Saint of Bright Doors (Vajra Chandrasekera, 2023)
Picked this one up because it received such high praise. Plus, since so many popular shows and movies emplace themes of dystopia within America (albeit with varying degrees of diversity), it’s always exciting to pick up a book that is written from a different perspective not just for the sake of colour, but to cohere around a more familiar system of belief.
The story follows Fetter, a gifted boy born to a messiah, raised by a demon mother who trains him to kill his father, but is ultimately disenchanted by the burden of expectations. Having renounced his patricidal fate Fetter moves away to the city of Luriat, and joins a support group of other ‘almost chosen ones’ to process his grief. While in the city Fetter does what any young adult does — reads, dates and works — until he is swept up by a simmering revolution.
I’m sure those familiar with Buddhist mythology will pick up on the themes from page one. The name Fetter itself is a translation of the word Rahula, the name Buddha gave to his son, to mean ‘a fetter to the path of Enlightnement’. So much for those popular naive conceptions of Buddhism as a distinctly moral religion based on universal kindness. To narrate a story from the perspective of Buddha’s disenchanted and disgruntled son serves as a fresh contrast to all those simplistic orientalist assumptions and allows us to analyse Buddhism as just another religion, a system of power and control. It also helps that this critique comes from Vajra Chandrasekhara, a Tamil author and a witness to the political turmoil in Sri Lanka, living as a minority in a predominantly Buddhist country.
Vajra does a great job here, weaving mythology with science fiction and the glue holding it all together is a perfectly calibrated florid prose. The writing is immersive and the diction helps make the familiar strange without insisting upon itself. Sure the prose is thick with description but there’s a rhythm to each line that makes the book unputdownable. At same time there’s a casual levity to the dialogue, which in the hands of a lesser writer might’ve seemed obnoxiously self aware. (I’ve had this problem with graphic novels like Laila Starr wherein the characters all speak like they know they’re in a piece of literary fiction).
What I am most impressed with is the careful plotting for roughly two thirds of the book. There’s clearly so much happening at once and even if the book only follows Fetter, until the final act, the narrative doesn’t feel stuck to his perspective. In fact, the anticipation is exhilarating. There are a number of pieces on the board, number of moves being made out of sight. The politics of different faiths collide even if in service of the same revolution. The supporting characters too aren’t mere mouthpieces for different factions. Vajra alludes to their insecurities and inner lives. And in between the lines there simmers discontent. The line between conviction and disillusion blurs but what remains is that single-minded purpose indispensable for a revolution. The city too is a well rounded character constructed in the image of a complacent bureaucracy. The titular mysterious bright doors are strewn across the city almost as a distraction from the very real pogroms. Vajra makes a witness out of us, omniscient but impotent.
At the two thirds mark there’s a section that works in a way I cannot explain. What seems like an interlude works as a picaresque adventure and Vajra manages to distend time in a way that seems like it should only work on screen and not in writing. Yet it does.
Despite all this, the wheels fall off in the back third. The scene is set and siege planned but the sleight of hand that comes isn’t tactical, it is magical. Sure, that big reveal is spectacular, but everything around this happens so fast that the twist feels like a sloppy macguffin. It is only while reading the final chapters that I felt the book’s focus on Fetter limiting. As the final third flips the board for some flash and bang, the book ultimately succumbs to its own critique. The book begins as a deconstruction of the trope of the chosen one, of messiahs, and most importantly, of the flawed assumption that the material world is a fetter to be left behind. After all revolutions are born of material inequities and not spiritual ones. Sadly, I get the sense that the author who wrote those final chapters no longer remembered this.