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Oleksandr Zholud's Reviews > The Saint of Bright Doors
The Saint of Bright Doors
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This is a South Asian urban fantasy that is heavily connected to Buddhist's backstory. I read it as a part of the monthly reading for May 2024 at SFF Hot from Printers: New Releases group. The book was nominated for Hugo and Locus (for Debut novel) awards in 2024.
The beginning looks like a run-of-the-mill fantasy, the way the first paragraph is:
The moment Fetter is born, Mother-of-Glory pins his shadow to the earth with a large brass nail and tears it from him. This is his first memory, the seed of many hours of therapy to come. It is raining. His shadow is cast upon reddish soil thick with clay that clings to Fetter as he rolls in it, unable to raise his head, saved from drowning in mud only by the fortunate angle of his landing. The arch of Mother-of-Glory’s knee frames what he sees next. His shadow writhes slowly on its nail. Mother-of-Glory dips her hands in that mud to gather up the ropy shadow of his umbilical cord and throttles his severed shadow with a quick loop, pulled tight. The shadow goes to its end in silence—or if it cries out, if shadows can cry out, that sound is lost in the rain.
It turns out that Fetter has several supernatural abilities, like he has to force himself to stand on the ground, for can turn weightless (or even massless), and fire cannot hurt him and a few others. He also is able to see demons, who are everywhere, but who mostly aren’t especially active, clinging to buildings’ walls.
He was born with the purpose, of becoming an assassin and killing his own absentee father as a final revenge for his mother. She trains him in this profession, pointing out that he ought to commit the Five Unforgivables, as set by the religious order of his father:
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.
So, from the very start readers know that Fetter should kill both his parents, and one of them trains him for it, quite a dark turn, for “The only way to change the world is through intentional, directed violence.”
However, quite soon we follow Fetter as he grows up and settles in Luriat, the city of bright doors, to live quite an ordinary modern life, watching TV, using a phone, having an affair with another man, learning more about the city and the world, including the fact that he is a second class citizen in local hierarchies of race and caste. Here the bright doors are introduced: they are elsewhere in the city, seemingly ordinary (usually painted in bright colors to stand out) but they cannot be opened and if a person visits their supposed other side, they’ll see there is nothing there…
So, at a first sight, it is more or less a usual growing-up fantasy novel, nothing spectacular – and it was what I thought until I’ve read this great review. For it turns out that Fetter is Rāhula, the only son of Siddhārtha Gautama (commonly known as the Buddha) and Mother-of-Glory is Yaśodharā, the wife of Prince Siddhartha. All characters have an established set of legends about them. I guess for Western readers, who are much more versed in Christianity than Buddhism, it is like a story of the Virgin Mary preparing her other kids to assassinate Jesus Christ! As such, it completely sets the story on its head.
The beginning looks like a run-of-the-mill fantasy, the way the first paragraph is:
The moment Fetter is born, Mother-of-Glory pins his shadow to the earth with a large brass nail and tears it from him. This is his first memory, the seed of many hours of therapy to come. It is raining. His shadow is cast upon reddish soil thick with clay that clings to Fetter as he rolls in it, unable to raise his head, saved from drowning in mud only by the fortunate angle of his landing. The arch of Mother-of-Glory’s knee frames what he sees next. His shadow writhes slowly on its nail. Mother-of-Glory dips her hands in that mud to gather up the ropy shadow of his umbilical cord and throttles his severed shadow with a quick loop, pulled tight. The shadow goes to its end in silence—or if it cries out, if shadows can cry out, that sound is lost in the rain.
It turns out that Fetter has several supernatural abilities, like he has to force himself to stand on the ground, for can turn weightless (or even massless), and fire cannot hurt him and a few others. He also is able to see demons, who are everywhere, but who mostly aren’t especially active, clinging to buildings’ walls.
He was born with the purpose, of becoming an assassin and killing his own absentee father as a final revenge for his mother. She trains him in this profession, pointing out that he ought to commit the Five Unforgivables, as set by the religious order of his father:
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.
So, from the very start readers know that Fetter should kill both his parents, and one of them trains him for it, quite a dark turn, for “The only way to change the world is through intentional, directed violence.”
However, quite soon we follow Fetter as he grows up and settles in Luriat, the city of bright doors, to live quite an ordinary modern life, watching TV, using a phone, having an affair with another man, learning more about the city and the world, including the fact that he is a second class citizen in local hierarchies of race and caste. Here the bright doors are introduced: they are elsewhere in the city, seemingly ordinary (usually painted in bright colors to stand out) but they cannot be opened and if a person visits their supposed other side, they’ll see there is nothing there…
So, at a first sight, it is more or less a usual growing-up fantasy novel, nothing spectacular – and it was what I thought until I’ve read this great review. For it turns out that Fetter is Rāhula, the only son of Siddhārtha Gautama (commonly known as the Buddha) and Mother-of-Glory is Yaśodharā, the wife of Prince Siddhartha. All characters have an established set of legends about them. I guess for Western readers, who are much more versed in Christianity than Buddhism, it is like a story of the Virgin Mary preparing her other kids to assassinate Jesus Christ! As such, it completely sets the story on its head.
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