Early on in Vajra Chandrasekera's lyrical, secondary-world fantasy The Saint of Bright Doors, the city of Luriat is said to be under the administration of "competing Dissolution Orders and Emergency Regulations," effectively governed by executive-run task-forces due to the "ongoing failure of Parliament." It is a moment that presents a frisson of recognition to the Southasian reader – floating signifier though that term might be – before the story returns to Chandrasekera's vividly imagined universe. Moments like these are scattered throughout the novel, anchoring The Saint of Bright Doors to a set of coordinates – a time and a place – even as Chandrasekera explores classic themes of power, memory, love and revenge.
"The only way to change the world is through intentional, directed violence," says Mother-of-Glory to her son Fetter, whom she is training to assassinate his father, for reasons yet unclear. Violence is a theme that underlies The Saint of Bright Doors: bureaucratised state violence in Luriat; revolutionary violence – dreamed of and at times executed – by the protagonist, Fetter, and his comrades; the spectacular violence that has historically accompanied the spread of institutionalised religion; and personal, "directed" violence of the kind articulated in Mother-of-Glory's desire for revenge.
Violence has, of course, been a staple feature of contemporary fantasy, with its two main narrative motifs of the "quest" and the "war," as the American writer and critic Lin Carter noted many years ago. But fantasy has often tended to aestheticise violence as well as to simplify it: an obsession with anthropomorphising swords is an example of the first tendency, and set-piece battle scenes of the second. By contrast, the violence in The Saint of Bright Doors is almost Foucauldian in how it drips from the interstices of society: as Chandrasekera put it to me, it is, "among other things, a gallery of manifestations of violence." To what extent are these manifestations informed by the past and present of Chandrasekera's native Sri Lanka? When I asked, he noted that "Sri Lanka has had several such histories compressed into the last century, each resulting in a different kind of failure."
To locate a work such as Chandrasekera's within its tradition, let us begin by noting that from its origins, modern speculative fiction – "SF", in all its variants – has been characterised by two (sometimes) contending impulses. Much of the speculation in much of speculative fiction has been about alternative worlds more or less different from our own – "world-building", to use the purist's term. World-building allows SF, should it so desire, to escape the constraints of time and place, to alter context, to ask "what if" and to "defamiliarise" familiar, "universal" themes by shifting and blurring focus. But, equally, SF's offering up a chance to construct new worlds is an invitation to shine refracted light upon this one. At its crudest, this involves SF slipping into allegory – something that J R R Tolkien long ago warned against. In its more subtle forms, however, it allows our world to creep into the cracks and shadows of SF's imagined worlds, sometimes fitting into the fissures, sometimes rubbing up against the edges. And what is "our" world depends, of course, upon the writer: their upbringing, their context, their horizon.