Monday, June 19, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

 


Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on July 11, 2023 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

The Saint of Bright Doors is the debut novel of Sri Lankan Science Fiction/Fantasy author Vajra Chandrasekera, who has written a whole bunch of SF/F short fiction for various outlets.  This is my first experience with Chandrasekera, but the novel got some hype on twitter from authors I enjoy, so I was very interested when I got an advance copy on NetGalley.  The novel features a man named Fetter, raised by his mad and possibly magically powerful mother to assassinate his cult leader father, who now just tries to live in peace in a City filled with all kinds of people, while he gets therapy along with others who have moved on from having been chosen or "unchosen" as special by various cults and religions.  

If that was all The Saint of Bright Doors was about, I might've liked it more, but Chandrasekera fills the book with so many ideas its pretty much bursting at the seems.  So you also have a city which is in some ways socialist in how it provides for everyone but is also a Big Brother-esque incoherent caste system-oriented bureaucracy-led city where pogroms and plague are always on the horizon.  You have demons only the protagonist can see, and mysterious bright painted doors that can't open, appear mysteriously out of real doors, and appear only throughout the city.  You have revolution, colonization, refugee camps, cults of personality, and more.  There's just so much happening here, and some of these ideas feel kind of contradictory, with the book moving from one idea to another, that none of it really lands and any message that's intended just comes out muddled. 

----------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------
Fetter was raised by his mother, the magically gifted Mother-of-Glory, to be a killer. Specifically, Fetter was raised not just to kill those individuals who betrayed Mother-of-Glory (who essentially rules the city of Acusdab and its mass of demon-summoning doctors), but his father, the man known as the Perfect and Kind, an incredibly powerful, prestigious and well followed cult leader who betrayed his mother long long ago. Fetter's gifts - his mother cut away his shadow, seemingly allowing him to float/fly and, unknown to his mother, he can see demons and spirits that others can't see or require a summoning to try to see - are meant to aid him accomplish that task. But after a childhood of killing, Fetter walked away from this destiny, settling in the nearby city of Luriat.

Luriat is a strange place Fetter doesn't quite fully understand. It's a place that provides for all its people and doesn't require anyone to work, but at the same time is run by a mix of contrasting and borderline incomprehensible factions, each with its own strange and unfathomable legal systems, is occasionally beset by pogroms and plagues, and perhaps most strangely, is filled with the mysterious "Bright Doors" - doors that led to nowhere that emit a strange presence, which are painted brightly and worshipped and studied by various people throughout the city. Fetter doesn't really care about all that - although he's curious about the doors and the odd feeling he gets from them - but just tries to get by in the City and spends his days helping those new to Luriat get their bearings in this strange city. He also finds himself in a support group for other people who were "unchosen" - once supposed to be possibly the central figure of a cult only to be cast away.

But the world won't let Fetter simply exist in peace. For a splitaway schism of his father's cult is plotting to bring his father, The Perfect and Kind, to the City and the young nobleman Fetter is dating is interested in seeing him. Meanwhile the leader of his support group is plotting revolution, and Fetter finds himself drafted into an effort to ingratiate himself with some nobles in support of that goal. But when the nobles lead Fetter to both a research project dealing with the Bright Doors and a plot to both bring his father into Luriat and to possibly give him harm, Fetter finds himself on a course of action that will throw him into disarray and put him back into the center of things like he never ever wanted....
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This novel begins with what is essentially a prologue chapter from Fetter's childhood, before jumping forward in time to his adult self for the rest of our full main plot. And this works pretty well as a setup for what seems like how the story that this book is aiming to tell: Fetter's life as an "unchosen" person - a person who has rejected or been rejected by a cult from a leadership position and has to figure out what to do next with their life. This concept, and the the support group of fellow "unchosen" members that Fetter attends, is really interesting and a full book could easily come out of the concept, especially with Fetter still seeing remnants of his old life, like the demons/spirits that only Fetter can see that still wander around (although there are less of them seemingly in Luriat) and the strange whispering presence he feels whenever he gets close to one of the city's Bright Doors.

But The Saint of Bright Doors tries to handle a lot more ideas than that, for better or for worse. So the novel deals with the fact that the City is run by a bureaucracy that is crazy and ridiculous, with two separate justice systems run by different contrasting peoples that are absurd and no one can figure out how they work. And it deals with how the City and its Empire has constant pogroms against outsiders and others, fears plague greatly, and all of this is for reasons that Fetter can't quite understand and probably no one can understand. Add in a revolution plotted by one of our Unchosen members, and well you have a Catch 22-esque novel here as well....but the Book doesn't focus on that either. So we have the different sects of the cult led by Fetter's father, the Bright Doors and how they are researched, a past history of questionable veracity dealing with colonization and stolen powers, the horrors and absurdities of refugee camps....there's just so so much here in this novel. And to the author's credit, the narrative never gets boring or dry and Fetter's character as he wanders through all these incidents remains generally fascinating to read about, as he learns and encounters all of this and has to figure out how to act...even when he doesn't want to. Fetter and a bunch of the side characters he encounters are generally fascinating, and all of them have their own stories going on on the side that I enjoyed reading about and would certainly be willing to read more about.

At the same time, all of these ideas kind of muddle and the plot just wanders at times such that it kind of feels hard to take any sort of full message from this novel - that is, if the author is trying to argue a point, it's hard to see what it is, and as a complete story from beginning to end it's hard to feel satisfied instead of feeling at the end like just "huh, that's a thing." There's some message at the end about how each person is their own world, as Fetter seems to gain his resolve finally at the end as to how he sees the world, but it's not developed well, and arguably hurt by a last minute plot twist that is only barely setup and just....well confuses and feels like something from another book entirely. Like I said above, each of these ideas is interesting to explore, but the book only tries to explore some of them before diverting to a completely new idea at times, sometimes in contradictory ways, like how Fetter wanders through a load of refugee camps/prison camps that surround the city for a whole act, which are so absurd in how they're administered and with no one knowing where to go or where they're assigned to go...only for Fetter to randomly find his way to the right place at the end of the act and to be then escorted out of the camp just....cause? There's a lot of this honestly, where seemingly long term plot arcs are up and abandoned, and character relationships and struggles (Fetter's attraction to a female researcher causing him confusion considering his relationship with a guy nobleman for example) just wind up not mattering or not being pursued.

The result is a book that I wanted to enjoy at the end far more than I did. The narrative and prose is done really well here, and again, all of these ideas are intriguing to read about! But it just feels like the author couldn't figure out what he wanted to stick to and kept introducing new stuff, such that this volume never feels like a complete whole.


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