Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera

Publisher – Solaris

Published – Out Now

Price – £9.99 paperback £5.99 ebook

Some stories take more than one lifetime to tell. There are wrongs that echo through the ages, friendships that outpace the claws of death, loves that leave their mark on civilization, and promises that nothing can break. This is one such story.

Annelid and Leveret met as children in the middle of the Sri Lankan civil war. They found each other in a torn-up nation, peering through propaganda to grasp a deeper truth. And in a demon-haunted wood, another act of violence linked them and propelled their souls on a journey throughout the ages. No world can hold them, no life can bind them, and they'll never leave each other behind.

When I was young, I would sometimes pop into a room and the tv would have something attracting my attention. One of my relatives would then say, ‘sit on the settee and enjoy the ride’. Reading is one of those things I tend to always now do with an eye on deconstructing what is going on – working out where the story is going based on the rules and the tells I’m spotting. I don’t recommend it for everyone; and not to do it all the time but for me its fun. When a book is really good though you just though have to let go and just say ‘OK I’m going to trust you’. In reading Vajra Chandrasekera’s mesmerising novel Rakesfall we have a tale full of tales telling a huge epic story but in way that I’d not really seen before and I so very much ended up enjoying the ride and savouring the experience.

Normally I’d nicely settle you in here with a paragraph summarising the novel’s plot but that’s one of the first things that jump out of Rakesfall is the story is not quite the usual approach. We start with an unusual story told almost in the style of people recapping a long running TV show with the tale of Annelid and Leveret growing up in 1980s Sri Lanka. We watch these two growing up and get asides from our narrator telling us what the mysterious ‘audience’ is responding to again in the style of many fandom recaps and their many theories on characters’ motivations. Warned of dangers in the forest around the family home we watch these two friends get closer but at the same time get our narrator’s thoughts on reality and causality before ending with a brutal murder and then get thoughts from victim and murderer as to what is going on. That’s just the first thirty odd pages. Things get deliciously stranger from here.

What Chandrasekera does is then take us into a series of linked episodes. We jump across time, realities and even dimensions following entities that in some ways respond to the Annelid and Leveret characters we first meet. We jump to worlds where the dead are just normally undead in human company, ones where demons live within a human body and can be seen and we merge this with Sri Lanka’s modern and also ancient history plus its myths. A murder victim can for reasons we need to understand in his next incarnation become a man driven to becoming a suicide bomber or a god or a character in play that may also be based on real-life events. Stylistically the story can shift tone to playfulness, darkness or even the power of joy with ease and what I as a reader soon realised if that to really get into this, I needed to back off a little. Imagine coming into a huge art gallery with a wall of a painted mural. Looking closely, I can see one section and admire that’s own message and technique, but the real pleasure is taking all the steps back and just immersing yourself into the story guided purely by the turn of the chapters and the various episodic sections to appreciate the much bigger story going on.

This very much for me is a tale of blurred boundaries where we have gods, demons, software AIs and humans being evolved to the point they cannot really be human anymore. There are stylistic tricks with format, history and so many nods to science fiction and fantasy that in the wrong hands this would be style over substance but what impresses me with Rakesfall if how Chandrasekera knows when to just the chapters and the plot of each episode to still have its own value. Each small section has its own density and purpose you don’t just feel like a fancy jigsaw is being made but that the stories are in dialogue with one another.

We have entities essentially coming back repeatedly in a series of reincarnations and examining the character’s same choices, issues and violence but in myriad forms. Each block of story is subtly different and so no danger of being overly repetitive. You may spot tributes to a lot of other concepts in speculative fiction, but it is also very much its own new story with science fiction blurring with the fantastical that makes it difficult for a reader to separate the two. It about love, friendship, misunderstandings and communication and that is both focused on the experience of the characters but also that of the wider world and its histories that it has been turned into. The story doesn’t infodump its way to spoon feeding a reader as to what is going on page by page but if instead making us have to link concepts and ideas as we skip across time and realities in a not always linear way. We start with the human and increasingly cycle into new forms and eventually we push past the human era you and I would recognise into something bigger a world of Minds and intelligences on scales that defy easy description. That this is done in just 319 pages makes it rather special,

Is there a nice simple plot here – no. In many ways each section is more a thematically linked set of tales but as we reach the ending, we start to see how certain characters, concepts and events all may be running in the background of each episode that we encounter. I really liked how the themes are played with and which setting the story went with next. At its heart is a friendship that borders on love and often the worlds the characters are in be that surrounded by dangers such as secret police, European invaders or vast nanotechnology gone wrong all hinder the conversation these two need to finally have.

Rakesfall is a reading experience to savour, and I think those who like their science fiction and fantasy to take some risks are going to have the biggest reward here. If you’ve read too many books like this one before, please send me the details but for me this underlines Chandrasekera as an incredibly interesting writer in the genre who has a gorgeous use of language. There are so many scenes here to throw yourself into and admire the storytelling but this is very much one where to really get the effect I just had to let the story lead me; and it is so refreshing not to easily guess what happens next all the time. By the end of Rakesfall you may not understand everything, but you’ve been on an incredible ride, you’ll very likely be digesting your opinions and thoughts on this for a long while to come. Highly recommended!