At the Fount of Creation by Tobi Ogundiran: Review by Gary K. Wolfe
At the Fount of Creation, Tobi Ogundiran (Tordotcom 978-1-250-90803-2, $21.99, 224pp, hc) January 2025.
Writers of duologies aren’t doing any favors for book reviewers. With a trilogy, we can blather on about middle-book syndrome and three-act structures; with an ongoing series, we can speculate about metanarratives or simply rate each new volume as though it were the latest album from a familiar band, but a duology somehow seems to offer too much and too little at the same time. Plus, it’s always awkward to discuss a second volume without revealing key points about the first. Several reviewers of Tobi Ogundiran’s In the Shadow of the Fall (reviewed here last June) noted that so much was packed into its relatively short but fast-moving narrative that it might well have become a multivolume epic, involving everything from Chosen One tales to myths of creation, exiled gods, monstrous body-snatchers, and apocalyptic visions. Others might have suspected that, given its open-ended but not-quite-cliffhanger ending, it might simply represent the rising action of a classical structure of which the second volume would simply be the falling action. So which might we expect of the concluding volume, At the Fount of Creation?
Well, Ogundiran outsmarted us. At the usual risk of giving away bits of that first volume, we were introduced to a young acolyte named Ashâke who, frustrated at having failed to win a sort of internship with one of the Yoruba gods called orisha, took matters into her own hands, got herself exiled from her religious community, and found a new community of griots and exiles who revealed to her that most of what she’d learned about the orisha, not to mention her entire world, was false. Except some of what they revealed wasn’t exactly true, either, and by the end Ashâke learned that, while the orisha weren’t quite extinct, they were endangered by a rather terrifying group of ‘‘godkillers’’ led by a powerful figure called only the Teacher, whose most ominous enforcer, Yaruddin, could ‘‘eat’’ people by simply pushing his way into their bodies and taking over. And Ashâke herself had a key role to play in saving the orisha, becoming the ‘‘guardian of the gods’’ that gives the series its subtitle. The rising action, it turns out, has hardly begun.
Ashâke is chosen to carry several of the orisha inside her mind, though each of them might manifest as separate beings from time to time. And it turns out they’re terrible backseat drivers, each with their own agenda: Oya, the goddess of winds and rain; Arewa, god of beauty and debauchery; Ogun, lord of war and metalworking; the shrewd and calculating Yemoja, the spirit of waters, who makes herself the default leader. The fact that Eshu, the god of roads and crossroads, is not among these onboard gods becomes a significant plot point later on. As Ashâke leads them on a quest to find missing griots – and some sort of safe harbor – they find themselves pursued by an army of godkillers, who have managed to recruit much of the population to their side, with the quite reasonable argument that the orisha are out for themselves, treating humans more or less as disposable chattel. In a parallel backstory, we learn of the origins of the Teacher himself, and the (again, quite understandable) reasons for his violent hostility to the orisha.
But the larger backstory takes us all the way back to the destruction of the legendary city Ile-Ife by the supreme god Shango and to the Fount of Creation of the title, expanding the tale to the full trilogy-worthy epic scope that some of those readers of In the Shadow of the Fall seemed to hope for. But Ogundiran seems less interested in epic-for-epic’s-sake worldbuilding than in exploring the real moral conundrums of the very ideas of godhood, belief, and responsibility. While the Teacher at first seems to share the classic villainous aspects of a Saruman or a Voldemort, his arguments about the indifference and petulance of the orisha can’t easily be dismissed, especially when we learn more about his motivations. And Ashâke, constantly confronting her own limitations while discovering her true powers, finds herself trapped in the middle, at best a reluctant hero. Essentially, At the Fount of Creation is a terrific moral fable, undergirded by Yoruba traditions and dressed up with some spectacular fireworks that seem to invite CGI treatment (monstrous transformations, sudden incinerations, a giant tree erupting from the ground, maybe a few too many of those now-familiar bright lights emitting from people’s orifices). But for all his violent spectacle and mythic scaffolding, Ogundiran never loses focus on his central concerns of flawed characters making difficult choices, and he never slows down the action for even a minute.
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Gary K. Wolfe is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and a reviewer for Locus magazine since 1991. His reviews have been collected in Soundings (BSFA Award 2006; Hugo nominee), Bearings (Hugo nominee 2011), and Sightings (2011), and his Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan) received the Locus Award in 2012. Earlier books include The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Eaton Award, 1981), Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (with Ellen Weil, 2002), and David Lindsay (1982). For the Library of America, he edited American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and a similar set for the 1960s. He has received the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and a Special World Fantasy Award for criticism. His 24-lecture series How Great Science Fiction Works appeared from The Great Courses in 2016. He has received six Hugo nominations, two for his reviews collections and four for The Coode Street Podcast, which he has co-hosted with Jonathan Strahan for more than 300 episodes. He lives in Chicago.
This review and more like it in the December 2024 issue of Locus.
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