A review by paracyclops
The Kingdom of Gods by N.K. Jemisin

challenging dark emotional funny mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Fantasy books set in entirely invented settings, that are also written with sentence-by-sentence care, and real thematic complexity, are vanishingly rare. I'm in a slightly strange position, in that my introduction to fantasy fiction, several decades ago, was through two foundational texts that absolutely fit that description: Tolkien's Lord of the rings and Le Guin's A wizard of Earthsea. After that, I didn't read a great deal of fantasy, for quite a long time, and when I did I was surprised by how few contemporary books I could find that seemed to be cut from the same cloth. N.K. Jemisin is one of the few.

The Kingdom of gods is the final instalment of Jemisin's debut Inheritance trilogy. I think it would be fair to describe this series as being written with a science-fiction methodology—certain differences from our own world are postulated, and then their consequences are explored in a straightforwardly materialist way, by which I mean that the magic of Jemisin's world is instrumentalised and technologised in much the same way that scientific knowledge is in our own world. It's not quite as simple as that however, as this is a world populated by gods (and godlings, and demons, which have specific meanings in the books, but basically amount to 'lesser gods'). Those gods have an ontological relationship to the universe, as deities do in many religions, and each holds a specific portfolio, their 'nature'. They are also, however, people, and it's the inner life of the gods that Jemisin explores in this final volume.

For the most part, this works effectively. She does that stuff very well—her world is relatively lacking in the kind of colour and gimmickry that animates many fantasy settings, and what makes the first two books so compelling is the plausible, complex, flawed, and vital characters she creates, each moulded from the clay of her setting in a way that makes it very hard to imagine them existing anywhere else. The Kingdom of gods has more in the way of big-ticket fantasy FX (although there was a fair bit of that in the earlier books), and is narrated by one of the older and more powerful gods. This offers an opportunity to explore some interesting questions—what would it be like? Jemisin is largely interested (as far as I can tell) in 'what would the experience of X feel like', rather than the ins and outs of what 'X' might do to a society or a culture. But it also serves to put some distance between the book and that portion of her readership that are not, themselves, gods. For me, a lot of it read like a superhero story, which isn't something I'm at all excited by—when the characters' power is so great, the limitations that make a story possible are kind of arbitrary, and Jemisin doesn't always do a great job of hiding that. 'It's okay, disaster Y has been averted, because of Z, an aspect of the world you didn't know about until it was deployed to save the day'.

However, this is quite a minor criticism. It certainly didn't do much to impair my reading pleasure. I loved the characters, and I loved how morally unrooted this world is—it's a challenge to religions' claims on moral authority. It certainly represents a much more plausible picture to me, in terms of the likely behaviour of human-like individuals invested with enormous power. Nothing is simple here, and there is no one lesson to learn from the book, but its greatest pleasure for me is that its gods struggle just as much as anyone else to reconcile themselves to the cards that chance has dealt them. In fact, that struggle is really the story here, although there is another one concerning power politics that I won't spoil for any potential reader. Jemisin is clearly one of the best writers currently working, and this is a gripping book.