I’ve been looking forward to reading Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall since reading and loving his debut novel The Saint of Bright Doors (2023). Though it’s a challenging book, The Saint of Bright Doors left me awestruck. It’s an innovative and captivating story that plays with genre conventions in a way I’d never seen before. I knew Rakesfall would be challenging too, but I also knew that I could trust the author to deliver another thought-provoking and exciting story. And he delivered: In Rakesfall, Chandrasekera presents readers with a compelling and complex tale. Masterfully constructed with sincere prose, Chandrasekera captures all the grief and fury associated with living under fascism while highlighting the importance of hope and advocating for collective liberation.

The novel follows Annelid and Leveret through various reincarnations, spanning from ancient times to the modern world and far into the future. With each reincarnation, they take on different names and faces, and sometimes even entwine into one being. They are characters who have lost everything and had their world upended, who long for connection and grieve for what they’ve lost. With every reincarnation comes new lessons, new pieces of the puzzle that they try to solve. The author weaves multiple narratives together with a wide cast of characters over a millennium of lifetimes to create a powerful and heart-wrenching story.

The politics of Rakesfall forms the heart of the book, reflecting real struggles for liberation and questioning power imbalances that are a result of capitalism and fascism. Rakesfall recognizes a world shaped by violence, greed, war, and exploitation, and seeks to break the cycles that make such a violent world possible. Rakesfall asks: What are you willing to do to create the world you want to live in? When the world is ending, what are the things that matter? Rakesfall makes it clear that the things that matter certainly aren’t wealth or war, and the book’s response to its questions is impactful because it’s truthful. In the first chapter, a character says, “The third thing that is never hidden is the truth” (p. 7). This frames the book and sets the stage for the many truths about our world that are strikingly illuminated by the novel.

For example, critiques of power are layered throughout. The power dynamics that Chandrasekera discusses in Rakesfall are real mirrors to everyday power imbalances: The politicians we vote for who promise peace are the ones sending the bombs; billionaires hoard wealth while some of us starve. In particular, the novel details how these actions by politicians and billionaires impact the rest of us. We are the ones who must deal with the consequences of their reckless actions. There’s a quote near the beginning of the book that says:

We died hundreds of thousands of times, whether in war, under war, or astride war: in shootings and bombings and shellings and camps and pogroms and hospitals. Oh, it’s all war, in the end—the dead know. We are not children. We died old and young over the decades and centuries … We are the ones who died for someone else’s peace. We are not the ones at peace. (p. 16)

This is one of many quotes in the book that gave me pause. The violence within Rakesfall speaks to the normalization of violence in Western society. The reckless actions of those in power create violence and injustice from which the main characters of Rakesfall work to liberate themselves. Chandrasekera delves into this throughout the book, and one of the most striking moments in the novel is the concept known as “The Simile of the Two-Handled Saw”:

The response to all insult, to all violence, is sympathy for the devil that does it to you. Whether you are struck with hand or stone or club or knife, or carved up with a saw, you must not hate. But what about the hand that strikes? What about the hands that hold the stone or the club or the knife? What of the hands upon hands needed for the saw? What of the state and the death politics? What of the hierarchies of power that organize and direct this violence? What about the givers of orders, the payers of bills? Is this not an engine of hate, deriving from hate, designed with hate, operating on ancient principals of hate? The simile is told with a purpose. It teaches the hated to hold still. To not buck under the saw’s teeth. (p. 87)

This succinctly describes the power imbalance in both the novel and real-life struggles for liberation worldwide. The normalization of violence in Western societies, combined with the violence of Western imperialism, contributes to perpetuating violence around the globe. One must only look towards Palestine, Sudan, Haiti, or the Democratic Republic of Congo for an example of this violence being carried out right now. The violence isn’t questioned, only our response to the hurt it causes. We protest genocide and are met with violence. We stand up for our rights and are met with violence. Western countries impose violence on countries of the Global South yet we are all expected to not fight back, are made complicit in our own undoing. Rakesfall acknowledges this complicity, too:

We are drowned at birth in the filth of enormity and complicity, and every morning since when we wake from sleep. This is what it means to be alive. We are ghosts haunting these worlds. We died in their making, in their breaking. (p. 255)

As much as this book speaks to the power of kings, it equally speaks to the supposed powerlessness of individuals who feel helpless because they believe individual choices and actions don’t matter. But this is the lie that is fed to us to keep us complicit in our own oppression. The characters in Rakesfall feel despair, but they also have hope and are motivated to create something better for themselves and those around them. The act of trying to create something better, of having hope and not giving up, is an integral part of the story and one of the main messages of the book. This is what Annelid and Leveret, and their reincarnated versions, grapple with; this is why they fight.

Hope is a motivator for the characters, but so is grief. For most of the characters, their actions are a response to it. Some characters are literally haunted by the dead, and others are the ones doing the haunting. But there’s also grief for the state of the world and the future that’s been lost, and the heaviness of grief is palpable throughout the book. One of the things that keeps the characters going is love and connection. But Rakesfall isn’t just about connections between people, it recognizes the interconnectedness of all things. Far into the novel, while two characters are discussing a story that is about one of their previous incarnations, a character says, “You were those people, and everybody else besides, and the wasps and the trees and the rocks, too. Everyone else was also. What do you think is the border of you?” (p. 245).

I love this line because of how earnest it is. Our lives and actions are rarely isolated—they have ripple effects. And we are never truly alone; the people we surround ourselves with, and the environments around us, influence us in one way or another.

A similar sentiment is found closer to the beginning of the book: “I am reborn to redie, another I to learn, another body, another history, another life: it seems this is the price of translation. I made myself porous to pass through, but what I pore through pours through me” (p. 24). This instantly reminded me of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993): “All that you touch / you change. All that you change / changes you.” These two quotes from Rakesfall, and this quote from Parable of the Sower, each highlight the importance of connection, recognize the impact we have on each other, and emphasize how our actions reverberate outwards. All the people we know and have known are a part of us. They change us, for better or worse and in small or large ways. So, who’s to say that nothing we do matters? Who’s to say that we can’t change the world for the better?

In the context of liberation, connection—and more specifically community—is how we survive. Understanding the connections between different struggles, and the connections between all things on Earth, is crucial and necessary to build solidarity and work towards collective liberation. Rakesfall is about rising up and working together to create a better world, one that can heal and carry us into a more just future.

Rakesfall does what the best speculative fiction stories do: shine a light on injustice and ask questions about how we can change. What futures can we imagine? What will it take to get there? How do we hold on to hope? Rakesfall has some answers to these questions. It brilliantly ties all its concepts together and offers a profound message about hope and liberation in its heart. Powerful and impactful, Rakesfall is a reminder to keep going and moving forward; no matter how difficult the path ahead might be.