Back in my long-lost youth, when I was running through the corpus of published science fiction like a hot knife through butter, the Nebula Award used to be the most coveted accolade in the field. Writers prized them because they represented the legitimate judgement of their peers: only published members of the leading SF authors’ club, the Science Fiction Writers of America, were eligible to vote for the nominated works, which were put up for recognition by their publishers just as Booker Prize nominees are today. Although a big-selling novel or other work certainly stood a better chance in the lists than a more obscure entry, the Nebulas were in no sense a popularity contest; they were taken, on the contrary, as an endorsement of quality imaginative writing, though not always of a conventional literary kind. To bag a Nebula was to be elevated to the high table of science fiction: winners over the years have included Dune (Frank Herbert), The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin), The Gods Themselves (Isaac Asimov), Rendezvous with Rama (Arthur C. Clarke) and American Gods (Neil Gaiman). Even people who never read science fiction are sure to recognize at least a few of those names.
Nowadays, SWFA stands for ‘Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association’ and the number of eligible territories of publication has spread far beyond the USA. The field, therefore, is broader. Yet the Nebula still stands, as it always has, for quality writing in the ‘speculative’ genre. The Nebula for 2023, which went to The Saint of Bright Doors, a novel by a Lankan author named Vajra Chandrasekera, should therefore have been big, big news on our little island. Science fiction is hardly a stranger to our shores, after all; this country was home to one of the acknowledged giants of the field for over half a century.
Yet, to my astonishment, the book and its author were practically ignored. The contrast with the fuss made over Shehan Karunatilaka’s receipt of the 2022 Booker Prize was sharp and, to SF fans at least, cutting. Not that The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida didn’t deserve its Booker, or that its author’s subsequent celebrity is in any way disproportionate to his achievement; only that Chandrasekera has surely deserved more of his compatriots than a noncommittal 185-word notice in the Sunday Times Plus, which, as far as I have been able to find by googling, is all he got. This is, frankly, scandalous – regardless of whether The Saint of Bright Doors, his Nebula-winning novel, is any good or not.
It is especially outrageous because, like The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, The Saint of Bright Doors is a novel with a strong real-world point to make, one that bears on urgent and salient Lankan social and political issues. It does so less obviously than Karunatilaka’s book, but more polemically. The relevance is disguised by the setting of the novel, a kind of parallel-universe Lanka that many of us will not at first recognize as our own country. The use of some such disguise was sadly unavoidable, for freedom of expression, though protected under the Constitution of Sri Lanka, is in fact forbidden to anyone who wishes to confront what one of the characters in Bright Doors refers to as ‘the invisible laws and powers’ of his world – or, as he also calls them, devils: the demons that infest the collective psyche of our nation.
What is this with Lankan authors and devils? The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is full of rakshasayas and preteyas, bossing the dead about and plaguing the living. In The Saint of Bright Doors, too, ghastly-looking supernatural entities abound, and though only the central character, Fetter, can actually see them, everyone believes in their existence. In his home country of Acusdab, the favoured traditional medicine is what Lankans call devil-dancing: the shamanic ritual ‘exorcism’ of evil disease-causing spirits. Fetter doesn’t seem to think these rites have any curative effect, but the devils are there all the same, cavorting invisibly about the sick and the dying, fastened parasitically on to buildings to batten (presumably) on some psychic emanation produced by the people inside, or simply stalking through the streets of the city of Luriat on business of their own. One is forced to ask: is it only coincidence that the first two novels written in English by Lankans to win prestigious international literary prizes are chock-full of devils?
To get the obvious out of the way, I don’t think Chandrasekera pinched the idea for his devils from Karunatilaka. Demons are common property and, in any case, he was already halfway through writing The Saint of Bright Doors when Chats with the Dead, the precursor of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, was published in mid-2020. I find it just as logical to conclude that, unbeknownst to each other, two Lankan writers dealing in their different ways with the same national nightmare inevitably found themselves channelling the common psychic wellsprings of their culture. Sinhalese folklore and the Buddhist jataka tradition are replete with asuras, rakshasas, ghouls and shapeshifting demons with magic powers. They’re all over the ancient Sinhalese chronicles, too: Kuveni, the jilted, vengeful yakkhini consort of Prince Vijaya in the ancient Sinhalese origin-story, stands at the head of a legion. The Mahavamsa gives this account of the coronation of Pandukabhaya, an early, pre-Buddhist king of Lanka:
It is especially outrageous because, like The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, The Saint of Bright Doors is a novel with a strong real-world point to make, one that bears on urgent and salient Lankan social and political issues. It does so less obviously than Karunatilaka’s book, but more polemically. The relevance is disguised by the setting of the novel, a kind of parallel-universe Lanka that many of us will not at first recognize as our own country. The use of some such disguise was sadly unavoidable, for freedom of expression, though protected under the Constitution of Sri Lanka, is in fact forbidden to anyone who wishes to confront what one of the characters in Bright Doors refers to as ‘the invisible laws and powers’ of his world – or, as he also calls them, devils: the demons that infest the collective psyche of our nation.
❦
What is this with Lankan authors and devils? The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is full of rakshasayas and preteyas, bossing the dead about and plaguing the living. In The Saint of Bright Doors, too, ghastly-looking supernatural entities abound, and though only the central character, Fetter, can actually see them, everyone believes in their existence. In his home country of Acusdab, the favoured traditional medicine is what Lankans call devil-dancing: the shamanic ritual ‘exorcism’ of evil disease-causing spirits. Fetter doesn’t seem to think these rites have any curative effect, but the devils are there all the same, cavorting invisibly about the sick and the dying, fastened parasitically on to buildings to batten (presumably) on some psychic emanation produced by the people inside, or simply stalking through the streets of the city of Luriat on business of their own. One is forced to ask: is it only coincidence that the first two novels written in English by Lankans to win prestigious international literary prizes are chock-full of devils?
To get the obvious out of the way, I don’t think Chandrasekera pinched the idea for his devils from Karunatilaka. Demons are common property and, in any case, he was already halfway through writing The Saint of Bright Doors when Chats with the Dead, the precursor of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, was published in mid-2020. I find it just as logical to conclude that, unbeknownst to each other, two Lankan writers dealing in their different ways with the same national nightmare inevitably found themselves channelling the common psychic wellsprings of their culture. Sinhalese folklore and the Buddhist jataka tradition are replete with asuras, rakshasas, ghouls and shapeshifting demons with magic powers. They’re all over the ancient Sinhalese chronicles, too: Kuveni, the jilted, vengeful yakkhini consort of Prince Vijaya in the ancient Sinhalese origin-story, stands at the head of a legion. The Mahavamsa gives this account of the coronation of Pandukabhaya, an early, pre-Buddhist king of Lanka:
He settled the yakkha Kalavela on the east side of the city, the yakkha Cittaraja at the lower end of the Abhaya tank. The slave-woman who had helped him in times past and was re-born of a yakkhini, the thankful (king) settled at the south gate of the City. Within the royal precincts he housed the yakkhini in the form of a mare. Year by year he had sacrificial offerings made to them and to other yakkhas; but on festival-days he sat with Cittaraja beside him on a seat of equal height, and having gods and men to dance before him, the king took his pleasure, in joyous and merry wise.*
Pandukabhaya, on the scant evidence of this paragraph (‘having gods and men to dance before him’), is traditionally considered the inventor of devil-dancing. But he himself is scarcely historical; he gets a brief, garbled mention in a fourth-century ce Pali work called the Dipavamsa but is otherwise known almost entirely from the Mahavamsa, which was composed about a thousand years after he is supposed to have lived. The roots of Lankan demonology are authentically prehistoric.
Some modern commentators consider the Yakkhas to have been a population of Lankan indigenes who were all but wiped out by the Vijayan invaders and whose remnants were later absorbed into the Sinhalese population or became whom we now call Vedda people. There is plenty of evidence in the chronicles for some such occurrence, and it would certainly explain the later demonization of the Yakkhas (as justifying their effective genocide). But whether or not we give credence to this appalling theory, there’s no denying that devils, demons, witchcraft and possession have always featured disproportionately in Lankan mythology, folklore and faith. Consider the following passage, written over three centuries ago by a close, astute observer of the Sinhalese people:
And indeed it is sad to consider, how this poor People are subjected to the Devil, and they themselves acknowledge it their misery, saying their Countrey is so full of Devils, and evil Spirits, that unless in this manner they should adore them, they would be destroyed by them…Their chief supplication they make to the Devil, as being God's instrument, sent to punish and afflict whom he pleaseth; as I have discoursed at large already.
The words are from Robert Knox’s An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon, a product of its author’s nineteen-year confinement on the island at the pleasure of the King of Kandy.† Other foreign authors, too, have written of the Lankan obsession with magic, charms and evil spirits. Few took these matters seriously, though some were credulously or cynically moved to pass on tales of dark apparitions and baneful mysteries that they had heard from the locals. Only the Protestant missionaries who began arriving in large numbers during the early British period – and who were far more prepared to believe in devils than the suave Oxford and Cambridge divines who administered the Church of England in Ceylon – took the diabolism of the natives seriously, writing fierce tracts against the popular practices of demon-worship (as they saw it), devil-dancing and magic. Interestingly, their hostility is echoed in The Buddhist Catechism, a work composed along well-worn Protestant lines by Henry Steel Olcott and taught to Buddhist children in government schools until the 1960s; but even this condemnation by one of the founders of modern Sinhalese Buddhism has failed to wean us away from our fascination with the dark side. A monograph on the subject published during the Victorian era – On Demonology & Witchcraft in Ceylon by Dandris de Silva Gooneratn – remains in print to this day. Our popular culture, too, is still haunted by devils.
Hardly surprising, then, that the two most successful Lankan novelists of recent times have hit upon demons and their kin as a metaphor for the shadow-side of our national psyche. They were not the first to make the connexion: deviltry and demons have long served as a popular metaphor among artists, performers and writers portraying or commenting on recent history in the Sinhala arts. The late Gananath Obeyesekere, who published a number of important anthropological works on demonology, called demons ‘a class of cultural symbols which are invested with subjective significance in order to articulate psychological conflicts.’‡ They serve equally well, at times, for articulating political ones.
❦
I almost gave up on The Saint of Bright Doors though – twice. The first occasion arrived on p. 40 or so, when someone says to Fetter, the principal character, ‘But first, I need to tell you both a story.’ Oh god, I thought, not another bloody info-dump.
Info-dumps, as we fans call them, are the bane of science fiction and fantasy: long passages, often extending over chapters, in which the author supplies the reader with necessary facts about the exotic setting of their story (the ethnology and mythology of Middle-Earth in The Lord of the Rings, the strange ecology of the desert planet Arrakis in Dune), or explains some important scientific idea on which the plot hinges (such as the hypothetical faster-than light particles used to send messages back from the future in Gregory Benford’s Timescape). Info-dumps are not good writing in any genre – readers looking for a story don’t want to be lectured – but are better tolerated, for obvious reasons, in SF and fantasy than in the mainstream. The first five chapters of The Saint of Bright Doors had been almost purely narrative, bringing me up to speed with Fetter’s curriculum vitae and describing Luriat, the city where he has come to live. None of it had been particularly engaging or enlightening and, at the end of five chapters, I still had no idea where the story was going – or even what the story might be about. Fetter seemed to me like your typical rootless Generation X protagonist: conflicted, listless, uncommitted, opportunistic – and quite uninteresting to a reader from an older generation for whom the psychology of a fictional character is of greater importance than the character’s ‘feels’. Fetter has been brought up by his mother to murder his father, a famous cult leader, but has left his home in ‘the hinterlands’ and come to the big city to get away from all that (not that he affects to care much about it one way or another). As for Luriat, I couldn’t get any handle on it at all; it seemed to be one of those made-up generic locales one comes upon in too-artsy modernist and postmodernist fiction, a conurbation of words peopled by enigmatic beings doing unexplained and seemingly pointless things, like the House in Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi or the settings of some of China Mieville’s stories.
After five eventless chapters of scene-setting, the promise of yet another info-dump was daunting. I stuck it out, though, and was rewarded for my efforts by the first properly drawn scene in the novel: Fetter, pretending to be someone else, accepts an invitation to dinner with some members of the Luriati elite, people far above his supposed station in life. I like dinner-party scenes, and was quite enjoying this one in spite of all the mysterious small talk about caste, religious cults and state corruption flying about above Fetter’s head, till he dropped a brick no-one in his situation could credibly have dropped: a gratuitous act of self-revelation concerning his identity that was, moreover, a confession of doings that, in Luriat, are considered criminal. Not the sort of thing an impostor at a posh dinner, already suffering from anxiety and social dislocation, would be likely to reveal, even after a couple of drinks. I flung the book away in annoyance, cynically wondering on what basis the SFWA could possibly have given it a Nebula.
But they had, all the same; and this, to me, suggested that The Saint of Bright Doors might have merits of a different, less conventional kind. I learned from a quick trawl through the Goodreads site that many other readers had complained about the things that annoyed me – initial slowness, confusing descriptions, general disorientation – but some had persevered and ended up praising the book. This on its own wasn’t enough to make me want to go back to it, but then I found a review explaining that the point of departure for the plot is a rough blend of Buddhist lore and Sinhalese race-myth. ‘Fetter’, I learned, is Sanskrit for Rahula: the name the Buddha-to-be gave his infant son because he regarded the boy as the strongest of all the chains binding him to the wheel of existence. Fetter’s father, in The Saint of Bright Doors, is certainly not the Buddha, but he is the founder and head of a new religious cult with superficial resemblances to Buddhism that has become very popular in Fetter’s country. And Fetter’s mother, whom he refers to as Mother-of-Glory (a very rough gloss on Yashodara, the name of Prince Siddhartha’s wife), is not the devastated but ultimately reconciled bhikkhuni of Buddhist tradition but bears a far closer resemblance to the demon-queen Kuveni. His father, too, is more Prince Vijaya than Prince Siddhartha.
With this helpful (but externally obtained) information, the earlier info-dumps began to make sense. Fetter and Luriat slowly slid into focus, though events, times and places remained confusing until I realised what an ingenious stratagem Chandrasekera has used to distinguish his parallel, fictional reality from the real world we live in. There are clues to it right from the beginning of the novel; we learn, for example, that ‘North Jambu’ food is very similar to ‘Luriati style’. I won’t say more for fear of spoiling the surprise, but keep an eye open for ‘the muddy lagoon of the singing fish’. Once this key is turned, other, incidental mysteries also reveal themselves: the name of an exclusive residential district of Luriat, for instance, becomes an obvious fantasy analogue of Cinnamon Gardens…
Now that my mind’s eye had something to look at, I began reading with more interest and, soon enough, with pleasure. This lasted, more or less, all the way through the long, episodically unfolding denouement of the book, which commences eighty pages or so before the end. Things do get a bit messy after that; the reader senses the author’s grip weakening. He manages to hold it all together, though, long enough to deliver a series of credible action set-pieces that bring the story to a close. Personally, I felt that the overall effect was to disperse among several scenes the impact that one good strong climax should have produced, and the novel ends without fully unfolding its subtext. But neatly satisfactory endings are hard to pull off for a writer seeking to transcend genre and write a novel of anthropological insight and political criticism, which is what Vajra Chandrasekera has tried to do. Has he succeeded?
It would depend, I suppose, on whom you asked. Science-fiction and fantasy readers enjoy the work of constructing their own imaginary visuals out of verbal materials supplied by authors; much of the pleasure of reading in these genres is derived from this activity, and authors particularly adept at providing the raw materials are celebrated as ‘world-builders’ capable of inventing credible, consistent and appealing imaginary settings for their stories. Herbert, LeGuin and Clarke were famous for this, as were many other SF writers like Brian Aldiss, Larry Niven, Robert Silverberg and Gene Wolfe. I suppose Mieville and Neal Stephenson are the present-day masters. The most famous world-builder of all was, of course, J.R.R. Tolkein, who wasn’t a science-fiction writer at all.
This being the case, it probably didn’t matter to many of Vajra Chandrasekera’s readers in the USA (where the book has sold remarkably well), or in other parts of the world, that the setting he has created is so foreign to them as to be positively alien; they would easily have adapted it to their own limitations of knowledge and taste. Quite a few of the settings are comfortably international anyway: generic apartment blocks and crumbling shopping malls are common enough anywhere in the world. The most brilliantly imagined setting of all, an entire country that seems to have been turned into a concentration or refugee camp, could be sited anywhere in the humid tropical zones of Planet Earth. All this is fine, but what doesn’t really gel is where exactly on the stream of real or imagined history Luriat, Fetter’s homeland of Acusdab, and Fetter himself are floating. In spite of all the present-day buildings and technology, they seem unmoored, somehow. And while this may not affect a reader’s enjoyment of the novel, it does make it hard to work out what it really is about. Overseas reviews, amateur and professional alike, are full of the most amusing confusion. Here’s a typical one from the Goodreads web site:
After five eventless chapters of scene-setting, the promise of yet another info-dump was daunting. I stuck it out, though, and was rewarded for my efforts by the first properly drawn scene in the novel: Fetter, pretending to be someone else, accepts an invitation to dinner with some members of the Luriati elite, people far above his supposed station in life. I like dinner-party scenes, and was quite enjoying this one in spite of all the mysterious small talk about caste, religious cults and state corruption flying about above Fetter’s head, till he dropped a brick no-one in his situation could credibly have dropped: a gratuitous act of self-revelation concerning his identity that was, moreover, a confession of doings that, in Luriat, are considered criminal. Not the sort of thing an impostor at a posh dinner, already suffering from anxiety and social dislocation, would be likely to reveal, even after a couple of drinks. I flung the book away in annoyance, cynically wondering on what basis the SFWA could possibly have given it a Nebula.
But they had, all the same; and this, to me, suggested that The Saint of Bright Doors might have merits of a different, less conventional kind. I learned from a quick trawl through the Goodreads site that many other readers had complained about the things that annoyed me – initial slowness, confusing descriptions, general disorientation – but some had persevered and ended up praising the book. This on its own wasn’t enough to make me want to go back to it, but then I found a review explaining that the point of departure for the plot is a rough blend of Buddhist lore and Sinhalese race-myth. ‘Fetter’, I learned, is Sanskrit for Rahula: the name the Buddha-to-be gave his infant son because he regarded the boy as the strongest of all the chains binding him to the wheel of existence. Fetter’s father, in The Saint of Bright Doors, is certainly not the Buddha, but he is the founder and head of a new religious cult with superficial resemblances to Buddhism that has become very popular in Fetter’s country. And Fetter’s mother, whom he refers to as Mother-of-Glory (a very rough gloss on Yashodara, the name of Prince Siddhartha’s wife), is not the devastated but ultimately reconciled bhikkhuni of Buddhist tradition but bears a far closer resemblance to the demon-queen Kuveni. His father, too, is more Prince Vijaya than Prince Siddhartha.
With this helpful (but externally obtained) information, the earlier info-dumps began to make sense. Fetter and Luriat slowly slid into focus, though events, times and places remained confusing until I realised what an ingenious stratagem Chandrasekera has used to distinguish his parallel, fictional reality from the real world we live in. There are clues to it right from the beginning of the novel; we learn, for example, that ‘North Jambu’ food is very similar to ‘Luriati style’. I won’t say more for fear of spoiling the surprise, but keep an eye open for ‘the muddy lagoon of the singing fish’. Once this key is turned, other, incidental mysteries also reveal themselves: the name of an exclusive residential district of Luriat, for instance, becomes an obvious fantasy analogue of Cinnamon Gardens…
Now that my mind’s eye had something to look at, I began reading with more interest and, soon enough, with pleasure. This lasted, more or less, all the way through the long, episodically unfolding denouement of the book, which commences eighty pages or so before the end. Things do get a bit messy after that; the reader senses the author’s grip weakening. He manages to hold it all together, though, long enough to deliver a series of credible action set-pieces that bring the story to a close. Personally, I felt that the overall effect was to disperse among several scenes the impact that one good strong climax should have produced, and the novel ends without fully unfolding its subtext. But neatly satisfactory endings are hard to pull off for a writer seeking to transcend genre and write a novel of anthropological insight and political criticism, which is what Vajra Chandrasekera has tried to do. Has he succeeded?
❦
It would depend, I suppose, on whom you asked. Science-fiction and fantasy readers enjoy the work of constructing their own imaginary visuals out of verbal materials supplied by authors; much of the pleasure of reading in these genres is derived from this activity, and authors particularly adept at providing the raw materials are celebrated as ‘world-builders’ capable of inventing credible, consistent and appealing imaginary settings for their stories. Herbert, LeGuin and Clarke were famous for this, as were many other SF writers like Brian Aldiss, Larry Niven, Robert Silverberg and Gene Wolfe. I suppose Mieville and Neal Stephenson are the present-day masters. The most famous world-builder of all was, of course, J.R.R. Tolkein, who wasn’t a science-fiction writer at all.
This being the case, it probably didn’t matter to many of Vajra Chandrasekera’s readers in the USA (where the book has sold remarkably well), or in other parts of the world, that the setting he has created is so foreign to them as to be positively alien; they would easily have adapted it to their own limitations of knowledge and taste. Quite a few of the settings are comfortably international anyway: generic apartment blocks and crumbling shopping malls are common enough anywhere in the world. The most brilliantly imagined setting of all, an entire country that seems to have been turned into a concentration or refugee camp, could be sited anywhere in the humid tropical zones of Planet Earth. All this is fine, but what doesn’t really gel is where exactly on the stream of real or imagined history Luriat, Fetter’s homeland of Acusdab, and Fetter himself are floating. In spite of all the present-day buildings and technology, they seem unmoored, somehow. And while this may not affect a reader’s enjoyment of the novel, it does make it hard to work out what it really is about. Overseas reviews, amateur and professional alike, are full of the most amusing confusion. Here’s a typical one from the Goodreads web site:
…a story about creating vs consuming, about how capitalism is slowly (or quickly even) consuming us all regardless of what we are creating. how money is allocated to religions vs how money is allocated to science. how people care so much more about their individualism than communities
Fiddlesticks. The Saint of Bright Doors is about none of those things, which are just contemporary American conundrums that the reviewer thinks are important. You can see how someone used to thinking in such parochial terms might not be able to grasp Chandrasekera’s novel in any other way. The foreign readers who have understood that the novel is ‘a take on (another universe’s) Buddhism, Sri Lanka-flavoured’ as a more perceptive reviewer put it, may understand better. However, they may not find the novel to have such resonance with their own lives and cultures. Then again, it scarcely matters, does it, so long as they enjoy it? A book is not what its author writes but what its readers read.
For Lankans, the difficulty is more subtle. Fetter’s world is full of familiar elements. We recognize some of the scenery – the ominous devil-drums, the devil-dances and the perahera elements, as well as the pervasive corruption at every social level, the ethnic and caste hatreds promoted in the name of religion, the regular pogroms. We perceive the religious and ethnic correspondences. But Luriat is not particularly evocative of Colombo – to me it came to feel more like a city in southern India – and other settings, too, are indistinct. A reviewer on Goodreads opined that the part set in the concentration-camp country reminded them of the Sundarbans sequence in Midnight’s Children. That’s not a bad comparison, in a glancing kind of way.
The thing is, you don’t (at least I didn’t) read The Saint of Bright Doors as a Lankan story. I don’t think Vajra Chandrasekera really means you to. He has tried to create something more universal using Lanka as his template. This, of course, is a thing any ambitious writer of any nationality might want to do. Luriat and Acusdab and the great open prison-camp through which Fetter wanders are not recognisably Lankan in the way that Shehan Karunatilaka’s Colombo unmistakably is; but neither are they meant to be. Then again, there are some pretty clear correspondences. Your mileage, as people still say sometimes, may vary.
I enjoyed The Saint of Bright Doors. Not nearly as much as I’ve enjoyed the great past Nebula winners, but they’re an impossible act to follow. Besides, I’m out of sympathy with contemporary writing nowadays; the only new fiction I can really bear to read since Martin Amis died is other top-table British literary stuff from the likes of William Boyd and Ian McEwan – writers my own age who are slipping past their game anyway. Most of today’s novels seem to be concerned with people and subjects in which I have not the slightest interest, and seem to be written by people who have thrown out their moral compasses with the rubbish and haven’t done much reading either, at least not within what you might once have called the established canon. Chandrasekera is an exception; he’s put in the work, that’s for sure, and his values, moral and literary, are of a rather old-fashioned kind. I like that.
His principal readership, though, should be among his own generation. It’s a pity The Saint of Bright Doors hasn’t made much of an impression in its author’s home country. I suspect the reasons for that are more than instrumental happenstance; this is not a book of which the majoritarian ethnocratic tendency in this country could approve, especially as it features bloodthirsty monkish villains with strangely familiar names like Ripening Wisdom and Shining Jewel of Truth. It’s a pity; the book, on its merits, deserves to be far more widely read, and I doubt that it would make any sociopolitical waves if it were. It’s a little too oblique for that. I think Chandrasekera was aiming at something more timeless, more general, anyway. It will be a few years before anyone can tell whether he’s hit the mark or not, but I did enjoy his book.
And the Bright Doors? A pretty conceit; never mind about them.
* Geiger, W. (trans.), Mahavamsa. Oxford University Press (1912).
† Knox, R., An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon in the East-Indies, London, 1681, Royal Society.
‡ Obeyesekere, G, Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. Chicago, 1981, University of Chicago Press.
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