Whirlwind Exploration in "Rakesfall"

By Madeline Schultz on July 1, 2024

Ray Nalter, author of The Mountain in the Sea, calls Rakesfall "a fearless, hallucinatory novel." It was clear from the first sentence of this genre-bending journey of a novel that trust in Vajra Chandrasekera was an absolute necessity, as well as a willingness to be thrown into worlds where our feet have barely hit the ground before being launched into another. As the word "hallucinatory" suggests, there is certainly an element to this style of storytelling that a reader dependent upon strict storylines and plots may reject, while a reader of experimentation and strangeness, such as myself, might come to embrace.

Divided into ten parts that are connected through one character floating—or perhaps more aptly, crashing—into different worlds, we see our protagonist finding new missions, varying from filing a lawsuit against a walking dead man, to discovering who is behind the murders of futuristic humanoids spending years in what resembles cybersleep. Each part offers a different experience through the lens of the same (woman? person? entity? ), centering around consistent themes: imperialism, colonialism, and who tells the stories we remember. Haunted by ghosts, Rakesfall is a journey of themes and ideas rather than traditional storytelling, one that speeds up as fast as it slows down, and spirals as quickly as things just began to make sense.

A component of this novel (though I'm tempted to almost call it a collection) that demands praise is the way in which Chandrasekera commands the deliberate and full attention of the reader. While this may seem true of any science-fiction novel, I felt it especially needed in Rakesfall. The worlds are so rapidly built and rapidly removed the reader needs to place implicit trust that they will begin to understand as the story continues to unfold. I found myself frustrated in the first two to three jumps, feeling disoriented and disappointed that just as I was beginning to understand a world, it was taken away from me. In the first half of the book I felt that I must be missing something and was frustrated by my own lack of understanding with the plot. The fast-paced nature of the writing and the protagonist changing into a new person in each section made my grasp on the plot feel fickle at times. It took nearly half the novel for me to see what Chandrasekera was executing: an acceptance of temporality in a continued story. Not only were the worlds unique and artfully crafted, they offered new challenges to both the reader and the protagonist in understanding the world around them. While I could appreciate this in the second half of the book and looking back on it, it is worth noting that I did find my confusion frustrating in the beginning and I wish there had been something slightly more concrete, whether in character, setting, or timeline, for me to cling to in the first half.

In this way, I found Chandrasekera's writing to be reminiscent of Marlon James', with his fantasy series Black Leopard, Red Wolf throwing you into a world entirely unbeknownst to you and at once familiar in the socio-political sense. The journeys and happenings experienced in this novel cannot be spoken about without underscoring the themes of colonialism and imperialism laced within the plot. Sometimes on the nose, such as using prejudice against literal walking dead people, and sometimes more subtly, like staging a futuristic-historical play, the desolation and pain that colonialism wreaks throughout this novel is clear to see. The mission of this book was to call attention to the massive historical (and present) failures of the world around us in a fantastical and whirlwind fashion, and Chandrasekera did so magnificently. I left this book feeling inspired to learn more about the history of colonialism in southeast Asia, specifically in Sri Lanka, the country from which Chandrasekera hails.

Despite the strengths of this novel, I was often frustrated by the visceral images on the page being clouded by word choice within the novel. It was not so much that the words didn't make sense as much as they obscured the visuals of what was happening. For example, in a section in Part II, Redder, a description reads "The red in your mouth is not always the pounded leaf; sometimes it is blood beaded from the tooth or the fist, sometimes blood flushed from the kiss. My two mouths too are red from fist's kiss and knife's bit. We are kin." While I can appreciate the imagery of the red filling a reader's vision, it was moments like these that I found difficult to ground myself in the story. I would have liked something slightly more concrete in the beginning of the novel to understand, whether that be a little longer in one setting or more history of the protagonist.

While I concede that this may have been intentional in an attempt to add to the pacing of certain scenes, I believe I would have found more willingness to feel lost had I not felt often confronted by confusing descriptions, as the already present confusion in the first half of the novel made contextualization difficult. While this was off-putting for me at first, I felt that as the novel went on this I was able to adapt to the language and felt less disoriented with the word choice as I read on. Specifically, I felt I was beginning to see the connections between the worlds, and the themes that were intertwined amongst them. While in the first half I felt like I was grasping at straws, the second half felt like I was watching a great piece of art play out in front of me, watching new worlds unfold before me on the page. This book challenged me to wait and see, to embrace the feeling of disorientation until I found my footing in Chandrasekera's worlds.

I can say with confidence that Rakesfall, like any ambitious literary work, is not for everyone. As someone who doesn't gravitate to sci-fi, I was concerned in the beginning that I had bit off more than I could chew. It is difficult to follow at times, and isn't going to offer an easily graspable plot. If I'm being honest, I may have put this book down in the first half had I been reading it for pure pleasure due to both its density and its complexity. That being said, I appreciate Rakesfall for demanding patience and imagination from me, and a willingness to become a little lost within its pages. I came out the other side of this grateful I took the leap to finish it. Not everyone is going to enjoy this book, but the ones who do will appreciate the mission of exploration, loss, and humanity that Chandrasekera extends a hand to bring us on. Rakesfall is a pioneer in the realm of science fiction, a challenger to our understanding of stories and history, and a dare to step into worlds far stranger than our own.