By Alix E. Harrow
This was a recommended fantasy on Goodreads – something about a girl finding a book that acts as portals into other worlds. It sounded intriguing so I made this a birthday request from Olman, as I wanted a thrilling escapist magical adventure story.
Even though Alix Harrow is white, I appreciated that the heroine, January Scaller, was of mixed heritage. While still a baby, her black father made a deal with wealthy Mr. Locke to scour the world for rare treasures to add to Locke’s vast collection. During her father’s explorations, he would also search for his missing wife, who disappeared when they were passing through a portal. This can happen according to the “rules” of portal travelling, as found in footnotes 7:
Literature and myth are rife with tales of those who have entered the void and failed to emerge on the other side.
Consider Edith Bland’s seemingly innocent The Door to Kyriel. Five English schoolchildren discover a magic door that takes them to a new world. As the children return home, the youngest and most fearful of them falls into a “great darkness” and is never heard from again.
Because her father was often absent, January became the ward of Mr. Locke, who was a caring enough guardian though sometimes January felt more like an exotic artifact in Locke’s Ivanhoe-esque mansion in 19thcentury Vermont, or an orphan.
Harrow was obviously influenced by the masterful Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell when she wrote Ten Thousand Doors. Like Susanna Clarke, Harrow employed the ‘realist fantasy’ trope of footnotes and chapters of scholarly text, ie. The Ten Thousand Doors: Being a Comparative Study of Passages, Portals, and Entryways in World Mythology.
The central contention is simply this: the passages, portals, and entryways common to all mythologies are rooted in physical anomalies that permit users to travel from one world to another. Or, to put it even more simply: these doors actually exist.Harrow is a good writer, but she’s not talented enough to pull off what Clarke achieved with Jonathan Strange. The tone and quality of writing in Ten Thousand Doors was uneven. Harrow can write with great insight, like the love of books, and January’s discovery of The Book:
Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books—those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles—understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn’t about reading the words; it’s about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-color prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tabacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, of literary weight or unsolved mysteries.
This one smelled unlike any book I’d ever held. Cinnamon and coal smoke, catacombs and loam. It smelled as if it had been in the mail for longer than any one parcel could be, circling the world for years and ccumulating layers of smells like a tramp wearing too many clothes.
It smelled like adventure itself had been harvested in the wild, distilled to a fine wine, and splashed across each page.
This quality of writing
doesn’t always translate to plot and narrative, which lacked depth, substance and proper world-building. I never experienced the same sutured immersion as I did with the universe of Jonathan Strange. Even her footnotes didn’t always seem to service the
narrative and felt more like patches instead of woven tapestry.
And what is the nature of these other worlds? As we have discovered in previous chapters, they are infinitely varies and ever-changing, and often fail to comply with the conventions of our present world, which we are arrogant enough to call the physical laws of the universe. There are places where men and women are winged and red-skinned, ad places where there is no such thing as man and woman but only persons somewhere in between….
Although much was written about portals to other worlds, there disappointingly wasn’t all that much actual portal traveling, and the worlds that were visited were either familiar or grounded in a reality that was similar Earth, not the fantastical dimensions of C.S. Lewis or Jack Vance. Worse, January doesn't even come into her powers of portal traveling until the very end! We only get a taste when January was a young girl, when she stumbled upon a portal simply by writing in her diary:
That afternoon, sitting in that lonely field beside the Door that didn’t lead anywhere, I wanted to write a different kind of story. A true kind of story, something I could crawl into if only I believed it hard enough.
Once there was a brave and temeraryous (sp?) girl who found a Door. It was a magic Door that’s why it has a capital D. She opened the Door.
January was briefly transported into another world, but before she could step foot in it, she heard Mr Locke’s voice calling her. And it was a loooong time before January can step through another portal again because when January returned to the blue door in the woods, it had disappeared. So we have to suffer through January’s ignorance, inexperience, despair, lack of confidence, and will. The last, her seeming lack of will, we don’t find out the true cause of it until the end, being due to Mr. Locke’s ability to mind control. There were a few subtle hints early on:
His eyes were stones, pressing down. “You are going to mind your place and be a good girl.” I wanted desperately to be worthy of Mr. Locke's love.
-
I should’ve lied. It would have saved so much heartache. But you have to understand: when Mr. Locke looks at you in this particular way of his, with his moon-pale eyes, you mostly end up doing what he wants you to. I suspect it’s the reason W. C. Locke & Co. is so profitable.
Only upon looking back did I realize the hints were there, but they were too subtle! As a reader, the whole time I was just wondering why did January suddenly become so passive?
We do experience a bit of portal traveling when the narrative flashed back to how Januarly’s mother and father, Ade and Yule/Julian, met. Again, I didn’t get a good handle on these characters and I felt Harrow kind of breezed through their meet-cute, which should have been the core of the story, as their relationship set off the chain of events that led to January being under Locke’s influence. January also had a few allies: Sam, the handsome grocer’s son and January’s childhood friend; Jane, a warrior from another world; and her dog, Bad.
There are still gem-like passages, like this one about Ade’s experience as a ruined woman:
When Dr. Carver’s Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition rolled out of Chicago the following evening, Ade and Frank were both crammed in his cubby in the performers’ railcar. In this way Ade suffered precisely the sort of fall from grace her aunts and grandmother most feared, and in so doing made a discovery: fallen women are afforded a species of freedom.6 There were certainly social costs—several of the women performers refused to speak to Ade at the lunch tents, and men made unfortunate assumptions about her availability—but in general Ade’s horizons expanded rather than shrank. She found herself surrounded by a bustling underworld of men and women who had each fallen in their own ways through drink or vice or passion or the mere colors of their skin. It was almost like finding a door within her very own world.
Ade gets homesick and longs to visit Aunt Lizzie in Missippi, this was a nice observation:Something about having a child bends you back to your beginnings, as if you have been drawing a circle all your life and now are compelled to close it.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January isn't destined to be an endearing classic, but it’s still a nicely written, if uneven, book and may be something my daughter could read when she’s older.
I finished this book on our new patio loveseat that Olman assembled on his day off, with a homemade Mint Julep.
Summer reading, baby!
