#rakesfall

I picked this up (at some delay) on the strength of Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors, one of the best books I’ve read in the past few years. Rakesfall was his debut novel (so far as I can tell) and, as is often the case, wilder, more rough-edged, and bursting at the seams with more ideas than it knows what to do with. It is profoundly not a book for everyone, and is pretty actively hostile both to treating it as brainless entertainment and to meticulously trying to keep track of and understand every particular. Taking a middle ground between them, I found it an absolutely joyous fever dream.

The book opens with a chorus of children’s ghosts spending a chapter discussing and analyzing their favourite TV show, and then for a time follows one of the main characters from it (after his costar murders him in a ritual that propels them into reality. Well, a reality). It gets steadily weirder and harder to explain from there, jumping back and forth across epochs, universes, and entire metaphysical systems. At one point it’s a political assassination in 20th century Sri Lanka. At another it’s a transhuman murder mystery on the post-post-post-post-apocalyptic remains of Earth. And at still another it’s the script of a play about Portuguese conquistadors torturing captured villagers for the location of nonexistent treasure, and also how the discovery of how to restore past lives’ memories centuries later really screwed up the friendship between future iterations of torturer and victim. It is mostly about the relationship between those two first entwined souls, as each haunts and is haunted by the other across uncountable infinities of lives, but it often takes some time in each vignette before you have any hope of figuring out how.

Which is to say, this is not a book that’s especially concerned with tight and linear plotting. Several different chunks of it were, according to a note in the front, originally published as standalone short stories and only later integrated into the larger narrative. This is absolutely unsurprising, but it’s not as if they’re outliers in how esoteric their connections to the rest of the book are – if not for that note, I wouldn’t have guessed there was anything unusual about them in particular. The book is very thinly sliced, with some larger sections forming little clumps of more conventional narrative and others being closer to an anthology organized by theme. Chandrasekera clearly enjoys plunging the reader into a wholly alien scene and letting them build up an image of what’s happening from context clues over several pages, which would rapidly become insufferable if he wasn’t also extremely good at it.

The writing itself is an absolute delight, playing with different idioms, perspectives, narrative genres and even formats as the mood takes it. Playful is a good way to describe the voice overall, I suppose? Jumping from grand and weighty symbolism and poetic turns of phrase to casual slang, intentionally childlike prose or the affect of an overly online group chat and back again without ever changing subject, that sort of thing. This was the pleasant surprise of a book that was really reliably enjoyable to read on a sentence-to-sentence level, and one with more than a few lines which I went back to and reread after finishing the page for the sheer pleasure of it.

It’s difficult to talk about the book’s themes and overarching symbolism in great detail just because there is so much of it. At the simplest level, you could describe its vision of reincarnation as ‘like in Cloud Atlas, if Cloud Atlas was good,’ but that’s leaving a painful amount of nuance on the cutting room floor. Someone willing to put in the effort could mine the book for a great many different essays worth of analysis and comparison, but I’m not that person.

🎄 December books🎄

I've been kind of struggling this month, which I'm putting down to watching stuff instead 😂