Review: Rakesfall, by Vajra Chandrasekera

Review: Rakesfall, by Vajra Chandrasekera

by Rich Horton

Vajra Chandrasekera made a big (and deserved) splash with his first novel, The Saint of Bright Doors, which won the Nebula Award last year. Rakesfall is his second novel, and it is if anything even more ambitious than his first, and it has been nominted for this year's Nebula. It is intricately -- and to be honest, sometimes confusingly -- structured. It is very well written. It audaciously mixes fantasy and science fiction -- and the fantastical parts are original and intriguing, while the science fiction ventures into the very far future with some very cool technological speculation. It even briefly visits the milieu of The Saint of Bright Doors. I was really primed to love it -- but I felt Chandrasekera didn't quite pull it off. 

Rakesfall opens with an excitingly confusing narrative -- a group of people -- a "fandom" -- are watching a TV series following the lives of a girl named Annelid and a boy named Leveret, shown on an old TV. The "fandom" seems possibly to consist entirely of dead people, and Annelid and Leveret seem to sometimes watch the "fandom" on their own TV. This is strange and cool ... and then we are in another milieu, and then another, and another ... And there are stories within stories. There is a long sequence in which the viewpoint character (seemingly a version of Annelid called Vidyucchika) is haunted by a corpse (a version of Leveret called Lambajihva) while living in a house whose owner's husband and son are both, well, undead. There is a justifiedly angry sequence set in Sri Lanka during the recent wars. Things jump forward to increasingly far futures, with a ruined Earth subject to ambiguously successful attempts at restoration, and with humanity spread into space, and also into digital worlds. Some of the embedded stories are real tours de force -- a postmodernist play about the horrible history of European colonization of Sri Lanka; and a fairy tale of sorts about Kings and Heroes and Wasps in particular. 

It's impressive, urgently and often beautifully written. It's powerfully felt. It's new, it's original. And ... for me, it didn't quite work. My main problem was the last half or so, in which the SF speculation kind of goes off the rails for me, and which was for some time rather boring, and by the end rather banal. This is a shame, because Chandrasekera can really write, and because his aims are impressive. Better, I think, that he try things like Rakesfall than settle for the routine -- but it's a risk/reward game, and sometimes the risks win. I'll add that perhaps the fault is with me -- perhaps it is my failure to understand the book more than the author's failure that I'm displaying. Fair enough! (Though I think the banality of the concluding segment is real.)

Is Rakesfall worth reading? Yes. Is Chandrasekera one of the most exciting newer writers in the field? Absolutely. In a way, the fact that he isn't afraid to do something as audacious as this novel, even if (in my opinion) the result is flawed, is good news. Because his next effort may be just as audacious -- and may absolutely nail it.