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leonidskies) wrote2026-04-13 09:41 am
leonidskies) wrote2026-04-13 09:41 am
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Book Review: Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera
I picked this book up in a bookshop last year; the year prior, I read Chandrasekera's novel debut, The Saint of Bright Doors, and it became one of the books I'd most readily recommend that I read in the last few years. This isn't a review of The Saint of Bright Doors, but please know that you should read that book because it's a really impressive work of fiction which works with perspective in an absolutely fascinating way. Rakesfall is similar; Rakesfall is also very, very different.
(The book also contains several references to the events of The Saint of Bright Doors. Probably more than I picked up on because I read that book two years ago, but I caught a couple.)
I had heard a little bit about Rakesfall before I bought it, and then before I subsequently read it, because I follow Vajra Chandrasekera on Bluesky and he's an avid reposter of reviews of/reactions to his work. My understanding was that this book would be weirder than The Saint of Bright Doors, and oh boy was I right. Something else I found interesting, though, were my feelings about picking this book up, going to the two reading apps I track my reading on (Goodreads and Storygraph; I have stuff to say about reading tracking apps but that's for another day), and discovering that readers... did not really like this book. Opinions split so thoroughly that this one has a low three-star average on Goodreads.
Weird, I thought, because I know from reading his first book that Chandrasekera is a very skilled writer and also Rakesfall won several awards last year. My estimation of the book succeeding in executing what it was trying to do fell a little, seeing that, but I still had pretty high expectations.
Rakesfall is a difficult book to explain the premise of. It's about two teenagers living during the Sri Lankan civil war, initially. As young adults, one of them kills the other, and the narrative pins the blame on a demon. The rest of the book charts the sprawl of their lives across history and how deeply they intertwine.
There's no way to put it other than this: Rakesfall is an incredibly accomplished work of literature. In a relatively short space, it does more than I think almost any book I've ever read has achieved. It has weird meta-fiction, historical pain, colonial critique, myth and parable and nested stories. It's science fiction, it's psychological horror, there's the most mundane zombie apocalypse I've ever read at one point. It captures intimate pain and family drama and sometimes it cracks a joke that totally throws you for a loop because how can this book be funny when it's all these other things too?
It's quite hard to write about this book. The characters are simultaneously slippery (sometimes literally) and constant. It switches up on you so quickly that while each segment makes its own kind of sense, the full tapestry is a little harder to pin down. I think, in a way, I'm afraid to make statements about it in the fear I've completely misread its meaning. Maybe this is just the kind of book I want to hold close to my chest, even though it deserves to be anything but.
Fuck, I don't know. It's art. It's playful and serious. It's grappling with concepts that are difficult to put into words. It's intimately personal and often devastatingly sad on a cosmic scale. Frequently, it's about the longevity of trauma. There are some bits that were distinctly transgender in a way I did not expect. When I finished it, I almost wanted to flip right back to the beginning and start again with new understanding of the work the book was doing. I didn't, and I'm not a big rereader regardless, but god. There's so much depth to this book and I am in awe.
I often see it said that sometimes, when you read a book, you can tell that the author is afraid of you. That there are so many books that fail to commit to the story they want to tell because they think the audience may well pelt them with bricks for it. In contrast, this is a book that looks you directly in the eye and goes "oh, a reader? Lol good luck" and hits the ground running with no expectations about whether you can chase or not. Maybe I just don't read enough fiction with a literary bent, but it felt refreshing to be treated as an adult who might not get the book but was at least still trusted to try.
Chandrasekera has mentioned he's working on another book right now. I'm excited to read it.
(The book also contains several references to the events of The Saint of Bright Doors. Probably more than I picked up on because I read that book two years ago, but I caught a couple.)
I had heard a little bit about Rakesfall before I bought it, and then before I subsequently read it, because I follow Vajra Chandrasekera on Bluesky and he's an avid reposter of reviews of/reactions to his work. My understanding was that this book would be weirder than The Saint of Bright Doors, and oh boy was I right. Something else I found interesting, though, were my feelings about picking this book up, going to the two reading apps I track my reading on (Goodreads and Storygraph; I have stuff to say about reading tracking apps but that's for another day), and discovering that readers... did not really like this book. Opinions split so thoroughly that this one has a low three-star average on Goodreads.
Weird, I thought, because I know from reading his first book that Chandrasekera is a very skilled writer and also Rakesfall won several awards last year. My estimation of the book succeeding in executing what it was trying to do fell a little, seeing that, but I still had pretty high expectations.
Rakesfall is a difficult book to explain the premise of. It's about two teenagers living during the Sri Lankan civil war, initially. As young adults, one of them kills the other, and the narrative pins the blame on a demon. The rest of the book charts the sprawl of their lives across history and how deeply they intertwine.
There's no way to put it other than this: Rakesfall is an incredibly accomplished work of literature. In a relatively short space, it does more than I think almost any book I've ever read has achieved. It has weird meta-fiction, historical pain, colonial critique, myth and parable and nested stories. It's science fiction, it's psychological horror, there's the most mundane zombie apocalypse I've ever read at one point. It captures intimate pain and family drama and sometimes it cracks a joke that totally throws you for a loop because how can this book be funny when it's all these other things too?
It's quite hard to write about this book. The characters are simultaneously slippery (sometimes literally) and constant. It switches up on you so quickly that while each segment makes its own kind of sense, the full tapestry is a little harder to pin down. I think, in a way, I'm afraid to make statements about it in the fear I've completely misread its meaning. Maybe this is just the kind of book I want to hold close to my chest, even though it deserves to be anything but.
Fuck, I don't know. It's art. It's playful and serious. It's grappling with concepts that are difficult to put into words. It's intimately personal and often devastatingly sad on a cosmic scale. Frequently, it's about the longevity of trauma. There are some bits that were distinctly transgender in a way I did not expect. When I finished it, I almost wanted to flip right back to the beginning and start again with new understanding of the work the book was doing. I didn't, and I'm not a big rereader regardless, but god. There's so much depth to this book and I am in awe.
I often see it said that sometimes, when you read a book, you can tell that the author is afraid of you. That there are so many books that fail to commit to the story they want to tell because they think the audience may well pelt them with bricks for it. In contrast, this is a book that looks you directly in the eye and goes "oh, a reader? Lol good luck" and hits the ground running with no expectations about whether you can chase or not. Maybe I just don't read enough fiction with a literary bent, but it felt refreshing to be treated as an adult who might not get the book but was at least still trusted to try.
Chandrasekera has mentioned he's working on another book right now. I'm excited to read it.