★★★☆☆ This would be so much better with a plot

The Saint of Bright Doors

Vajra Chandrasekera

I picked up Vajra Chandrasekera's The Saint of Bright Doors because it's a finalist for the 2024 Best Novel Hugo award. Over and over as I worked through this year's Hugo finalists, I have found myself asking, "Why is this a Hugo finalist?" Not this time. The Saint of Bright Doors is exactly the kind of highly original and creative work I expect to get nominated for awards.

At the same time, I found myself thinking as I approached the end, "Thank God I will soon be finished!" It is creative, but it's very hard to read. I have a good deal of tolerance for literature that makes me work (see, e.g., here), but I need to be compensated for my trouble. In a novel I need the usual accoutrements of good fiction: engaging characters and a plot that keeps me wanting to know what happens next.

In my headline I already hinted at the problem with The Saint of Bright Doors -- it doesn't have a plot. OK, that's unfair. it does have a plot, but only a very attenuated one. For most of the novel it was entirely unclear to me what problem Fetter might have been trying to solve, or what, if any, progress he was making. I didn't care what he would do next. Forcing myself to keep reading was hard work, and I'm tired now. I was tired already before I had read a third of it.

Now, I will say that there is a delicious plot twist near the end, which I will consign to a spoiler tag. OK, here it is: Fetter's shadow, from which he was separated at birth, shows up as a character and first-person narrator. And of course we find out that he, the shadow, was to some extent orchestrating Fetter's life. Before that twist my rating was going to be two stars, but it was brilliant and surprising enough to earn another star. If the novel had been a lot shorter, the twist would have been a sufficient pay-off to justify it.

The Saint of Bright Doors is a brilliant debut. But as a novel it was too demanding for me to truly enjoy.

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