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The Saint of Bright Doors Q1 – General Overview
How do you feel overall with this book? Did you enjoy the reading experience? Did this book make you want to read more of Chandrasekera’s work? Did you find it an easy or difficult read and did you come away from it thinking about the book more, or did it leave little impression on you?
Comments
Top level - I liked it, and found the intricacy of social detail very absorbing. To have a society so stratified by multiple layers of race, language, history and other dimensions was both bewildering and fascinating.
Other thoughts - it was a slower read than I had expected, which is no bad thing but took me by surprise when I realised I wasn't racing through it. I had anticipated from the title that there would be more passage through the bright doors, so the fact that we learn almost nothing about them for maybe half the book was intriguing
I also liked it. It had a real sense of South Asia that was refreshingly alien to my jaded Eurocentric experience. But that's probably for another question.
The book didn't prompt deeper thoughts in me, or change my world-view: the concerns of the characters were very small and personal, for all the world-spanning effects of the family feud. The greater events in the book were mostly a backdrop, with Fetter mostly untouched by them.
The Bright Doors were one such backdrop feature. They were a cool background feature, but they had next to no impact on the events in the book. If they weren't there, would much have changed in the book?
My initial impression was quite positive. I found the prose-style compelling. I rather liked the world-building, overall, for being a bit unusual. I thought the bright doors conceit was pretty interesting, and I liked its ‘weird fiction’ quality. I didn’t really know what to make of the kind of godly family aspect of the book, but was willing to give it a chance.
Now at the halfway point, I still like the prose. Many of the other elements I liked haven’t developed much. The world is still intriguing, but a quarter of the book has gone by and there’s been no further development of the setting by the author, which is a drag. It remains quite impressionistic.l - I was hoping for more. The bright doors aspect similarly hasn’t developed much - is it just a conceit? I can’t tell the characters apart. I’m rather lost I terms of what the plot is right now - there seem to be several unconnected plots. Wondering if I should persevere.
I quite enjoyed this book - thanks for suggesting it. I would definitely read another book by Vajra Chandrasekera, but I'm not sure I will seek it out. More if I run into it I will pick it up to read. Like @Apocryphal I found the second quarter dragged.
I quite enjoyed the setting, which I found familiar but unrecognisable (?). I posted a quote by Dick recently about how that is something important for SF. However I think that familiarity with this cosmology is uncommon in my society, and so for a lot of people I suspect that it just appears "exotic."
I have spent some time thinking about its take on things. I'll discuss this more in relation to other questions, or get back to it after I have responded to them.
For some reason I couldn't grasp this book. It writhed and fought me tooth and nail, like Merlin fighting Mad Madam Mim. I got about 10% of the way through and gave up. Hopefully I can go back to it later and try again. It took me three tries before I could read Hitchhikers Guide , so there is precedent...
My apologies, kcaryths!
“The Perfect and Kind is not looking at Fetter. He’s looking at me. He can’t see me - it’s not possible - but he is looking regardless.”
Is this an author insertion? Who else would the narrator be?
That's the kind of thing it kept doing to me, utterly throwing me off my game.
No need to apologise at all. This book did not do well for me either. I found myself completing it because of the quality of the writing, but I didn't enjoy much of the reading experience. I DNF'ed my first Chandrasekera book so this one was at least one I was up to finishing, but I don't think I'll be looking for more of his works to read.
> Every so often this book flips into the first person present. I haven’t wrapped my head around this yet.
> “The Perfect and Kind is not looking at Fetter. He’s looking at me. He can’t see me - it’s not possible - but he is looking regardless.”
>
> Is this an author insertion? Who else would the narrator be?
Good questions. They're answered soon in the book.
The book often reminded me of the Broken Earth books by Jemisin. Here we had a similarly impressionistic modern setting in which all the characters were basically super-human, and a story about a parent-child relationship. I preferred this to the Broken Earth on several levels. Firstly, it wasn’t trying to beat me over the head with a morality lesson. Second, the characters (such as they were - not very distinct mostly) were easier to care about because they weren’t pretentious dickheads. Third, the story wasn’t belaboured, dragged out into three books by delaying the big reveal by having bathroom breaks. Also, the big reveal was more meaningful. However, I did find BE to be a more readable and coherent work.