Saint of Bright Doors

( em português → sol2070.in/2025/06/livro-the-saint-of-bright-doors/ )

A strange, mythical, and captivating novel: The Saint of Bright Doors (2023), by Sri Lankan author Vajra Chandrasekera, winner of the 2024 Nebula Award—one of the most important awards in speculative fiction.

Strange, perhaps, because it comes from another culture. In Buddhist Sri Lanka, it may not have sounded so exotic, despite its heresy against the dominant religion. Classified as fantasy and full of magical realism, it is a queer Oedipal saga where legends are reality.

We follow Fetter from childhood, when his pagan mother eliminates his shadow and trains him to commit all five of the most serious religious crimes, including murdering saints and even his mother and father.

It is necessary to situate the book to understand it better. The Buddhist religion is often seen in the West with an aura of greater coherence, critical practical spirit, and pacifism. But in countries such as Sri Lanka, which is predominantly Buddhist, religious institutions seem no better than those we know well, with their corruption, political promiscuity, and neglect of multiple forms of violence. In some respects, they seem even worse, as they brutally contradict what they preach, given the culturally and religiously motivated massacres that have been devastating the country.

Vajra transports this apocalyptic spiritual context to a magical world with levitating saints, magic doors, revolutionary movements, demons, and “enlightened” beings—without discarding smartphones and online surveillance—as if all religious and folkloric mythology were part of consensual reality.

Just as Western stories rebel against involuntary Christian indoctrination in education, the author does so with Buddhism, although he does not name it.

The gay protagonist Fetter is the unrecognized heir of the “enlightened” one, a quasi-chosen one. He leaves his mother and ends up joining a support group for quasi-chosen ones, being drawn into a conspiracy to unravel the mystery of the bright doors and, with his special abilities, even helping to fight the religious-political tyranny.

Loaded with psychological archetypes, it reconciles the mythical with the mundane, as one critic said, the surreal with wisdom.

I just felt that, at times, it drags on in an exposition of scenarios that don't resonate, at least with me (who already has an above-average familiarity with the East and Buddhism).

However, there is a twist at the end that fully compensates for the less captivating passages, practically on the same level as the great immemorial myths.

I tore through this book, and might just re-read it immediately, which is something I never do.

It starts out as a fantasy story that feels exceptionally weird because Chandrasekera's willing to do his world building / exposition very slowly. I kept going through a lot of confusion because the writing itself is just so beautiful. And then gradually as the exposition falls into place it becomes clearer that the book is at least partly a critique of religious fanaticisms and chauvinisms... but each time I felt I really had a handle on the book something in its world would shift - either the protagonist learning a new piece of his own story or a significant detail the the author waited until a dramatic moment to show the reader. Even the ending feels like another instance of that, and it is a relatively unclear ending, though it fits the whole mood of the book enough not to be frustrating.

To be clear: I like this kind of storytelling better than spending pages and pages on worldbuilding before anything happens, and all loose ends tied up by the conclusion. It just needs a damn good writer to make it work, and Chandrasekera is one. I also never felt like I was more confused than the protagonist himself, which I think is how the book managed not to fall into feeling like a cheap trick.

After reading it, I read up on the story of Rāhula, and realised that many more details in this book are clearly-intentional references to that than I'd picked up on. And I read some Sri Lankan history and realised that much of what felt like echoes of Myanmar or Israel were more direct references to specific aspects of Sri Lanka's civil war. Part of why I want to re-read is to have those things in mind, but I think it's also a strength of the book that it works as a more general allegory too. I think I would advise other readers to go in the same order as me: dive into the book first, and catch up on its references after.

#SFFBookClub