Hugo 24: The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

The sense of history folding in on itself is not unique to any one country. I didn’t really feel it in the UK until I returned as a visitor who had made another home in a different country where that sense of historical dislocation was even more stark. It is more than just the haunting of the past into the present but also that sense of the past sitting much closer to the present than it should.

Fetter, the central character of The Saint of Bright Doors is more keenly aware of the dislocation of both time and geography than most. He has some of the qualities of a Peter Pan, unattached from his shadow and with a loose relationship with gravity. Raised in a remote rural village by his mother to be an assassin, he has turned his back on that destiny and instead lives in the modern world of email, crowd-funding, run-down apartments and light-rail transit.

Fetter lives in the present or rather he doesn’t live there at all. Science fiction and fantasy have their fair share of unreliable narrators but Fetter lives in a world of unreliable world-building. The world is not right, time and history are not right and the city of Luriat is not on any real maps. The fault lines in this folded world of smartphones and creeping demons are the eponymous bright doors. Strange preternatural portals are scattered throughout the city and at any time a regular door might become co-opted and transform into these intrusive gaps in normality.

You can pick out the history and the geography in places. Luriat appears to be in South Asia and yet the rest of the world is to the south of it. It may have been under British colonial rule at some point (the third occupation of the Absent Queen perhaps?) but people’s grasp of history is sketchy. Pogroms and plagues dominate recent history and an authoritarian government with their own race-based pseudo-science suppress dissent.

Overshadowing everything is the presence of Fetter’s absent father — the messianic leader of a powerful cult. It is his father that Fetter’s mother raised him to kill, a destiny Fetter has refused but which he is pulled towards.

Stylistically, this book is not written like a novel by Gene Wolfe but it shares so much in common with Wolfe’s approach that the comparison is apt. Fetter walks through this strange world as if its contradictions are normal and the reader has to follow where he goes without any clear sense of what this world is. The novel does give some answers to these questions or at least explanations that indicate how the world could be ours. At some point you just need to trust in the narrative and not struggle to much with the dislocation. You are meant to feel lost.

The hopelessness of finding a way through is reflected in Fetter’s own journeys, in particular in the later part of the book when he is trapped in a huge open air prison that stretches on for days and contains its own wilderness. By this point, at least, we have been given some explanation for why the world geography is so horribly wrong.

I was lucky to start this book while travelling myself and in a head space where a weird challenging read was what I needed. It’s not an easy book to get into and given the themes of alienation, the stylistic choices make a great deal of sense but still, I think if I had been trying to read this during my regular work week I may have stalled in the early chapters. That’s not a criticism of the book — it is how it is for good reason and it wouldn’t work as well if the introduction to Fetter’s world was more accommodating. Well before the end I was racing through the chapters eager for the story to play out.

I strongly feel this is a book that deserves an award. I can see why it might not win one because it is easy to bounce off the initial chapters but once you hit the rhythms of the book and start to get a sense of narrator’s unusual perspective (another Wolfe-like aspect) this is a very rewarding read. I’ve one more novel to read in the Hugo Best Novel category but it is going to have been a very, very good book to make me not give this one my number one preference.