On the Saint of Bright Doors

This book was a bit hard to grapple with at first: Chandrasekera opens in the manner of a mythological tale, and there’s a steep learning curve to the world he’s built. Adding to the challenge, Nochu_Dee on Goodreads points out that the book is allegorical — a commentary on Buddhist extremism and politics in South Asia. I can’t speak to that, but their thoughtful review is well worth reading. The Saint of Bright Doors is an outstandingly original work: there are demons, “bright doors” that appear for reasons no one understands, time-play, an evil (?) mother, supernatural powers, and more.

The single biggest problem is that it leans far too heavily on exposition. On some level that’s necessary to tell a story of this scale in so brief a form, but it’s plain that characters aren’t driving it; the book’s value is in its world-building and its play with interesting concepts. And some of those concepts have so much promise, yet so many don’t reach their potential. Fetter devotes enormous time to studying the Bright Doors, but the novel is inconsistent about why: is it to meet the other students and drive his attempt to assassinate his father (itself inconsistent, since there’s little indication he would)? Or to depict the politico-religious anxieties of the city’s elites? The doors themselves are full of promise, and then they drop out until the last chapter, where Fetter suddenly leads a demonic army. Another missed opportunity is Mother-of-Glory’s remark that Luriat simply didn’t exist before the Perfect and Kind transformed the nature of existence — what does that tell us about reality? How does it change Fetter’s understanding of the world? We don’t know. The book is littered with cool but underdeveloped ideas like this. The major twist is that it’s narrated by Fetter’s shadow, which is a smart choice that adds real depth, though the enormous tonal shift in the last two chapters costs the novel some of its coherence. Other ideas are better executed: the depiction of the prison camps was particularly well done, utterly surreal, adding depth and texture and developing Fetter’s character. In spite of the conceptual problems, I really enjoyed the novel — the world is fantastical and feels alive, even where many of the characters don’t.