THE DOORS OF EDEN
Animal crackers
Adrian Tchaikovsky returns, cracks in reality in tow.
RELEASED 20 AUGUST
608 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Adrian Tchaikovsky
Publisher Tor
The portal-to-another-world story is one of the oldest fantasy staples. Often these narratives are about escape and imagination, which is perhaps because writers can relate to them so easily: storytellers create other worlds in their minds, and books are the portals they make to allow readers to access them. But in The Doors Of Eden, Adrian Tchaikovsky applies the trope to contemporary fears: this is a novel about borders.
It begins when Lee Pryor goes hunting for monsters on Bodmin Moor with her girlfriend Elsinore “Mal” Mallory, who vanishes during the expedition. Mal reappears a few years later, very much changed – stronger, weathered by brutal experience – and she’s not the only person to cross to our universe from another one. The cracks in reality are getting wider, and maybe they can’t be fixed. Other characters who get caught up in this business include secret service agents Alison Matchell and Julian Sabreur, who have high levels of unresolved sexual tension; spiky transgender genius Dr Kay Amal Khan; and Daniel Rove, a tech tycoon with the political outlook of Nigel Farage.
With its large ensemble cast (all distinctive and well-rounded) and sprawling plot, reading The Doors Of Eden is like binging on a particularly ambitious TV serial. Indeed, it’s easy to imagine it being visualised, provided a big enough budget could be raised to realise all these worlds: the contemporary Britain in which it’s rooted is vivid, and it smartly uses elements of crime drama and thrillers as a jumping-off point for a much wilder story.
At first it seems to have little in common with one of Tchaikovsky’s previous novels, Dogs Of War, about animals boosted by technology becoming war machines. However, as the characters explore the other universes, we see a different take on similar subject matter, with other Earths where the dominant species evolved from a different ancestor. The explorations of these realities, and what society would be like if, say, people evolved from rats, are some of the most thoughtful and fascinating parts of the book. But there’s a lot more to it than that.
The novel explores the dread of the “other”, with strange worlds leaking into the world we know and understand; the old bogeyman of being “overrun” by people from another culture. This subject matter has always been tricky to deal with for liberal-minded SF and fantasy writers: alien invasion stories are easy if you want to demonise the Other, offering plenty of opportunity for rousing conflict and affirmation, but if your aim is to undermine those fears, it can be difficult to strike the right balance. The Doors Of Eden approaches this theme very cleverly: the nature of the problem allows Tchaikovsky to explore a variety of takes on it, rather than having an “us vs them” narrative.
Tchaikovsky has a lot of pieces to put on the board and it takes a while to fix all the characters in your head, and also for the true shape of the story to emerge. There are also various interludes which are good in themselves, but a little disruptive to the plot. However, The Doors Of Eden is held together because Tchaikovsky has a strong handle on his theme and never loses sight of it amid the tumultuous narrative. He raises the stakes as high as they’ll go, to the point where it feels like there can’t possibly be a satisfying resolution. Yet when that resolution arrives, it feels exactly right. Eddie Robson
Coming from Tchaikovsky next year: One Day All This Will Be Yours, a novella he describes as “How To Time Travel Wrong”.
Like binging on an ambitious TV serial