The City We Became by N K Jemisin
I would like to thank Nazia from Orbit for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Orbit
Published – Out Now
Price - £16.99 Hardcover £8.99 Kindle eBook
Every city has a soul. Some are as ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York City? She's got five.
But every city also has a dark side. A roiling, ancient evil stirs beneath the earth, threatening to destroy the city and her five protectors unless they can come together and stop it once and for all.
I am a city fan at heart. On the one hand cities are by definition large places you can get lost in (although my own is just half a million people) and if you hear the word Liverpool or say London it will conjure an image of what you think it and its people are like. For London I tend to go between the Queen and Dick Van Dyke as a chimney sweep – cities can be dreadfully stereotyped. But the reason I love cities and visiting different ones is that they aren’t homogenous they’re wonderful mixes of cultures; classes and ideas crossing and influencing each other each has a different feel to it. If I leave the house; I can waltz from a bohemian art quarter to one of the oldest Chinese communities in the UK and then cross into Georgian quarters that resemble old style London. Cities are magical blurring of boundaries…and fantasy has realised that for ages with urban fantasy making cities unique and mythical realms for our own time from Neverwhere to Harry Dresden’s Chicago. In N K Jemisin’s latest novel starting a new series The City We Became takes us to the Big Apple and a slightly different but superb take on the genre is delivered.
We start with a homeless graffiti artist finding out that he is starting to feel the New York come alive – a city where roads are arteries; air vents are lungs and 8 million people carry its life force. But in the process of awakening there is a thrilling chase from monsters that try to resemble police officers. He finally sees the Enemy in the river and a huge clash in the river erupts breaking a bridge but finally New York finally becomes into its own power. Our avatar wins but falls to the ground weakened and vanishes…this, is going to be a problem. Then five other individuals dotted across the boroughs of New York start to sense and feel the city. In the primary avatar’s absence these people have now been selected to gain power; join together and defeat the next stage in the ancient Enemy’s plan to stop Cities gaining this power but the Enemy has been learning and playing a long game no one has expected.
There is so much to love in this novel. This is a very very different tale to the Fifth Season and the style is very much modern, fast and alive compared to the haunting epicness of the Broken Earth series. The original avatar’s story could easily have been a book in itself but Jemisin turns it into a racing short story style prologue (which to be fair it originally was!) that still manages in just a few pages to introduce the concept of living cities and the enemy but then presses the stop button and giving us a whole new challenge and story to get our teeth into. The joy here are the five new characters that we then meet. The charming but dangerous Manny who has arrived in the city for a fresh start; Aislyn a woman that dreams of trying to escape to the city from a controlling father but he has made her fearful of the people in the inner cities; City Councillor Brooklyn Thomason aka in her youth the rapper MC Free; strong willed Bronca a sixty-something arts director and Padmini a young immigrant who is carrying her families hopes in getting a great job to use their hard earned maths skills. These five very different people are going to have to face their own challenges as they learn who they now are and more importantly try to work together to save their home.
Character wise each of these new avatars gets a strong voice. Manny seems like he will be the hero but we see he’s not quite the good guy is required and that gets unsettling especially as he longer remembers who he was. Brooklyn appears gentle and established but underneath packs a lot of passion for her cities and loved ones; and Bronca turned out to be my favourite an indigenous native american woman who in her later years embraced her sexuality; a love of art and yet never backs down in a fight…even if no one actually wanted or started one. It’s a great dynamic as they cross each other’s paths and gives the book a lot of tension. For each group we meet a small group of other New Yorkers and importantly we see New York as a city of many other faces and places. Yes, there is a that big city arrogance that NYC isn’t a normal place (something all cities share) but Jemison imbues us with a sense that each borough itself has a unique identity to it something tourists aren’t always aware of. On top of that the magic the characters wield is adapted to their personalities rather than invitations they can be songs, equations or something very different and that again gives the story a different feel.
This is important as while the first chapter suggests the enemy here was going to be the establishment forces such as racist police the actual main Enemy here is something more dangerous – the forces that just want a homogenous identify for EVERYONE. Appearing as a snarky yet strange ever-changing Woman in White who each character has to face up to Jemisin adds cosmic horror to the story – a force that comes from outside and enhances the baser side of natures – greed, racism and the alt right. I loved how Lovecraft gets slammed for having these fears too! The forces that want all cities to look the same; remove all trace of individuality and remove all the people they don’t want to see. What impressed me is this is clearly a tale of our own time where cities and cultures are under attack from mobs that scream censorship when their racist art isn’t allowed to be shown or from the faceless corporations that remove community shops to be replaced with the same old stores we see everywhere. Jemisin really does make this enemy creepy and inhuman a powerful power that can turn people by simply touching their hand in the street and playing to their fears. They aren’t something we can easily defeat, and some avatars will find this new world offered more tempting than others.
As the story progresses Jemisin adds a wider canvas as we meet avatars of other cities and find out these battles have been going on for millennia and sometimes cities will fail and die. It makes the story rather more than just a standard urban fantasy quest adding a more mythic dimension than I was not expecting. Cities are one of humanities’ greatest ideas and produce so much of what our lives now are – they can also be awful, dangerous and yet filled with unexpected delights. This tale ends fairly neatly in its own right but heralds a new trilogy I am looking forward to exploring this world a great deal.
Jemisin wraps up all of these themes into an epic tale that makes you appreciate the variety that humans create and shows what we can do when we decide to work together. It was a wonderful reading experience and the kind of story where afterwards you’ll probably look at your own home with a new perspective too. Strongly recommended!
