(++++) WORLDS’ END

5 Worlds, Book 5: The Emerald Gate. By Mark Siegel, Alexis Siegel, Xanthe Bouma, Boya Sun, and Matt Rockefeller. Random House. $12.99.

     In almost all grand fantasy adventures, from The Odyssey to The Lord of the Rings, the ending is in a sense a foregone conclusion: the grand quest will come to a successful end, the protagonist will gain his or her just reward, and the world that has been destabilized by the events that set the quest in motion will be restored to its rightful state of being. An apt stopping point is a necessity: there is no Book 25 of The Odyssey, and no exploration of life in the Grey Havens after Frodo leaves Middle-earth forever and joins Bilbo, Gandalf, Galadriel and Celeborn. The fascination with these stories lies in how the conclusion will be reached more than with what the conclusion will be.

     The creators of the marvelous 5 Worlds series have this formula down pat, to such an extent that there is nothing formulaic-feeling about it. The underlying quest, to re-light five mysterious “beacons” located on five different worlds and thereby save those worlds and all their peoples while transforming all the civilizations, is certainly grand enough. And the portrayals of the individual worlds and the many races living upon them are handled with great skill and considerable depth: these may be graphic novels aimed mainly at preteens and young teenagers, but their characterizations go well beyond what is usual in the form. The young people who, against the feckless and often venal forces of their elders, make the re-lighting possible, have real personalities and real inner lives – and some conflicts among themselves, which are typical in fantasy quests but handled here with considerable sensitivity.

     The basic idea is that these five interrelated worlds were settled long ago by obscure, poorly understood ancient figures called Felid Gods, about whom many mysteries remain. Each world supposedly has its own giant colored beacon, built for no known reason and now dark after having presumably been lit and important in some significant way in the dim past – but the fifth and final world, strangely named Grimbo (E), appears not to have a beacon at all. The focus during the search for that final beacon is on the peculiar challenges facing the protagonists as they look for it, and in particular the difficulties facing Oona Lee, goodhearted but initially not-very-skillful student at a prominent school called the Sand Dancer Academy, who has led the quest and gained steadily in stature and self-assertiveness through the first four books. The other two members of the initial trio of protagonists have their own well-developed roles to play in the series’ conclusion. An Tzu’s mysterious illness – in which parts of his body are constantly fading to invisibility – proves crucial here, not only by providing a link to the Felid Gods but also by giving an entry point to the chief villain, a revenge-seeking entity known as the Mimic. Of somewhat less consequence in this final volume is Jax Amboy, a star athlete in a highly popular game called Starball, originally an android construct but now fully human – thanks to symbiosis, earlier in the sequence, with a strange spiritual creature known as a Salassi Devoti. In The Emerald Gate, as in all the books, additional characters join the central three, here including Vea and Vector – returning from earlier volumes – and new characters from the races that live on Grimbo (E), especially a plant person called Samphire who becomes the latest character to learn that unquestioning obedience to authority and unthinking following of long-established customs are not the way to do what is right and what is needed in current times and circumstances.

     It is interesting that Oona faces both internal and external challenges in The Emerald Gate, but scarcely surprising that she overcomes all of them and is able – with assistance, since friendship and teamwork are key elements of the 5 Worlds stories – to light the final beacon. It is also interesting that the expected runup to a massive cataclysmic battle with the Mimic turns out not to be the climax of the quest: Oona fascinatingly realizes that even the Mimic has a place to be and a part to play in the continuing existence of the worlds, and she finds a way to limit that role instead of trying to eliminate the Mimic altogether. Once that happens, all that is left is the very end of the successful quest – which in this case involves a transformation of Oona that is at once unexpected and unsurprising: it just seems like the right way for these graphic novels to end. Throughout the 5 Worlds books, mystery after mystery is introduced and solved – only to whet the appetite for the new ones that keep coming up. The Emerald Gate continues that pattern: even the explanation of this final world’s name is included and neatly handled. The book brings the series to a thoroughly satisfying conclusion by drawing on many classic elements of fantasy quests and illustrated storytelling, using the graphic-novel medium skillfully and bending the tropes of heroic fantasy while remaining firmly within that long and storied tradition.