Category: Books

Unforgiveable Fire: The Saint of Bright Doors

a novel by Vajra Chandrasekera

I’ve been thinking about shadows. About magic and power.

“There is nothing,” said the monarch, “except the power which you pretend to seek: power to grind and power to digest, power to seek and power to find, power to await and power to claim, all power and pitilessness springing from the nape of the neck.”
“Thank you.”
“Love is a trick played on us by the forces of evolution. Pleasure is the bait laid down by the same. There is only power. Power is of the individual mind, but the mind’s power is not enough. Power of the body deides everything in the end, and only Might is Right..[“]

TH White The Once and Future King

The Saint of Bright Doors won the Nebula award for best novel. It was nominated for the Hugo. It has won or been nominated for others. What interests me—this is not a review, so spoilers—is the notion that the narrator is the figure so often chosen as a villain in stories, whose third person descrpition of Fetter, arguably not the real protagonist, is so close I wondered often why it wasn’t in the first person. I will go back to look for clues on my second read.

We are not good readers these days. Everyone complains of it. Many blame social media, algorithms, now AI. (Personally, I believe things were going that way before, and it’s just another way of see Distraction and Stand on Zanzibar, hell, The Demolished Man.)

But this novel is so modestly written, and moving, that I had no possible distraction, if you don’t count eating and sleeping. I put down Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob by to read this; doesn’t mean he’ll win a Booker or Nobel, I’m talking about attention.

Vajra Chandrasekera is one we’re paying attention to at the moment, for better or worse. For me it’s better. I hope it is for him as well, that the book’s life and his career lead him into more.

The notion of the author’s persona as a little bit of flowing darkness moving from corpus callosum to bowel (via penis) and influencing the characters via small changes in their chemistry is a beautiful one and deserves accolades. It’s a lovely riff on the Graham Greene’s “splinter of ice in the heart of every writer.”

Also, of what it takes to mend a political situation.

Also, a mediation on predestination.

The doors, too, offer a wonderful take on the possibilites killed by religio-political machinations, the lives (and whole landmasses) rendered uninhabitable with the denial of freedom that is cloaked in the offer of freedom, the shutting off of human possibilities in sexuality, art, and just plain fun.

A boy is trained to kill by his mother, whose beautiful name, Mother-of-Glory, is by the end deeply ironic. Of course he rebels. It’s altogether possible she foresaw this.

It’s a classic born assassin trope and the undermining of this by Fetter, and perhaps his shadow, provides the way into the next main character here, the city of Luriat (an anagram of “ritual”), which is like a tropical version of Delany’s Bellona, the ever-burning city in Dhalgren. Its elaborate castes and neighbourhood heirachies are, we learn, all the product of the change Fetter’s father rang in the fabric of reality.

Later we learn this all the Bright Doors there are the product of the pinched off possibilites the so-called Saint the Perfect and the Kind, his father, has left in a megalomaniac and petty destruction of his mother’s island home, a place before names. Fetter travels from Acusdab (closest anagram “abacus”) to Luriat after his training is complete and he has made his first Unforgivable crime, assassination of his grand uncle.

“The Five Unforgivables are the major crimes as defined by your father’s ideological apparatus,” Mother-of-Glory says. She has given this speech so often Fetter knows it by heart, which is the point. “They are declared to be outside the jurisdiction of any regime of restorative or retributive justice. The Five Unforgivables are, in order of severity, matricide; heresy leading to factionalism; the sancticide of votaries who have reached the fourth level of awakening; patricide; and the assassination of the Perfect and Kind. By definition, they cannot be forgiven and cannot be redeemed. That means that if you commit any one of them, the cult will hunt you for the rest of your life, and make your name a curse for generations to come. Your mission is to commit them all. Your father abandoned us. We were unchosen, cast out of his eschatology. We are going to destroy your father’s cult and salt the earth where it falls. Now you say it.”

Fetter repeats the catechism, obligingly. He could recite these words in his sleep.

At this stage his mother’s project seems all rather nasty and worth our hero’s spurning. We are in the realm of dreams with a floating boy assassin with amputated shadow left somewhere behind. In Luriat we’re in the modern world, recognisably a place of wars and plagues, charlatans and inequality.

Fetter seems to be having a grim kind of fun, with a boyfriend and support group of other significant beings who have missed or denied themselves a possible destiny. Fetter plays all of this close to his chest, perhaps because his father is such a big cheese in the Saint world. As things turn out, despite Fetter’s best efforts there is no need for forgiveness or redemption for him.

The Perfect and the Kind gets his desserts and we have the mysteries sort of unveiled for us. This is more or less offstage, which for some I recognise might be unsatisfactory. However, Chandrasekera is slipping away from the genre’s expectations like the shadow he’s following, himself a shadow of the shadow.

There is a lovely description of a prison as large as a country (possibly) and Fetter’s rise from idiot to clerk to healer—and abruptly the story shifts sideways again, to the Perfect and the Kind’s inner circle, or at least his protection and some insight into his regime’s careless and intentional cruelty. I am not entirely sure what the Perfect and the Kind intends for the world, and it’s entirely possible he’s not after anything but survival and aggrandizement. He’s certainly not after pleasure, since by the time Fetter arrives in his environs his relationship with his offsider and sex partner is empty. Not love, The Mother-of-Glory has told Fetter all about their relationship, and what his father brought:

They infected us with strange ideas from the south-west. They brought doctrines of shame and disgust for the body and the glorification of the perfected mind. They asked us to look at our bodies not as the clean and perfect instruments of living that we had known, but as bags of flesh containing the thirty-one parts of impurity: the hairs of the head and the body; the nails and the teeth; the skin, flesh, and tendons; the bones and marrow; the heart, liver, and kidneys; the lungs, pleurae, and spleen; the intestines large and small—the shit and undigested food; the bile, phlegm, and pus; the blood, sweat, and tears; the fat, sebum, and spit; the mucus, the synovial fluid, the piss. They asked us to reflect on this and be repulsed: is the body not disgusting?

Like this, they brought endless categorizations and subcategorizations and enumerations of being and experience. They brought, almost incidentally, the politics they knew, of centralization, of the consolidation of power, a politics of thrones.

It is significant that the shadow, small dot of yin in the bowel of the Perfect and Kind’s yang, entered through his “yang” during sex with his employee. This is an integrated vision of diversity against perfection, of plurality against totalitarianism, of sharing against accumulation.

I see the world of Bright Doors as somehow upside down, with the island to the fairytale north of the subcontinent that is so big there is no continent for it to hang off and it is the only land in the world of ocean.

Work of this kind would have been impossible in the “Golden Age” of Science Fiction, and impossible without the reaction to it in the 60s and 70s. It is also impossible to see where this novel came from without other literatures, the kinds arising out of places where the stories are not entirely Christian, such as South America and Asia.

(Of course, Blish’s After Such Knowledge is a great example of where such magic can come entirely out of European tales and sui generis minds, I’m in no way bagging that.)

I’d like to see wonderful work of this kind arising from my own continent, which it has, and for the rest of our societies to come to the conclusion I have about this work: it is not merely the vehicle for an allegorical expression of the urge to diversity and freedom, unpefectability of heart and blood, it is the manifestation of such a life. I always try to see the reality of existence behind a work of art. This is not the author’s biographical world. It is as curated as any other aspect of a novel.

It does, however, have the ability to seep around the curation, to say things about an everyday life that the purely intentional might actually occlude. It might take many years for this stuff to find focus, since we take so much for granted about an increasingly global circumstance of life. It might also prove very thin, as in a superhero movie, whose only colloquialism is the globally translated one.

In The Saint of Bright Doors, we’re constantly getting nods at such circumstance. It’s not totally visceral, but this is Chandrasekera’s first novel. He’s steering intuitively through all the right things to have accumulated in some years a really substantial body of work. I won’t make any predictions, but I will read what comes.

© Sanjeewa Weerasinghe
The Saint of Bright DoorsVajra ChandrasekeraTordotcom368pp hcJuly 2023

 

Levitating With Footy: Helen Garner’s The Season

Part of my Readit series in the Prom Coast News

In a Helen Garner book, people cook and scoff, play music and wander arm-in-arm, weep and tidy, bellow and say things they do not mean; listen well and poorly, choof and dance, chiack and argue, pedal and surf, panic and screw. And die.


In The Season nobody dies. After years witnessing autopsy, murder trials, and watching theatre, here you find lightness. As with other artists clearing their 80s, you no longer need to become somebody.


People get hurt. This is the story of Helen Garner’s year following the Flemington U16 Colts, and her grandson, ruckman, Ambrose, interleaved with the fortune and fate of the AFL Western Bulldogs.


So, scrappy. There are even references to long-term head injury, but only to run from it, as she runs from stats and the game’s history and politics.


The kind of injury Garner’s heart catches on is a boy’s tumble, boot stops in the thigh, broken leg. Garner’s partisan response to a Collingwood injury is shamed by another grandmother. Pain is complicated here, tackling a skill and a desired violence, their coach’s prescription of running after a loss no punishment but a necessary source of winning strength, moving on.


And there’s plenty of violence. Our game’s fighting immediacy, joyous battle sublimation and youthful passion at one end, and its place in the week and family at the other—this is The Season’s subject.


If it’s not the sacred nature of sport. Helen Garner doesn’t pretend to know football but she does get the wellsprings of culture and Australian life. A netting bag of oranges and gin bottle in The Children’s Bach, cycling past nighttime Melbourne Exhibition Buildings in Monkey Grip, and now player and parent melee and being halftime oranges nanna.


Garner’s feeling of some presence beyond us dates back to Cosmo Cosmolino and maybe earlier; I disagree that atheists may not feel it and yet in Garner’s honesty about her desire for more, more, than this, she has opened the space to utterly nail it. AFL especially is an art reaching skyward, like ballet; yes its ideal bodies are large, but light with it, long as greyhounds and lithe as KG whiting. Some young women here do compare netball with footy, but glancingly, and Garner doesn’t rouse code or state beasts; here we see footy as jazz, acrobatics, spectacle—and worship. This isn’t woo-woo profundity, at last she shows the bricks: putting your body on the line; in the zone making out play under winter dark; young energy and love and growth pain; crowds “beserk” for their messengers of the gods. The roots of it in family routine and fitting in training no matter how sore or wet or freezing. Loss.


Brotherhood. In sports “literature,” replacing the male-unsporty-geek-foreigner-journalist with gimlet-eyed-feminist-nanna-opera-buff does make a change, nevermind Garner omitting entirely she’s a national treasure—that’s of a piece with our hero’s wildly creative parents as merely Amby’s mum and dad. There’s open envy for garrulous, beautiful boys—striding, ambling, buffeting, slinging, twriling, milling—and a casual absence of self-pity about her coming years, an approach which allows us to accept this as a new angle on masculinity in a world with plenty of male ones.


Also, it’s beautiful poetry.


How many artists go on at the height of their powers into their 80s? Alright, Saramago, Atwood, Miró, Le Guin, Keneally, Glass, but it’s uplifting as a writer to see that the good dying young doesn’t mean the rest of us are old tossers. This Garner shows promise. I look forward to her next book. (She’s not ruling it out.)

The SeasonHelen Garner Text Publishing 208 pp26/11/2024

Friends and Three Friends

My new novel, The White Library, is out everywhere now. It’s a pity there is no paperback; still, digital can be something better these days. So far, people seem to like it. There’s an excellent review from Ian Mond in Locus and a five star review on Amazon by somebody who ought to know, a librarian. I must get get off my arse and make sure that the next novel will get read. That one is called Three Friends. It’s been sitting around pretty much finished without me approaching publishers. (Covid. Moving house. Building a house.) At last, on the Surf Coast, I can think.

What is it about? First attempt at a pitch. <clears throat>

Three Friends is subtitled a massive conspiracy. That kind of does it, I reckon, because it is, and if I saw that it would grab me. If you look at the fact that it’s an “anti-anti-utopia”, as Kim Stanley Robinson has recently described the mode, set in the near future, you might think that politics is what motivated me, but it’s more like a reflection on what my work has been over the years. A collision of two things. Quite incidentally, I’ve been looking for an agent recently and, collecting reviews, having to read them, I must admit reviewers have for decades picked up my preoccupations.

My work is always about friendship. Groups of friends. Told in natural dialogue.

In the Locus review, Ian Mond wrote, about the plot of The White Library,

I will say it features a romance as heartfelt, genuine, and unconventional as anything you’re likely to encounter in literary or genre fiction.

Which, apart from being embarrassingly kind, echoes Martin Livings in Eidolon nearly thirty years ago, talking about The Weird Colonial Boy. He uses the words,

Voermans’ second novel has a kind of open-hearted sincerity that makes Adams’ Mostly Harmless look like a cynical marketing ploy.

It goes on in a still more embarrassing vein, the kind of review you wish everybody read. (Thank you Martin Livings!)

The point is, I think it’s driven by the dialogue.

I’m motivated by what are essentially poetic images. At least one has to settle before I begin to write. There is a doozy in this one. Yet, what brings this down to earth is the way people speak and what surprises and delights me and if I am honest is one big reason I write: even those people in my novels who may start out “unsympathetic” are never only that. They turn around and do—such things! And the sympathetic can be more than flawed. All in their words. I have an urge to inscribe what I see as ordinary existence into the—frankly—whacko plots and ideas in my work. Don’t know why. It’s something I have in common with Samuel Delany and is probably more what attracted me to his work than a lasting influence. Even in the Neolithic, a character is close miked and you can hear coloratura, feel bass growl. Such influence is hard to tease out, though, obviously, when he’s such a genuine superhero to the whole field. And I love Hemingway dialogue as well, whatever else he may have done. Le Guin I admire as much, but there is none of those qualities in her dialogue. It’s complicated.

So, character. But where are the limits to naturalism? Written before the pandemic, Three Friends takes off from such an MO at the points language will break down, like suicide, childhood sexual abuse, loneliness. Rhythm changes, as Jerzy Grotowski pointed out in Towards a Poor Theatre. So each character has a style of non-prose—poetry, if you must. Three Friends is part-autobiography, a reaction to a workplace with HR that promotes “mindfulness” as if the workplace and world are not dysfunctional. And I have to say it is an anti-dystopia set in Melbourne; it’s also made of my life.

When will we see it? Perhaps next year! Oh, and here’s some Surf Coast, our new front yard view:

Next interruption will be moving to Gippsland.

Ditty

Thought I saw Les Murray in my rear vision mirror
walking with a black dog where the footpath isn’t clear.
Had like a simile in one hand but no lead gripped in the other:
puppy was or wasn’t his, it would appear.

Sun was shining on his temple and crows were sighing by the tracks
I got on to Preston Market in my café latte dacks
where railway bells are ringing and golden hocks are hanging
and Les is up ahead already singing.

Pituitary Blues

for Karl

It’s a sunny day in Melbourne
The rain is pouring down
I chased the nurse around my bed
I did it sitting down
I think I know just what to do
But I’ll put it off till spring
Easier to wrestle
When them alligators sing
For the minute think I’ll just relax and listen to the band
The pituitary blues has got me by the gland

Oh when them hormones come a knockin’
And the thyroid does the talkin’
It never works out pretty anyway
So go on and do your drillin’
I’ll just be here chillin’
It’s not as if I want the job today

It’s a great day to be going home
Lord knows I need some beauty sleep
This hotel’s got good service
But the barber isn’t cheap
My whusky days are over
Least till my brain begins to set
And women like a bearded gent
Though I knows I makes ‘em wet
So it’s songs I got and I’m gonna sing don’t give a fuck if you can’t stand
Them pituitary blues have got me by the gland

Ex Libris

If all the books in my whole house I’ve never read
Out of tricky polymorphism re-expressed into
(Non-sexually of course)
Ones I would
And sat up hoping:
Some get better, some worse, and some stay just as they are.
Although the number about fish masses;
About novel and novelist, painter – but not a musician – declines;
And the ones unchanged present themselves perhaps more brazenly.
I have calculated tMissed the Blackbirdhe number of novels I might in my day
Assuming an average span of average ones –
Is it obvious the Canadian brother between 39 and 60 beats his heart
Three two hundredths slower than la femme canadienne? –
Novels I’ll actually consume will not allow much shilly-shally
Yet the space for authors unbidden, novels unbidden –
Sadly those cut short beat them –
And books I just have to waste my time on if I’m not to ascend to boredom
Leave a narrow shelf space running off into time for the ones I must, I shall, I dread but do:
Just enough to range and rearrange
Deck chairs.
So when you speak to me of brevity, I’m against it:
It isn’t art that is too short but the frequency of art things too much and short things make many
So I’m against it.
So when you speak to me of clarity, simplicity, communication, surely you don’t mean in the service
The service of what you mean by brevity.
They’re not out there making haiku but slogans
For commercial disruption not the real kind
Just where less makes more and more make less
(Apparently)
So I’m against it.
Time anyhow prints me a book on the stoop in the shape of a person and how
Can you say no to puppy eyes?
One more drops off that shelf at your feet. Yes I will walk your damn book.
It will be my pleasure. The pleasure is all mine. Come on then.

So if you see a blackbird a-scratching in the dirt
If you see a blackbird a-scratching in the dirt
You could kindly tell him that he has got my shirt;
If you see a blackbird a-fleeing from a cat
If you see a blackbird a-fleeing from a cat
You should kindly tell him that he has got my hat;
And if you see a blackbird dance his manky dance
If you see a blackbird dance his manky dance
You must kindly tell him that he has got my pants;
Then if you see that blackbird a-dressed in all my feathers
If you spy that blackbird a-wearing all my feathers
You very well may sing to him what he is to me, me forever.

a science fiction convention

Covered the Natcon for Radio National. Is it me or is it SF fandom? A bit of both. We have both changed. I have never felt so at home at a con before. In fact it has been quite the opposite; that although I might have a lot in common with the people at such an event I could never really talk to them. Well, I still have the trouble talking, but I’m not too worried about that now. Before in some sense it was like not being able to talk to myself, and so distressing. Now?

More later.

Old Friends

Got an email from my old friend Donald in Mallacoota wrote the other day. What it must be to live there! Less than 400 people in the off season. But also very limited in what is available to you. I don’t mean in entertainment: the entertainment must be the same as here; I mean we we have a band, we watch movies, we drink and we fall about. No, it’s just that if you want to change your life you can just go out and get another job – perhaps not easy, but they are here, unless you have one of those jobs that there is only a handful in the whole country.

I suppose it sorts the wheat from the chaff as far as your priorities are concerned; you cannot just up and take some piece of crap on a whim. Also, the consumer society doesn’t grab you the way it can here. It adds some time for thought – and I guess you can obsess about some piece of rubbish much more successfully, on the other hand, without the means to confront yourself with the foolishness of actually laying your hands on it immediately!

clever stuff

Writing the latest chapter (24, the fourth Bianca one), I have been wondering if the references to research about utopian fiction must be submerged, or if people will enjoy them for what they are.

Why in fact did I put that bit in there? What in fact are they? I suppose I thought it was a rather neat way of thinking about existence. It could have been because I wanted to show off my erudition, I suppose. I was looking for an impersonal way of making an introduction to the chapter, because it was supposed to be a bit mysterious, it was a plot that had been mentioned but not described and should unfold in a leisurely fashion because there is already a sure element of suspense involved.

(Mind you, we haven’t written all the previous Bianca chapter yet.)

It occurred to me that the description of life as a corridor, with blinding windows beside it, mirrors behind and a trapdoor ahead, was picture of mortality we wanted our readers to fear on behalf of our valiant revolutionaries.

It is also a poetic image which is striking, the vulnerable inside the invulnerable. The elderly person in the robot.

The question is, do you mention the source or ask people to figure it out for themselves? I suppose if you do not put people off, there is no harm in it. It is a chapter of action, and can stand a little freight.

Naturally, this post will make more sense if you read the chapter. Come back in about a year; I hope it’s published by then! We’ll see if the bit about Erewhon makes it.

computer depending

Yes, hung from our computers. Mine had problems with its power supply, which I was told might cost more than a new laptop to repair. Fortunately, Lenny was able to fashion a new pin and solder it, saving me about $1600. Yes, and although I had avoided that sickening feeling of not having backed up my work, I was very much put out by having to use another computer. I had to use it elsewhere, nothing was where I wanted it; I suppose all this was fairly wussy, but I spend so much time on the laptop and I am a creature of habit.

pictures of george

I’ve begun a gallery for George Turner and asked Bruce Gillespie to put in comments, but he has declined, I think. Who can blame him. So little time in his life, and lots of old pictures. What to say? Anyway they’re on the gallery site. http://pv.rumspringe.org.au/wp-gallery2.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=282

grey river

Went to Grey River with Natalie. Thanks to the Sparrows. Natalie loved
searching in rockpools most of all, I think. I got some writing done,
we ate well and slept like crazy. 9 hours a night, when I have been
getting 4, plus the odd afternoon nap. There are about 8 houses strung
along the road on the slope, with koalas in the back yard. Heaven!
Have a look at the pictures in me gallery. http://pv.rumspringe.org.au/pictures

Sawmill Website

Did the Sawmill site for Jill and Gerard today. It’s tempting to write a script that will set up WordPress for me and copy all the plugins and themes I want. But I won’t. Better to spend my time learning new songs. Good site for Sawmill, though. It’s a great idea for people to record all the birds and animals they saw. http://sawmill.rumspringe.org.au/

S.Y. Agnon

music: Solomon Burke

Reading The Bridal Canopy which all new to me. And gently funny. Taking my time with it, but at the same time I’m eager to get onto the other books I have out of the library. I can’t help thinking there is a story in this stuff somewhere, but I’m not pushing it.

Fred Vargas

music: Josh Ritter
mood: yes

Yep, I’m reading Have Mercy on Us as well, which Jill and I agree is not profluent, but it’s likeable for that very reason. I like the village-y Paris, the town crier, which my theatre group once did, at the Williamstown Summer Festival (the first one). Who is this “Fred Vargas”?

Reserved at my Library

You can only reserve 15 at a time. What I recommend, they seem to say they’ll order, but in practise it’s a mystery as to why it takes so long. Perhaps what I order is so good it does the rounds of all the librarians before it goes out. Anyway, it’s like a little Christmas when they get one. Of course, it’s not always like this, I try to reserve stuff on their website that I know they’ll have, or I wouldn’t get much to read at all.

Band of gypsies /
by Jones, Gwyneth

I read the other two of this series, recommended to me by Rosaleen Love. She’s good, but Jill didn’t get into them. I can see why.

The blue mountain: A Novel.
by Shalev, Meir.

Highly recommended by Keren Rubinstein

Considering Aaron Sorkin
by Fahy, Thomas

Who is of course author of The West Wing and I have all the eps. It’s the closest thing to Shakespeare on the Romans – not that I’m comparing Aaron to Bill, but this is the most powerful person on earth and the problems are big, with lots of room for – stuff.

Elsewhere, perhaps /
by Oz, Amos

Always been curious about him.

Ferocious minds
by Broderick, Damien

A mate – his latest.

Inside job
by Willis, Connie

Read everything I can of hers. To Say Nothing of the Dog is great.

Looking for Jake : and other stories /
by Mieville, China.

Been borrowing this from Jill – ordinarily not a great short story reader, but he’s very good and some are long, I think.

On SF
by Disch, Thomas

The master.

Quest for consciousness
by Koch, Christof

This was ordered so long ago I think they’ve forgotten. This looks good though, as more research for “http://pv.rumspringe.org.au/research.html”>Chain

Rushdie, Salman, Standing Order Fiction author : pre-purchase record.
by Rushdie, Salman.

Shalimar the Clown

Science in the Capital: Science in the Capital /
by Robinson, Kim Stanley

Sequel to Forty Signs of Rain\\ I think, which my friend Glenda did not like, but Jill did.

The secret river /
by Grenville, Kate, 1950-

Very good reviews. 30 people want this book at the library. I am number 4.

Sports night (DVD)
by Sorkin, Aaron

Nuff said.

Spy kids (CD-ROM)

For Oscar. Been on order for 8 months and seems to be there now. But we’re third on the list.

First Post

music: Ravi Shankar
mood: Hm.

I’ve just installed this software and it’s not bad. It would be good to see if we can get other people to use it.

As usual, I’m going to list what I’m reading and watching right now. A little S.Y. Agnon: THE BRIDAL CANOPY, which is pretty funny as well as full of love. Just seen SEAN OF THE DEAD, which was pretty funny too, but of course just a little more crass than Agnon.