There Are Doors

From the point of view of the schizophrenic, there is only occasional and fleeting doubt about their reality principle, and to the outside world those are the moments of clarity and hopefully the beginning of the return to normalcy. Apart from those moments, the person's worldview is as airtight as language itself - self-referencing and reinforcing. Though the narrative of "There Are Doors" is third-person, the narrative only questions Adam Green's life and thinking when he does - which only comes with electric shock, and still are fleeting moments. The end result for the reader is that there is no independent point-of-view from which to verify or repudiate Adam's thinking, his questions and conclusions and behavior. The reader is stuck with Adam willy nilly, beginning to end. It's a wild ride of a read that takes you from department store break room to bizarre underground theater, from talking barbie dolls to drives in big black limousines with Presidential Cabinet members. This, I think, is a testament to Wolfe's brilliance as a writer: he's committed to describing the world from Adam's point of view alone, to tying it all together in a mad, coherent whole. Either it all hangs together, or none of it hangs together. That's what makes this story what it is. That's what the story is, period. And it's a great story. For those interested in this kind of story: it's more truth than fiction, if you take the word of the author of "Operators and Things" - another out-of-print book, unfortunately. Barbara O'Brien (apparently a pseudonym) gives her ostensibly autobiographical account of her own schizophrenic episode and spontaneous remission. It reads much like "There Are Doors", and certainly they have in common the almost suffocating circular reasoning of the main character. For a quite different take on mental illness, one not quite as locked into the mind of the patient but just as jarring, is "Scandal" by Shusaku Endo. Bravo Gene Wolfe!

I rarely praise any book quite so highly as I am about to praise this one. A great novel is one that, in addition to telling a good story, gets better on every re-reading and rewards its readers more and more as their understanding grows. This is a terrific story that holds a great wealth for the reader to discover, and thus I'm forced to admit that I do think this really is a great novel.The style, if not the content, is definitely influenced by Kafka - there are deliberate references thrown in and even a character unmistakably based on Kafka himself. This is far from a retread of "The Trial", however.The protagonist is led on a surreal chase through another dimension in search of "the Goddess", who he has fallen in love with after a short tryst in his own dimension. This other world is strange, yet familiar: it runs a bit slower in time (the clock, one might say, has gone by now about 40 years slow), but the major difference is that here, for unexplained reasons, human males inevitably die after mating. This creates a (significantly) bee-like social structure with childbearing women (queens, if you will) in the positions of power; the men are for the most part skittishly subservient, but with a dangerous revolutionary undercurrent.Most of the struggle in this book, however, is internal, as neither the reader nor the protagonist himself has a firm grasp on his own identity. What is his real name? Is he really an "alcoholic"? Is he mad? Is he, perhaps, a god?A bit of knowledge about ancient myth will greatly expand the scope of your experience with this book - it is a good story regardless, but looking up some myths (if you don't know it already) will open up a whole new dimension to things. A knowledge of mythology and the world of myths itself will take you even further. Reading Campbell - or better yet, Robert Graves - is a great help in appreciating the artistic depth in much of Wolfe's work, and especially this book. Hopefully "There Are Doors" will encourage you to check these out, if you haven't already. But all this aside, this was a tremendous novel and I recommend it highly.

Good novels tell stories; great novels tell stories that haunt, leaving behind emotions much deeper than the tale seems to, at first, justify.There Are Doors is a great novel; it's the kind of book that will have you slightly wistful and sad for days. My first thoughts upon waking, during several days in the week following my reading of this book, were of the images it evoked.The plot is simple enough: a nebbishy nobody with psychological problems concludes that his girlfriend of brief duration is from some other place, and that certain gateways connect Here with There. There's the expected optical illusion of experience: are the protagonist's experiences really an interaction with a different external reality, or just an internal one? The plausible answer flips back and forth. Yet, where a overly clever and self-proud post-modernist novel would embrace this contradiction, and not resolve it, Wolfe does resolve it, although not simply, and not without a tour of the protagonists inner and outter life - which involves a world very similar and yet strikingly different than our own.Don't expect standard science-fictional tropes, but be prepared for a lingering and haunting vision of deep love, loss, and yearning.

It may seem odd, writing a review of a book that is out of print, yet this is one of Wolfe's books that has strangely grown on me over the years, one which I have reread many times (I have reread the Book of the New Sun many times as well, though for different reasons). Not properly science fiction, or even garden-variety fantasy, it is a more like magic realism. As always, Wolfe likes to break rules, confounding the reader's expectations at every turn. The point of view character is not a larger than life hero like Severian or Patera Silk. Rather, he is a department store furniture salesman with subtle but serious mental problems, the sort of gray little man you might see every day, but couldn't describe five minutes later. He has also discovered that there are doors from here to there, "there" being a parallel world where women dominate and men die young. As the novel begins, he is recovering from a brief fling with a woman who has affected him like no other, and his pursuit of her leads him to discover that she is the physical embodiment of the Female Principal itself, the Goddess. She walks among mankind from time to time, and selects lovers who are unlikely to be believed (like the probably schizophrenic narrator). The central character's fractured psychology and his willingness to accept whatever reality is foisted upon him reminded me of a fever dream (and indeed, the second time I approached the book, I was down with the flu, and curiously, it made me more responsive to the material). As Wolfe moves his character back and forth between the worlds (with stops in mental institutions on both sides), he explores themes of alienation and isolation, the knowledge that one is fundamentally damaged and therefore different from one's fellows. And he unashamedly explores obsessive love and redemption from a man's point of view (curious that there is a whole literary industry devoted to women's expressions of love, but nothing for men--this kind of vulnerability is too frightening to most male readers I suppose). And it addresses the age-old question, is love a gift that is given or a prize to be earned?

This is something of an oddball novel for Gene Wolfe. Fairly narrow in scope, it postulates an alternate Earth co-existing with our own, which can only be reached through a handful of secret doorways. This may seem like a pedestrian trope for someone like Wolfe, but as usual, there are bigger issues afoot. "There Are Doors" is often overlooked; it really deserves a wider readership. Check it out.