Most of the time, I turn to a story for some sense of security. For an explanation or a way to orient myself. If I’m not sure how to think about something, how to feel about a situation, sometimes reading about it in fiction has allowed me to temporarily inhabit new perspectives, so I could safely explore and reflect. Outside the context of the known, the familiar.

In recent years, I have been trying to not look for this in a story. To simply allow a story to be there, on its own terms. To inhabit a space apart from it, to observe and contemplate. Or to imagine myself inside of it, to have the words everywhere and all around me. But without expecting anything, only waiting.

Rakesfall (2024) by Vajra Chandrasekera requires that kind of reader. Someone comfortable with being uncomfortable. Someone who is not so interested in exploring certain ideas, but in seeing what happens when a lot of ideas share the same space and all at once, and what might come of that in the reader’s mind. (Not in their heart, so much: this seems more about thinking than feeling.)

Reading his first novel, The Saint of Bright Doors, I felt a similar sense of disorientation but Rakesfall opens with a scene from an imagined television series—a precise moment in a specific episode, presented from the perspective of a single viewer, one of the broader fandom of this series.

The details make it all seem so solid. And clear. There are actors and there are viewers, you can categorise them easily and immediately. But just a few breaths later, there are re-viewers. And statements like this: “We watch them watch us.” There are corrections to the common misperceptions about the nature of the show and the true significance of certain characters and plot points. There are Wikipedia pages and forums to consult and deconstruct. Everyone knows this story, but nobody agrees as to its significance. There’s nothing solid here.

Just as the fans debate a myriad of meanings for the briefest moments in the narrative, Rakesfall’s readers will chronically feel as though they are flipping around, a finger holding a place in the novel marking a passage read previously but understood differently.

More than halfway through the book, for instance, an explanation is given for one of the show’s main characters’ names. These aren’t their real names, we recall (only nicknames, but this was worth noting on the novel’s first page); with this new information, it matters how it was originally described, what we accepted as true back in the beginning. How what we now know contradicts or supplements that.

And I found myself not only flipping backward throughout the entire book, but sometimes even flipping forwards (the idea of spoilers seemed irrelevant).

As when the first section is called Peristalsis, which I didn’t think about much until, a few pages later, it’s said that one of the show’s characters is fascinated by it. (Really?! I thought. What child even knows the term, I wondered. But, then, a few pages later: “We are children because we choose it.” So…maybe not children.)

Here’s how her fascination is described: “Swallowing and choking, digesting and shitting, the movement of dead things through the living body, it obsesses her as namings and the absences of namings obsess us.” Which is what had me flipping forward, to see what the final section was called (“Running the Gullet”).

There are thirty-two chapters in the 290-page novel (the last one a single page long) and six of them were published previously, in five different publications, between 2016 and 2021, so this sense that one is not reading a novel but excerpts from a writer’s notebook could have some basis. There’s a sense that maybe this Sri Lankan writer has been, and forever will be, contemplating love and war, division and propulsion, colonialism and resistance.

But there are also specific literary elements that secure my interest in this work specifically. For instance, I enjoy the contrast between the story’s mythic feel (golden eggs, ghost children, a skull on a stick) alongside one character being described as “a great believer in horoscopes and Myers-Briggses and technocracy and meditation and life hacks to improve productivity.” (It made me laugh, the plural of Myers-Briggses, even though I can never remember my own damn letters.)

And I liked Part V, which is partly presented as the script of a four-act drama, complete with a Dramatis Personae (and you can bet I kept a finger plugged there for a spell). But which opens with the kind of grid or legend one might find in the rules of a Euro-styled, high-strategy board-game—with statements like fortunes aligning with the six faces of a die. (It seems like a story that could have been excerpted someplace like Analog or Clarkesworld, but it wasn’t one of the bits published independently.)

And that I enjoyed learning the term ‘tetralemma’ and wondering why I’d only ever thought about ‘dilemmas’ before hand. And how sentences like this play with time and memory: “I feel old, though I am not and have not yet been; I feel as if the lives I’ve skipped like stones across the water of worlds were added up.” I liked the way that some of the characters confronted and explained, the language leaving room all around, seeming to be connected to memory and history and legends all-at-once.

But, in the end, I felt lonely and longed for company in this read. Whether to have someone else flip to a page I’d overlooked, with a salient clue. Or to have someone else say, I too have no clue.

Rakesfall is in my stack because it’s nominated for this year’s Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. And after I finished, I was reminded of how I felt (but not so much) after I finished reading Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, which won the prize last year. If my personal befuddlement is any indication, this one will win for sure.