Gobsmacked at how good this is, without even the caveat of “for a first novel.” Fetter, the feral only child of a messiah, trained by his mother as assassin, destined to commit matricide and fratricide, navigates a dystopian Sri Lanka far too recognizable in the present. Each sentence is exuberant, profound, precise, often scathingly funny—fragments that kaleidoscope by the end into a brilliant, emotional whole.
I’m gonna steal So Mayer’s phrase, because I don’t know how to sum it up better than “a work of Le Guinian complexity about unbecoming a messiah.” The unreal meets the real, a slippery form of time travel, worlds layered atop each other, the past made and unmade, ordered and disordered, a dozen times over by our rapacious empires and our unchosen ones.
“They’re our mistakes, I suppose… it’s not surprising they’re so hungry to haunt us—the histories we forgot, the crimes we buried. Devils know I’ve buried mine.”
Given that Chandrasekera wrote this one to, quote, suit the market, I’m even more excited to see what he unleashes in Rakesfall this summer. And give his blog a follow—his essays have rapidly become some of the best in my rss feed.
Pull quotes ⚭
Fetter isn’t even the only feral child of a messiah in his social network. There’s a support group for unchosen ones, which was recommended to him by the therapist he’s been seeing ever since he learned what a therapist was. He attends those support group meetings religiously, every Haruday at sundown. He hasn’t told Hej about any of that yet, but he doesn’t feel like he’s hiding anything. It’s early days, and he feels like he has time. He luxuriates in that feeling, stretching out in it like a cat in the sun. He supposes this is what happiness feels like. It’s an effort to stay grounded in it.
Closer to home, the Luriati hinterlands are sick with violence; he learns slowly to read between the headlines, to understand that a riot is a pogrom, and that when a monk of the Path Behind is on TV calling for peace from both sides, that it means that the Path Behind is once again attempting to cull the hinterlands of the pathless, and of the races and castes that they consider low and other: his father’s legacy conjoined with the droppings of imperial Alab. Too, he learns there is plague abroad in the distant southeastern subcontinent of Aggiopa, where all those empire-builders came from, endlessly infecting and re-infecting the world. Fetter isn’t ready to grapple with a world so enlarged, so bloated from pain.
It is obvious that they fear infection, but infection by disease or ideas or identities?
In its own way, it is the perfect distillation of everything that is good about Luriat; the freedoms it gives, to those allowed to accept them; the space it creates for its citizens to make, to see, to hear, to be art, if they so desire and as long as that art does not cross the invisible lines of force that would bring down the boots and the drums.
They were a cult, the first cult we had ever known, and we had no defenses against them. They infected us with strange ideas from the south-west. They brought doctrines of shame and disgust for the body and the glorification of the perfected mind. They asked us to look at our bodies not as the clean and perfect instruments of living that we had known, but as bags of flesh containing the thirty-one parts of impurity: the hairs of the head and the body; the nails and the teeth; the skin, flesh, and tendons; the bones and marrow; the heart, liver, and kidneys; the lungs, pleurae, and spleen; the intestines large and small—the shit and undigested food; the bile, phlegm, and pus; the blood, sweat, and tears; the fat, sebum, and spit; the mucus, the synovial fluid, the piss. They asked us to reflect on this and be repulsed: is the body not disgusting?
Like this, they brought endless categorizations and subcategorizations and enumerations of being and experience. They brought, almost incidentally, the politics they knew, of centralization, of the consolidation of power, a politics of thrones.
No one in this group is entirely present, not even Fetter. Everyone is neck-deep in plot, entangled in things that are too complicated to even talk about.
They are all unchosen too; it’s just that the degree of their unchoosing is greater because they were never almost-chosen. Perhaps that distinction is finer than he’d thought. It means there’s no such thing as ordinary people.
Fame, she says, is how a ruling class conditions artists to docility and incorporates their work to lesser ends. Sedition, unrest, and even revolution are useful to political actors currently out of power.
Fetter himself thinks of the law less as strategic or rule-based and more as a muddled, dangerous beast. A rabid leopard, like Caduv’s character in the play. 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. It’s because none of them can see the devils, he thinks. That’s why they’re all so optimistic about worldly law.
This is how the thought comes at him; sidelong, clinging to the back of another thought like a tick, or a child.
He thinks of Hej and he aches. He thinks of Hej’s face, his smile, his hands, the low burr of his voice, the scratching of his beard. He aches, but there is also a low shameful breathing out, release, relief. All those lies of omission, all the secrets he’s kept; he can let go of that guilt from never opening up, never sharing his truth, never loving more than he feared.
There is a reason the older term for devils is invisible laws and powers, Fetter reminds himself. Mother-of-Glory taught him this, and he’s seen it in his reading, deep in the heart of abstruse footnotes. The devils are not a people or a species. They don’t groom or fuck or fight or die. They may not be alive, or even truly be a them, as he understands the theory, not beings with a consciousness or sense of self that a mortal would recognize. They are principles of the world’s operation. They are gears and wheels; they are interlocking, grinding teeth. Or so it is supposed, at the most sophisticated level of mortal thought that he has ever encountered. There is no telling if this is any more or less true than the childhood terror of monsters that they still evoke in him.
Even manipulation would speak of a kind of care that’s absent in this room. They don’t care, because the outcome of this room is already decided.
…the no-time of this no-place. The discrete tick tock of timepass becomes a liquid gurgle, as if he is submerged in the unending flow of a river in which the boundaries between objects dissolve into a slurry that passes into silt through his hands.
But is there such a thing as a type of devil? Isn’t that more race science? Isn’t it just a simplifying habit of thought, no different from the pervasive Luriati nonsense of higher and lower types? Perhaps, he thinks, peering carefully into the murk, every devil is unique and that they sometimes look like each other only reflects that they are kin. What difference does it make, when the devil is in the water at his feet?
Fetter finds it within him to roll his eyes. “This isn’t death magic,” he says. “Filling in fucking citizenship forms in post-Occupation Luriat is death magic. This is just … doctoring.”
“You already have a Saint-General and a Saint-Errant,” Fetter says, at last. “Aren’t they a matched set? Order and disorder—don’t they cover all eventualities between them?”
Status is a rainbow on a proud soap bubble, inflated to its uttermost.
Rulers love to submit, and the Path has always paid too much attention to thrones and not enough to people.
“You make the same mistake again and again,” Ordinary says. “The sin of metonymy. I say people and you hear the people. I say power and you think of thrones and parliaments.”
What is it that comes out of the Embassy’s bright door? Fetter never describes it clearly when he tells this story later, leaving his hearers to imagine a legendary monster. Monstrousness seems demanded by the mayhem. Some horrific and misshapen creature, twisted and ferocious, with invisible tentacles and claws and mandibles. Rumour will draw on old hinterlander stories to speak of devils, imaginatively extravagant because nobody knows what devils look like. The news will report it as malign foreign influences. Neither will make reference to bright doors at all.
I hoped to build a systematic engine for the salvation of billions, but at this point, the Path Above is essentially a massive umbrella coalition of imitation poperies, strange cults, and personal development seminars, dispersed across a wide territory.
I’m taking Fetter’s part. It’s my oldest habit, to confuse him with myself. A shadow’s duty, perhaps, but I am not him, I remind myself as I have reminded myself since we were children. I am the Unfettered. Someday, I will earn that name in truth.
I could never hide unseen in the brain of the Perfect and Kind, which he prizes and holds up to the light of self-observation, but in his despised and forgotten gonads there is shadow enough.
“So much for destiny,” Koel says, offering a wry little laugh that invites Fetter to join in. But he doesn’t.
“The only way to change the world,” Fetter says, as if disagreeing with the part he doesn’t speak out loud.
“You’re not going to give me some individualist shit about personal growth?” Koel says. “Change yourself to change the world? Something you learned while meditating upon the mysteries of your own ass.”