Book Review: There Are Doors by Gene Wolfe
Mr. Green has hooked up with Lara, a woman he knows almost nothing about. After a week, she disappears, leaving only a note explaining that “there are doors” and that he must not go through them. Mr. Green promptly manages to stumble through such a door and finds himself in what appears to be an alternate Earth. An Earth where Lara is a goddess, and men die if they have sex.
Mr. Green is an unreliable viewpoint character–even if he isn’t delusional or suffering from hallucinations, there’s plenty of evidence that he’s mentally ill. It takes him a frustratingly long time to realize he isn’t on his Earth because he honestly can’t trust his own memories as to what is real. The reader is not helped in determining how much is real and how much is madness by the fact that several characters are transparently based on the classic Joe Palooka comic strip. (Readers born after 1980 or so might not have this problem.)
Such plot as there is is doled out sparingly, with long sections of “nothing happening” as Mr. Green gets his bearings or goes through the motions of his workaday life in what passes for the real world. While the book comes down pretty solidly on the side of science fiction by the end, it can also be argued that Mr. Green has just had a final psychotic break from reality.
It’s an interesting change from the sort of science fiction I normally read, but I would only recommend it to readers with patience and a willingness to guess at what isn’t said.
