has been chosen for her — what she must do, who she must be with and whose children she must have, all the while travelling around to smaller towns to control the movements of the earth, clearing ports of the raised rock that has blocked them and calming the land alongside Alabaster, a powerful older male orogene who knows much more than her and questions a great deal of their situation. Syenite and Alabaster discover a floating obelisk in the port they are meant to clear, one like others that float over certain places in the world but have so far gone unexplained.
Later still, there is Essun, an older woman who comes home one day from the village school she teaches at to find out that her husband has murdered their son and left with their daughter, having found out what Essun really is and what she passed on to their son. Essen begins to search for her daughter, while somewhere else far away, a massive rupture of the earth begins, close enough for the shocks to come through and for people to know that worse is coming, an apocalypse that may last longer than any they’ve seen before. Someone, somewhere else, with the power and desire to destroy the earth has done just so, and once again, the world begins to break.
Essun’s chapters are written in second person entirely — the reader is Essun, she is the reader, all her struggles are the reader’s. The immediacy in this perspective is gripping, fascinating and incredibly effective in pulling the reader deeper into the narrative. For some writers a second person narrative would be a huge risk; for Jemisin, it’s skilful and quite perfect.
Each of The Fifth Season’s point of view characters is an orogene, one of the subjugated, controlled people without whom the world would not be liveable. Why do they not control society, when they are the ones with the power? “Orogenes built the Fulcrum”, Alabaster tells Syenite, “we did it under threat of genocide, and we used it to buckle a collar around our own necks, but we did it.” What has been done to the orogenes, for generations and generations, to subjugate them in this way that they are, essentially, slaves to a system completely dependant on them, a world and an economy that cannot function without their innate abilities? Jemisin effectively, cleverly explores imperialism in a world with a broken history that is the basis for society, one that is written, of course, by the imperial powers themselves. All orogenes are taken away from their families to be trained in the Fulcrum — any orogene child may instinctively move a mountain, it is said, but only a trained orogene can move a single boulder with specific purpose.