“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.”
Fetter’s mother rips off his shadow immediately after birth, and almost as immediately starts his training. He commits his first killing at age eleven (a grand-uncle on his grandfather’s side), and spends the next two years murdering various extended family members at his mother’s direction in their backwater town of Acusdab. At age thirteen Fetter’s mother kicks him out of their home and sends him off to begin his life’s work: finding a way to assassinate his father, the living messiah known as the Perfect and Kind.
When we next see him, Fetter is in his early twenties living in the seaside town of Luriat, and has completely rejected his mother’s plans for him. He’s got a comfortable life, a boyfriend, plenty of time to read, a solid reputation as the helpful person his neighbors can go to for help, and a weekly therapy group for the offspring of messiahs, rejected prophets, and others who have been “unchosen” by their various religious destinies.
Note: none of this is played for whimsy or humor. Not really, unless it’s the kind of gallows humor you get where you have to laugh at how fatally ridiculous things have gotten. Vajra Chandrasekera’s city of Luriat is a bustling modern metropolis, with a diverse population, areas of wealth and poverty and the false cheer of gentrification, as well as a mishmash of religions and cults and an all too real oppressive government. It also happens to have things like relapsed holy men who can accidentally cause visions, the occasional person (like Fetter) who can fly if they forget to keep their feet attached to the ground, and roving spectral monsters that can’t be seen by most of the population. Strangest of all, every door in the city has to be transparent glass, or mesh, or kept permanently open, because otherwise it will stop being usable as a door. Forever.
…any closed door in Luriat can become a bright door, if left closed long enough. Any doorway that can be shut and that can’t be seen through when closed, if left shut and untouched for an undetermined length of time will vanish from one side and become unopenable from the other.
Magical realism is completely different from magic in a fantasy world. The magic is there, but most of the time people either completely ignore it, or they just accept it as, huh, that’s weird isn’t it? Fetter has no shadow; that’s not a metaphor, he literally doesn’t cast a shadow, and people just don’t comment on it, if they even notice at all. The bright doors are a recognizable phenomenon around the entire city. And yet you still have business owners doing stupid things like bribing the inspectors to get around the building requirement of transparent doors, and now your entire shopping mall went bankrupt because so many of your entrances have become an unusable supernatural phenomenon, you jackass. There’s an entire bureaucracy wrapped around the bright doors – like the scientific study that Fetter gets roped into as cover for a revolutionary movement – but mostly the doors are just curiosities.
Fetter himself is the eternal outsider, even in a city he’s lived in for years. He’s caught between his mother’s war on his father, and his identity as the son of the Perfect and Kind. It’s exhausting, having to remember at all times to not accidentally float into the sky, to pretend he doesn’t feel the cold wind blowing out of the bright doors or see the horrifying devils that stalk the crowds. Sometimes Fetter doesn’t even know if there’s a real person there outside of everything he has to pretend to be. For a while he even has to take on a stolen identify so he can collect information for his secret revolutionary friends. He spends his time pretending to be an up-and-coming student so he can help study the bright doors, getting closer to a young scientist who he’s uncomfortably drawn to, praying that all his identities never intersect and out him as a lower-caste revolutionary fraud and religious freak of nature (with a boyfriend), any of which could end with him getting imprisoned, disappeared, or outright executed.
It felt to me like the study of the bright doors really highlighted the ridiculousness of the things society focuses on when there are much bigger problems. There’s a team of scientists who’s only job is to watch closed doors in shifts to see what happens when they translate to a bright door, but none of it really seems intent on solving the fact that there are magic doors eating regular doors all over the city. It’s like the organization of castes in the city. There are an insane amount of levels and distinctions, and which people are considered “higher” than others changes so often that people have to consult a recent almanac to find out who’s just committed a social blunder, and you can imagine someone shouting how can this possibly be important? There are “prisons” that are really cities miles across – with quasi-governments overseeing each province – with no trials, sometimes no indication of what people were imprisoned for, and the people inside are still focused on which prisoners are members of which castes so any supplies coming in can be directed to the people who “deserve” it.
Fetter already knows the government is dangerous (and becoming more so as the invading forces of the Perfect and Kind gradually take over), but it takes watching a mass execution on the beach – one that’s so large the platform for the gallows stretches into the waves and why does that little detail make it so much more horrifying? – to realize that all his filling out the right forms and keeping his head down is really just whistling past the graveyard. This is a government of total control and weaponized religion, with an ability to rewrite history that would make the rulers in 1984 green with envy. Even Fetter’s revolutionary friends, with their oh so calculated pushing the boundaries of what is and isn’t illegal, don’t yet understand that people can do everything right and still be singled out for punishment. Nothing is safe when you’re living under a government that will arrest and execute and then make up the reasons for it later.
None of the others understand that the law might do anything, at any time, to anyone, and justify itself any way it likes – it is feral, like the invisible laws and powers of the world of which it is a pale imitation.
Fetter’s overwhelming impulse to be helpful means he’s constantly being cast into the role of whatever the people around him need at the moment, regardless of what he might think about it. Chandrasekera’s fever-drenched prose paints a more and more nightmarish situation as Fetter is swallowed whole by some of the more insidious elements of colonialism, too many competing religious factions to keep track of, and an entire continent’s history of lies and betrayal. There were moments when I wanted to ask Fetter what the heck he was doing, wasn’t he supposed to be running from this, how can the risk to his friends, his lover, his comfortable life be worth it? Which of course leads to the very frightening realization that, if all of those things could be taken away, why not risk it all to just do something. Even if, like Fetter, you can never quite put into words why it was ever an option for you in the first place, or ever know how it will all turn out.