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The Doors You Mark Are Your Own
Joshua City is one of seven city-states in a post-apocalyptic world where water is scarce and technology is at mid-twentieth-century Soviet levels. As the novel opens, the Baikal Sea has been poisoned, causing a major outbreak of a flesh-eating disease called nekrosis. Against this backdrop of political corruption, violence and oppression, a struggle for control of Joshua City ensues, and a revolutionary group called The Underground emerges.
The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is a sweeping literary epic—the result of years of painstaking writing and world-building by two brilliantly imaginative minds—that readers will get lost in and never want to end.
The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is a sweeping literary epic—the result of years of painstaking writing and world-building by two brilliantly imaginative minds—that readers will get lost in and never want to end.
- GenresFictionScience Fiction
724 pages, Paperback
First published March 17, 2015
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March 5, 2015
A long novel is a different beast. In its pages, a whole world may be contained; characters arrive and depart, suggesting lives begun long before; a reader can spend days, even weeks, tracking the progress of a plot that winds and dips and twists, building inexorably toward an explosive finish. The first book of The Joshua City Trilogy, The Doors You Mark Are Your Own, clocks in at an impressive seven hundred twenty-four pages, beautifully designed by Dark House Press, under Curbside Splendor Publishing. The novel, by Okla Elliot and Raul Clement, is a remarkably engaging and wholly satisfying addition to recent books that straddle the line between literary and genre fiction. The authors display their extensive and impressive world building skills, as well as a deft ability to plot a long story with multiple threads. In a metafictional turn, the book is presented—in an introduction and prologue—as a translation: originally “written” by Aleksandr Tuvim as a history of Joshua City, while the renowned poet is imprisoned for conspiracy against the government. Footnotes throughout the text from “translators” Elliot and Clement are judiciously used, though the narrative necessity of such an extensive backstory for the book’s origins remains, at this early point in the trilogy, mysterious.
The novel opens in Joshua City, one of the seven city-states still standing in the After-Time. Following “The Great Calamity,” an unsteady peace known as the Baikal Treaty has been brokered. But now Joshua City’s water has been deliberately poisoned, leading to a flesh-rotting illness known as “nekrosis.” Suspicion of water poisoning, in defiance of the Treaty, has created an unsteady political environment. In a desperate effort to regain control, the city’s leader, Mayor Adams—a villainous figure whose greed and disinterest in the true state of his people reads as an indictment of multiple current world leaders—blames the spread of “nekrosis” on an outside faction and declares war.
Into this tumultuous time the book introduces Nikolas Kovalski, a medical student interested in finding a cure for “nekrosis.” His roommate, Adrian Talbot, is a medical student as well, and his dark history includes his mother’s suicide and the epilepsy that strikes him without warning. Nikolas grows more and more disenchanted with the city’s treatment of its people, embodied by Mayor Adams and his dictatorial tactics. Adrian, meanwhile, believes he can do the most good while working inside Joshua City’s system. The novel, then, is a classic tale of paths diverging, and soon enough Nikolas has become the leader of “The Underground,” a resistance group comprised mostly of young men and women who work to mobilize the citizens of Joshua City, while at the same time, Adrian journeys to a desert hospital outside the city’s limits.
As the book expands, several more plots and characters are introduced—including a movie producer from the rich world of Silverville and a distraught widower whose house extends nearly impossibly over the Baikal Sea. One of the strongest subplots focuses on Nikolas’ brother, Marcik, through his early days as a Baikal Guard for Joshua City to his eventual capture and imprisonment. In setting scenes among a military regiment, the authors are able to explore the rough and often lawless lands outside of Joshua City. Beyond the cafes and underground bunkers, Marcik’s world feels particularly alive: the fat moon overhead, the insects (“drunk fat flies and long-nosed bloodsuckers”), the mountains in the distance, and the narrow passes created by rivers. Marcik’s growth and development from a naïve guardsman to leader takes an unexpected turn that cleverly recasts the novel’s opening prologue featuring “author” Aleksandr Tuvim.
Marcik is almost wholly a man of action; as a guardsman and prisoner, he leads a sensory existence, and here Elliot and Clement excel. The book is most uneven, in contrast, when character and plot are framed as vessels for ideas—for example, early in the novel when the narrative pauses for Adrian to lament, “How sad that it takes a war to obtain funding for a hospital.” A point is being made here, bluntly. But several pages later, the book more cleverly and effectively shows this very idea in action, during Adrian’s time as a volunteer at the desert hospital. Here, in scenes of illness and surgery that are vividly described, the consideration moves beyond a shallow told statement to a deepened understanding of true economic disparity and the crude morality and hierarchy of this particular world during this particular war.
Of the book’s central characters, the largest dissonance exists between how the book wishes to present Nikolas and how he appears on the page. His sections are often the least engaging; the description of him “lazily pondering the rights of humans and the duties of the revolutionary” is not uncommon or unusual. This is only troublesome because the prologue of the book insists that Nikolas is a central figure in the revolutionary history of Joshua City—engaging, dynamic, and attractive to the populous eager for change. One fears that Adrian and Marcik, far more alive and dynamic in their individual sections, will be relegated to a secondary, supportive status to Nikolas. Early in the book, Nikolas comes across as a scholar who speaks too often, at length, without recognizing how foolish he sounds. Recast as the leader of a revolution, his charm, his powers of speech, and his impressive intellect are told but rarely shown. By the second half of the novel, one senses overcompensation—a need to remind the reader—when Adrian sees Nikolas as “too brilliant, too resourceful.” Even Marcik—at a tense moment when he is at odds with his brother—says unconvincingly, “You are a brilliant man, Nikolas, the real genius of the family.”
The trouble is not that Nikolas cannot be brilliant, or a leader; rather it is that the book’s depiction of the young man cannot support the idea. In service of Nikolas’ “brilliance” even Katya, a porcelain-masked woman initially presented as tough and independent, is reduced by the novel’s second half to simply existing as his lover, unerring in her belief in him. “‘But you’re too important,” Katya tells Nikolas. “If we lose you, the revolution is lost.’ … [Katya] hated the way what [Nikolas] said was always right … he knew he was more important for the revolution than others.” Katya, luckily, avoids the unfortunate pattern established in this novel: too often, girls and women are presented as mentally unbalanced, suicidal, raped, used as sexual objects, or blackmailed into appearing in propaganda films before being killed off in car accidents. Eventually, one is left wishing for a strong female character of depth and complication who lives for herself, not as a sacrifice for a man.
In the end, the plots set into motion at the beginning of this trilogy are carefully considered, and for such a lengthy work, The Doors You Mark Are Your Own moves briskly. In its epic scope, the novel is able to address several issues; as with other works of postapocalyptic and dystopian fiction, the book often recontextualizes and comments on issues of class divide, the role of resistance in an authoritarian government, the use of media, and the ties of family and friendship in times of duress. Elliot and Clement are particularly effective in describing scenes of resistance. The novel’s momentum is wisely built in each rebellion orchestrated by The Underground echoing and amplifying the violence and destruction of the previous one.
The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is a novel that wishes to challenge the expectations of genre work and at the same deliver a satisfying tale of young men taking different paths in life. The world of Joshua City is richly imagined and lovingly evoked. From this material, Elliot and Clement have written a thrilling novel of a world with much left to explore, so that the novel’s ending is no ending at all, but a propulsion toward future volumes.
--originally published on Heavy Feather Review (http://heavyfeatherreview.com/2015/03...)
The novel opens in Joshua City, one of the seven city-states still standing in the After-Time. Following “The Great Calamity,” an unsteady peace known as the Baikal Treaty has been brokered. But now Joshua City’s water has been deliberately poisoned, leading to a flesh-rotting illness known as “nekrosis.” Suspicion of water poisoning, in defiance of the Treaty, has created an unsteady political environment. In a desperate effort to regain control, the city’s leader, Mayor Adams—a villainous figure whose greed and disinterest in the true state of his people reads as an indictment of multiple current world leaders—blames the spread of “nekrosis” on an outside faction and declares war.
Into this tumultuous time the book introduces Nikolas Kovalski, a medical student interested in finding a cure for “nekrosis.” His roommate, Adrian Talbot, is a medical student as well, and his dark history includes his mother’s suicide and the epilepsy that strikes him without warning. Nikolas grows more and more disenchanted with the city’s treatment of its people, embodied by Mayor Adams and his dictatorial tactics. Adrian, meanwhile, believes he can do the most good while working inside Joshua City’s system. The novel, then, is a classic tale of paths diverging, and soon enough Nikolas has become the leader of “The Underground,” a resistance group comprised mostly of young men and women who work to mobilize the citizens of Joshua City, while at the same time, Adrian journeys to a desert hospital outside the city’s limits.
As the book expands, several more plots and characters are introduced—including a movie producer from the rich world of Silverville and a distraught widower whose house extends nearly impossibly over the Baikal Sea. One of the strongest subplots focuses on Nikolas’ brother, Marcik, through his early days as a Baikal Guard for Joshua City to his eventual capture and imprisonment. In setting scenes among a military regiment, the authors are able to explore the rough and often lawless lands outside of Joshua City. Beyond the cafes and underground bunkers, Marcik’s world feels particularly alive: the fat moon overhead, the insects (“drunk fat flies and long-nosed bloodsuckers”), the mountains in the distance, and the narrow passes created by rivers. Marcik’s growth and development from a naïve guardsman to leader takes an unexpected turn that cleverly recasts the novel’s opening prologue featuring “author” Aleksandr Tuvim.
Marcik is almost wholly a man of action; as a guardsman and prisoner, he leads a sensory existence, and here Elliot and Clement excel. The book is most uneven, in contrast, when character and plot are framed as vessels for ideas—for example, early in the novel when the narrative pauses for Adrian to lament, “How sad that it takes a war to obtain funding for a hospital.” A point is being made here, bluntly. But several pages later, the book more cleverly and effectively shows this very idea in action, during Adrian’s time as a volunteer at the desert hospital. Here, in scenes of illness and surgery that are vividly described, the consideration moves beyond a shallow told statement to a deepened understanding of true economic disparity and the crude morality and hierarchy of this particular world during this particular war.
Of the book’s central characters, the largest dissonance exists between how the book wishes to present Nikolas and how he appears on the page. His sections are often the least engaging; the description of him “lazily pondering the rights of humans and the duties of the revolutionary” is not uncommon or unusual. This is only troublesome because the prologue of the book insists that Nikolas is a central figure in the revolutionary history of Joshua City—engaging, dynamic, and attractive to the populous eager for change. One fears that Adrian and Marcik, far more alive and dynamic in their individual sections, will be relegated to a secondary, supportive status to Nikolas. Early in the book, Nikolas comes across as a scholar who speaks too often, at length, without recognizing how foolish he sounds. Recast as the leader of a revolution, his charm, his powers of speech, and his impressive intellect are told but rarely shown. By the second half of the novel, one senses overcompensation—a need to remind the reader—when Adrian sees Nikolas as “too brilliant, too resourceful.” Even Marcik—at a tense moment when he is at odds with his brother—says unconvincingly, “You are a brilliant man, Nikolas, the real genius of the family.”
The trouble is not that Nikolas cannot be brilliant, or a leader; rather it is that the book’s depiction of the young man cannot support the idea. In service of Nikolas’ “brilliance” even Katya, a porcelain-masked woman initially presented as tough and independent, is reduced by the novel’s second half to simply existing as his lover, unerring in her belief in him. “‘But you’re too important,” Katya tells Nikolas. “If we lose you, the revolution is lost.’ … [Katya] hated the way what [Nikolas] said was always right … he knew he was more important for the revolution than others.” Katya, luckily, avoids the unfortunate pattern established in this novel: too often, girls and women are presented as mentally unbalanced, suicidal, raped, used as sexual objects, or blackmailed into appearing in propaganda films before being killed off in car accidents. Eventually, one is left wishing for a strong female character of depth and complication who lives for herself, not as a sacrifice for a man.
In the end, the plots set into motion at the beginning of this trilogy are carefully considered, and for such a lengthy work, The Doors You Mark Are Your Own moves briskly. In its epic scope, the novel is able to address several issues; as with other works of postapocalyptic and dystopian fiction, the book often recontextualizes and comments on issues of class divide, the role of resistance in an authoritarian government, the use of media, and the ties of family and friendship in times of duress. Elliot and Clement are particularly effective in describing scenes of resistance. The novel’s momentum is wisely built in each rebellion orchestrated by The Underground echoing and amplifying the violence and destruction of the previous one.
The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is a novel that wishes to challenge the expectations of genre work and at the same deliver a satisfying tale of young men taking different paths in life. The world of Joshua City is richly imagined and lovingly evoked. From this material, Elliot and Clement have written a thrilling novel of a world with much left to explore, so that the novel’s ending is no ending at all, but a propulsion toward future volumes.
--originally published on Heavy Feather Review (http://heavyfeatherreview.com/2015/03...)
July 27, 2015
THE DOORS YOU MARK ARE YOUR OWN is a sweeping epic in the vein of Frank Herbert's DUNE or Margaret Atwood's THE HANDMAID'S TALE. It is smart yet entertaining. It also deals with many political issues confronting us today: government surveillance, water scarcity, women in the sciences, immigration, and more. I strongly recommend this novel for the intelligent and politically engaged reader.
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June 30, 2015I tried with this book. I really did, and I've decided not to give it a rating because I didn't finish it.
I probably could have, but after 400+ pages, I was still struggling to care, and the problems and limitations of the text became so aggravating to me as I went that I couldn't even enjoy the parts I should have.
But let's unpack this a little, because I think the novel's failure is partly influenced by expectation. I got caught up in the hype and had high expectations for this. Maybe my expectations were too high. It had comparisons to Nabakov, Solzhenitsyn, Atwood, and others, which made me excited. It's an epic SF dystopian novel, so I was excited there too.
Unfortunately, I think it might have been too difficult to live up to these expectations.
Anyrate, here are my main issues with the book:
The narration--There are elements about the narration that just don't work for me. The device of having a fake author and having the authors be translators is fine. I'm indifferent to it as a device, but I imagine this is where the comparisons to Nabakov come from, because it's sort of a selfconscious and playfully postmodern device. It reminds me, though, more of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun. So the device itself is fine and I have no strong feelings about it, but its use bothered me a lot.
The use of footnotes is also a device I'm indifferent to, but I don't understand why they bothered to use them in this book. The author notes tell us very little and do little to contextualise the world or the plot or anything like that. The translator notes are completely useless. They do nothing but remind us of the device presented in the Notes on Translation, which begins the novel, and the Author's Introduction, which follows that bit. So the use of footnotes in the text only reinforces the idea that this is a translation by a different author in a language that doesn't exist, which is just odd. It's mostly like the book is winking at us in ways I find unpleasant and distracting, because you are, as a reader, able to get into the novel and just forget about the device and the style. And though the notes are rare [which is another reason I think they could be completely excluded], they add an annoying effect on the text that serves, as far as I can tell, no meaningful purpose.
Then there's the storytelling of the novel as a whole. Since the book so often wants to reinforce the idea that this is written by someone with nearly unlimited access to secret documents, including journals, surveillance tapes, and so on, it's told in a peculiar fashion that I find unpleasant for technical and stylistic reasons.
First, the technical: our author, Aleksandr Tuvim, goes into insane detail about the lives of the people in the novel. Even minor ones. For example, how could he know the details he knows about the Ulani torturers? I mean, this isn't a huge deal, but it's hard to get into that wilful suspension of disbelief when you, as a reader, are pushed so hard for seemingly no purpose. Like, the novel, at times, gives so much detail that he, as a historian, simply could not know. And, yeah, sure, this is what he calls a History Novel, which gives him a certain ability to fudge with facts, but then there are times when he straight up gives us pages from a character's journal. And perhaps most troubling, he remains too close to his characters to give a proper sense of proportion, I think, which would be necessary in a history.
And now the stylistic, which is related to the above: There's so much telling in the novel. Sometimes there's even a paragraph telling us what we learned thirty or fifty or one hundred pages ago, which is frustrating and annoying, because the authors clearly don't trust my intelligence as a reader. But then there's all the telling of emotion and significance. The narration will literally tell us that a person feels afraid or anxious or whatever, but will show none of this behavior. It will tell us that characters are charismatic or important but I almost never felt that way about characters described this way. While the narrator gets deep inside the heads and lives of characters, we mostly only learn facts. We never really get to experience the world through their eyes. And, yeah, again, this can be excused or explained away through the device, but that's a cheat and I'm not buying it. It would be a lazy way to explain away the very deep problems with the narration.
Then another point that bothers me, which can also be explained away by the device, but is also hinged on the narration, is that this novel very much follows the Great Man theory of history. And, fine, sure, that's a common thing, but it doesn't make the book more interesting. And since the authors get to choose how to tell this story and how to frame this history, I find it a very weak and ineffectual ideological take on history. And this very much is a story of Great Men who shape the world through their own brilliance and will. And, sure, that could be interesting, but it's hard to buy it from the characters we see. Backstory is often thrown at us to explain why a Great Man is the way they are, but I'd rather just see the Great Man in action. Related to this problem and the voice of historian is that none of the great speeches or ideas by the Great Men are ever written. The tyrant ruling Joshua City is meant to be charismatic and a great orator, but his speeches are never given. For what purpose? That might be interesting! And, presumably, the author of this history would have access to the words of the speech. This is where we could see how these men are really shaping history and why they're so effective. But, no, things are sort of summarised and brushed over. We're told that men are brilliant. We're told men are charismatic. We're told they're important. But rarely are we allowed to see any glimpses of these things. The only captivating Great Man in the novel is Marcik, the brother of the Great Man we're told shaped history more than any other. Marcik at least takes leadership and behaves like a leader that people would believably follow, especially in a military setting. His is the most interestingly told narrative thread in the novel, though it's certainly not where the heart or brain of the novel rests. It is, however, told evocatively with great narrative propulsion and scenes we can hold onto.
And I very much mean the Great Man theory to represent only male characters. 400 pages in, there's only one female character, and she's mostly a satellite of one of the Great Men. We don't really know why she loves Nikolas, our Great Man and protagonist. We know she loves him because we're told this. We don't really know why she's so devoted to him, except that she tells him he's important to the future of the world. Why he's important isn't really clear, but the novel tells us this often. We actually learn this in the Author's Introduction at the beginning of the book. He leads a revolution that changes history, so the presumed future audience [which doesn't exist in our reality] would already be very familiar with him and his story. However, it also seems clear from the beginning of the novel that his revolution failed, because our author is in prison under some totalitarian government, not unlike the one that's described in the novel.
So we know that Nikolas is great and that he failed. Now we assume we'll learn why in the novel. 400 pages in, it's hard to see why people follow him. And this is a big problem with the novel, mind. We have a protagonist who is boring and hard to like.
Nikolas is a brilliant medical student. We know this because we're told it. We never see him have brilliant insight. No, mostly he just insults people around him for being stupid. He's also a bit of a bohemian, in a very 19th century way. He's Rimbaud without the audaciousness. Eventually, for reasons that are told to us but certainly not felt by us, he quits medical school to do...something. That something is mostly get drunk with his group of pseudointellectual friends who plan for a better future through revolutionary means. It's a bolshevik group, basically, which is fitting for the very Russian setting. Now, this is where we could really get the ideas of the group and learn why they're so attractive. And we kind of do, in bits and pieces. It's all very vague Marxism, essentially, which is a huge disappointment, because it makes this feel like a 19th century novel [which is something I'll discuss more later] than it does like a potential future. All the ideas in the group are retreads of Marxist ideology. I mean, that's fine, but the book says nothing new about politics or even collectivism, which would certainly make this part more interesting. It would also make us care about Nikolas' ideas. They'd be unfamiliar and beautiful and maybe even a possible way to deal with the problems we see in our current world. But instead it's just rephrasing and summarising an old idea. Sure, that idea is an attractive one and it could work in our world, but it does nothing to excite me. And because it doesn't excite me, as a reader, I can only understand why people follow him on an intellectual level. I have no strong feelings about him or the ideas he presents. Sure, people in the novel do, but, because the ideas are all so vague and underexplained, it's hard to know which parts of the ideology are so attractive to people. This novel comes with the assumption that people are simply waiting for a good idea, which would be nice if humans were at all rational. Day laborers begin coming to the meetings and the meetings grow, though we never really get to hear what's said at a meeting or why people are attracted to him as a speaker and leader. Why would so many people find a young drunk man slurring out halfcocked ideas become something worth giving up your life for? But it happens, fine.
Nikolas moves from pure revolutionary talk to personal violent revolution. Why he does this isn't really understood, which would have been a nice thing to include, since there's so much deep delving into the inanities of his personality, like why he drinks and such. But the turn isn't as important, I suppose, though it does certainly come to shape his revolution.
Another thing that really bothered me about Nikolas, and is when I really struggled to keep believing, to keep reading, is when he basically becomes a ninja over the space of twenty pages.
In certain types of characters, I could accept this. But Nikolas is very much a character of the brain and this is what he values in life. He's also a very heavy drinker and smoker. I can accept that he has natural physical abilities, but for him to gain this level of coordination, strength, and endurance in such a short amount of time is absurd. We're not sure how long his training is, but after it's complete, we know he's known his woman for four months. Now, she knew him before his training and knew him long enough to fall hopelessly head over heels for him [which I'll come back to], and so I'm guessing his training took about a month.
He went from a heavy drinking and smoking intellectual to a man of insane physical capabilities. The kind you'd find in an elite warrior.
And this is one of the biggest problems with Nikolas. He's a Gary Sue.
He's good at everything. He has personality flaws, but they don't really effect him. Sure, he drinks and smokes and has a temper, but these don't seem to negatively impact him outside of superficial events. Certainly this is why he dropped out of medical school and became violent, but those seem to just be part of his destiny [a word bandied about that I find unpleasant in a book like this]. He never struggles, and while there are people like this [especially in fiction (and especially when they're Great Men)], they don't make for interesting characters, especially when we never actually see their insight, their charisma.
The reason Andrew Wiggins in Ender's Game works is because we get to see everything that makes him a great leader and we get to see his development as a thinker, a soldier, a leader.
I mentioned the woman who loves Nikolas and how she's basically the only female character of consequence that I've encountered in the novel over the first 400+ pages. We know very little about why she does what she does. We know she loves Nikolas and believes he's basically the future of Joshua City, but we never know why. And here's the thing: I could buy the other stuff about Nikolas if they could show us this. How did he win her over?
You know what the reader sees? The way their relationship develops is because he finds her fascinating, because, as part of her culture, she wears a mask. She's also a prostitute for reasons we discover later. She becomes of interest as a reflection of Nikolas' desires. We're told she's intelligent and blah blah blah, but we never see much from her except her concern for and love of Nikolas.
This is super problematic, and not just because she's the only female character in the novel. I mean, really, if we could just see what ideas turned her to Nikolas, I think I'd be able to buy that Nikolas is a great leader, that he's charismatic.
But now let's shift gears towards another thorn in my side while reading this. The whole conflict of the novel and its historical context are centered around fresh water scarcity. Okay, cool. This is an idea I'm into. But how is this developed or shown? Well, it's not. In fact, we're shown a big difference between classes, but I'm not sure how the water scarcity relates to this. You know all the drinking Nikolas does? Did you know he's dirt poor? Did you know the super poor of this world drink alcohol often, and it's not expensive? Do you know how much water you need to make a liter of vodka? Or even a liter of beer?
Much more than you might think. And so where does this water scarcity hit people? We know it's the cause of war and such, but water also seems freely available when it's in a form not described as water. It would be much cooler if alcohol were a symbol dividing the classes. Not only are the impoverished classes mistreated, manipulated, exploited, but they can't even drink away their sorrows. That's something I'd like to see in this novel, or a novel that tries to deal with water scarcity. That would also help me believe in how easy it is to mobilise people for Nikolas' cause.
But also I wish there was an explanation of the plumbing system in these cities, which is an odd request, but that would be a very useful thing to have. The authors could present an alternative to our environmentally wasteful current system. Because you don't need running water like we currently use it, and many would argue we're doing a poor job of sustaining our limited fresh water. And this would work fine in the novel since Tuvim describes all kinds of random things, but it would also show the ingenuity of the Joshuans and the people of the other cities. If they could solve this problem, I'd believe in their cultural dominance more.
It's a very standard dystopian novel, and I guess that's my problem, because I expected much, much more. ANd it's not that books need to say anything about the world beyond the book or the world we live in, but those elements, for me, help make the books significant to me as a reader and as a person. It makes me walk away from the novel changed, inspired, invigorated, and intellectually motivated. But this is treading the same water as 1984 to me. And this is a big problem of the novel, I think. The fact that it feels like it was written 100 years ago though it came out this year. The ideas are 19th century, the behavior of some of the characters matches this. At other times, it's a very Soviet era novel, which is also problematic.
And it has racial attitudes that match those eras of novels, I think. But I'll leave that one alone since I didn't finish the book.
These are the biggest problems I had with the novel and the reasons I gave up. I could have kept reading but chose not to. The novel is political without having anything to say about politics. It's about history without having anything to say about history. It's violent without having anything to say about violence.
It's written in a very easy to read way. The pages can fly by if you want them to. And, I mean, I read the first 300 pages or so in about two or three days, then took off a few weeks because of how much these things were bothering me. I read about 120 pages yesterday and kept getting angrier and angrier at the book, and so I gave up.
Many readers will not have the problems I did with this book, and so I encourage everyone to give it a shot. You very well might love this book and think it's the best thing to come out of the indie press world [which was my hope!]. Many of the problems I had with the novel are probably specific to me as a reader, so, despite all my complaints, I still think it's worth giving it a shot.
Give it 150 pages. If you like that, give it another 150, and on and on until you finish or give up. It's possible it has a great second half, but from what I could see coming in the micro and macro conflicts, I decided it was best for me to just walk away. Because, as far as I could tell, nothing was going to change the way I felt.
I'm disappointed in the novel, which is a weird way to feel. I'd probably rate this as a one or two, but I'll leave that blank, since I didn't finish. It's possible the next 300 pages could change my mind and even turn it around.
I hope so, though I won't know. But I hope this finishes well.
I probably could have, but after 400+ pages, I was still struggling to care, and the problems and limitations of the text became so aggravating to me as I went that I couldn't even enjoy the parts I should have.
But let's unpack this a little, because I think the novel's failure is partly influenced by expectation. I got caught up in the hype and had high expectations for this. Maybe my expectations were too high. It had comparisons to Nabakov, Solzhenitsyn, Atwood, and others, which made me excited. It's an epic SF dystopian novel, so I was excited there too.
Unfortunately, I think it might have been too difficult to live up to these expectations.
Anyrate, here are my main issues with the book:
The narration--There are elements about the narration that just don't work for me. The device of having a fake author and having the authors be translators is fine. I'm indifferent to it as a device, but I imagine this is where the comparisons to Nabakov come from, because it's sort of a selfconscious and playfully postmodern device. It reminds me, though, more of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun. So the device itself is fine and I have no strong feelings about it, but its use bothered me a lot.
The use of footnotes is also a device I'm indifferent to, but I don't understand why they bothered to use them in this book. The author notes tell us very little and do little to contextualise the world or the plot or anything like that. The translator notes are completely useless. They do nothing but remind us of the device presented in the Notes on Translation, which begins the novel, and the Author's Introduction, which follows that bit. So the use of footnotes in the text only reinforces the idea that this is a translation by a different author in a language that doesn't exist, which is just odd. It's mostly like the book is winking at us in ways I find unpleasant and distracting, because you are, as a reader, able to get into the novel and just forget about the device and the style. And though the notes are rare [which is another reason I think they could be completely excluded], they add an annoying effect on the text that serves, as far as I can tell, no meaningful purpose.
Then there's the storytelling of the novel as a whole. Since the book so often wants to reinforce the idea that this is written by someone with nearly unlimited access to secret documents, including journals, surveillance tapes, and so on, it's told in a peculiar fashion that I find unpleasant for technical and stylistic reasons.
First, the technical: our author, Aleksandr Tuvim, goes into insane detail about the lives of the people in the novel. Even minor ones. For example, how could he know the details he knows about the Ulani torturers? I mean, this isn't a huge deal, but it's hard to get into that wilful suspension of disbelief when you, as a reader, are pushed so hard for seemingly no purpose. Like, the novel, at times, gives so much detail that he, as a historian, simply could not know. And, yeah, sure, this is what he calls a History Novel, which gives him a certain ability to fudge with facts, but then there are times when he straight up gives us pages from a character's journal. And perhaps most troubling, he remains too close to his characters to give a proper sense of proportion, I think, which would be necessary in a history.
And now the stylistic, which is related to the above: There's so much telling in the novel. Sometimes there's even a paragraph telling us what we learned thirty or fifty or one hundred pages ago, which is frustrating and annoying, because the authors clearly don't trust my intelligence as a reader. But then there's all the telling of emotion and significance. The narration will literally tell us that a person feels afraid or anxious or whatever, but will show none of this behavior. It will tell us that characters are charismatic or important but I almost never felt that way about characters described this way. While the narrator gets deep inside the heads and lives of characters, we mostly only learn facts. We never really get to experience the world through their eyes. And, yeah, again, this can be excused or explained away through the device, but that's a cheat and I'm not buying it. It would be a lazy way to explain away the very deep problems with the narration.
Then another point that bothers me, which can also be explained away by the device, but is also hinged on the narration, is that this novel very much follows the Great Man theory of history. And, fine, sure, that's a common thing, but it doesn't make the book more interesting. And since the authors get to choose how to tell this story and how to frame this history, I find it a very weak and ineffectual ideological take on history. And this very much is a story of Great Men who shape the world through their own brilliance and will. And, sure, that could be interesting, but it's hard to buy it from the characters we see. Backstory is often thrown at us to explain why a Great Man is the way they are, but I'd rather just see the Great Man in action. Related to this problem and the voice of historian is that none of the great speeches or ideas by the Great Men are ever written. The tyrant ruling Joshua City is meant to be charismatic and a great orator, but his speeches are never given. For what purpose? That might be interesting! And, presumably, the author of this history would have access to the words of the speech. This is where we could see how these men are really shaping history and why they're so effective. But, no, things are sort of summarised and brushed over. We're told that men are brilliant. We're told men are charismatic. We're told they're important. But rarely are we allowed to see any glimpses of these things. The only captivating Great Man in the novel is Marcik, the brother of the Great Man we're told shaped history more than any other. Marcik at least takes leadership and behaves like a leader that people would believably follow, especially in a military setting. His is the most interestingly told narrative thread in the novel, though it's certainly not where the heart or brain of the novel rests. It is, however, told evocatively with great narrative propulsion and scenes we can hold onto.
And I very much mean the Great Man theory to represent only male characters. 400 pages in, there's only one female character, and she's mostly a satellite of one of the Great Men. We don't really know why she loves Nikolas, our Great Man and protagonist. We know she loves him because we're told this. We don't really know why she's so devoted to him, except that she tells him he's important to the future of the world. Why he's important isn't really clear, but the novel tells us this often. We actually learn this in the Author's Introduction at the beginning of the book. He leads a revolution that changes history, so the presumed future audience [which doesn't exist in our reality] would already be very familiar with him and his story. However, it also seems clear from the beginning of the novel that his revolution failed, because our author is in prison under some totalitarian government, not unlike the one that's described in the novel.
So we know that Nikolas is great and that he failed. Now we assume we'll learn why in the novel. 400 pages in, it's hard to see why people follow him. And this is a big problem with the novel, mind. We have a protagonist who is boring and hard to like.
Nikolas is a brilliant medical student. We know this because we're told it. We never see him have brilliant insight. No, mostly he just insults people around him for being stupid. He's also a bit of a bohemian, in a very 19th century way. He's Rimbaud without the audaciousness. Eventually, for reasons that are told to us but certainly not felt by us, he quits medical school to do...something. That something is mostly get drunk with his group of pseudointellectual friends who plan for a better future through revolutionary means. It's a bolshevik group, basically, which is fitting for the very Russian setting. Now, this is where we could really get the ideas of the group and learn why they're so attractive. And we kind of do, in bits and pieces. It's all very vague Marxism, essentially, which is a huge disappointment, because it makes this feel like a 19th century novel [which is something I'll discuss more later] than it does like a potential future. All the ideas in the group are retreads of Marxist ideology. I mean, that's fine, but the book says nothing new about politics or even collectivism, which would certainly make this part more interesting. It would also make us care about Nikolas' ideas. They'd be unfamiliar and beautiful and maybe even a possible way to deal with the problems we see in our current world. But instead it's just rephrasing and summarising an old idea. Sure, that idea is an attractive one and it could work in our world, but it does nothing to excite me. And because it doesn't excite me, as a reader, I can only understand why people follow him on an intellectual level. I have no strong feelings about him or the ideas he presents. Sure, people in the novel do, but, because the ideas are all so vague and underexplained, it's hard to know which parts of the ideology are so attractive to people. This novel comes with the assumption that people are simply waiting for a good idea, which would be nice if humans were at all rational. Day laborers begin coming to the meetings and the meetings grow, though we never really get to hear what's said at a meeting or why people are attracted to him as a speaker and leader. Why would so many people find a young drunk man slurring out halfcocked ideas become something worth giving up your life for? But it happens, fine.
Nikolas moves from pure revolutionary talk to personal violent revolution. Why he does this isn't really understood, which would have been a nice thing to include, since there's so much deep delving into the inanities of his personality, like why he drinks and such. But the turn isn't as important, I suppose, though it does certainly come to shape his revolution.
Another thing that really bothered me about Nikolas, and is when I really struggled to keep believing, to keep reading, is when he basically becomes a ninja over the space of twenty pages.
In certain types of characters, I could accept this. But Nikolas is very much a character of the brain and this is what he values in life. He's also a very heavy drinker and smoker. I can accept that he has natural physical abilities, but for him to gain this level of coordination, strength, and endurance in such a short amount of time is absurd. We're not sure how long his training is, but after it's complete, we know he's known his woman for four months. Now, she knew him before his training and knew him long enough to fall hopelessly head over heels for him [which I'll come back to], and so I'm guessing his training took about a month.
He went from a heavy drinking and smoking intellectual to a man of insane physical capabilities. The kind you'd find in an elite warrior.
And this is one of the biggest problems with Nikolas. He's a Gary Sue.
He's good at everything. He has personality flaws, but they don't really effect him. Sure, he drinks and smokes and has a temper, but these don't seem to negatively impact him outside of superficial events. Certainly this is why he dropped out of medical school and became violent, but those seem to just be part of his destiny [a word bandied about that I find unpleasant in a book like this]. He never struggles, and while there are people like this [especially in fiction (and especially when they're Great Men)], they don't make for interesting characters, especially when we never actually see their insight, their charisma.
The reason Andrew Wiggins in Ender's Game works is because we get to see everything that makes him a great leader and we get to see his development as a thinker, a soldier, a leader.
I mentioned the woman who loves Nikolas and how she's basically the only female character of consequence that I've encountered in the novel over the first 400+ pages. We know very little about why she does what she does. We know she loves Nikolas and believes he's basically the future of Joshua City, but we never know why. And here's the thing: I could buy the other stuff about Nikolas if they could show us this. How did he win her over?
You know what the reader sees? The way their relationship develops is because he finds her fascinating, because, as part of her culture, she wears a mask. She's also a prostitute for reasons we discover later. She becomes of interest as a reflection of Nikolas' desires. We're told she's intelligent and blah blah blah, but we never see much from her except her concern for and love of Nikolas.
This is super problematic, and not just because she's the only female character in the novel. I mean, really, if we could just see what ideas turned her to Nikolas, I think I'd be able to buy that Nikolas is a great leader, that he's charismatic.
But now let's shift gears towards another thorn in my side while reading this. The whole conflict of the novel and its historical context are centered around fresh water scarcity. Okay, cool. This is an idea I'm into. But how is this developed or shown? Well, it's not. In fact, we're shown a big difference between classes, but I'm not sure how the water scarcity relates to this. You know all the drinking Nikolas does? Did you know he's dirt poor? Did you know the super poor of this world drink alcohol often, and it's not expensive? Do you know how much water you need to make a liter of vodka? Or even a liter of beer?
Much more than you might think. And so where does this water scarcity hit people? We know it's the cause of war and such, but water also seems freely available when it's in a form not described as water. It would be much cooler if alcohol were a symbol dividing the classes. Not only are the impoverished classes mistreated, manipulated, exploited, but they can't even drink away their sorrows. That's something I'd like to see in this novel, or a novel that tries to deal with water scarcity. That would also help me believe in how easy it is to mobilise people for Nikolas' cause.
But also I wish there was an explanation of the plumbing system in these cities, which is an odd request, but that would be a very useful thing to have. The authors could present an alternative to our environmentally wasteful current system. Because you don't need running water like we currently use it, and many would argue we're doing a poor job of sustaining our limited fresh water. And this would work fine in the novel since Tuvim describes all kinds of random things, but it would also show the ingenuity of the Joshuans and the people of the other cities. If they could solve this problem, I'd believe in their cultural dominance more.
It's a very standard dystopian novel, and I guess that's my problem, because I expected much, much more. ANd it's not that books need to say anything about the world beyond the book or the world we live in, but those elements, for me, help make the books significant to me as a reader and as a person. It makes me walk away from the novel changed, inspired, invigorated, and intellectually motivated. But this is treading the same water as 1984 to me. And this is a big problem of the novel, I think. The fact that it feels like it was written 100 years ago though it came out this year. The ideas are 19th century, the behavior of some of the characters matches this. At other times, it's a very Soviet era novel, which is also problematic.
And it has racial attitudes that match those eras of novels, I think. But I'll leave that one alone since I didn't finish the book.
These are the biggest problems I had with the novel and the reasons I gave up. I could have kept reading but chose not to. The novel is political without having anything to say about politics. It's about history without having anything to say about history. It's violent without having anything to say about violence.
It's written in a very easy to read way. The pages can fly by if you want them to. And, I mean, I read the first 300 pages or so in about two or three days, then took off a few weeks because of how much these things were bothering me. I read about 120 pages yesterday and kept getting angrier and angrier at the book, and so I gave up.
Many readers will not have the problems I did with this book, and so I encourage everyone to give it a shot. You very well might love this book and think it's the best thing to come out of the indie press world [which was my hope!]. Many of the problems I had with the novel are probably specific to me as a reader, so, despite all my complaints, I still think it's worth giving it a shot.
Give it 150 pages. If you like that, give it another 150, and on and on until you finish or give up. It's possible it has a great second half, but from what I could see coming in the micro and macro conflicts, I decided it was best for me to just walk away. Because, as far as I could tell, nothing was going to change the way I felt.
I'm disappointed in the novel, which is a weird way to feel. I'd probably rate this as a one or two, but I'll leave that blank, since I didn't finish. It's possible the next 300 pages could change my mind and even turn it around.
I hope so, though I won't know. But I hope this finishes well.
March 31, 2014
Whoa...
February 7, 2015
Originally published at Risingshadow.
The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is a literary dystopian masterpiece of an epic scope that nicely differs from other new speculative fiction novels. It's the first part of the Joshua City Trilogy.
This novel has been written in a slightly different way than other new speculative fiction novels. The text has been translated from Slovnik and other languages into English, so the actual authors are merely "translators". The story was originally written by a fictional person called Aleksandr Tuvim and it was decoded into English by Okla Elliott and Raul Clement so that people could read it. This kind of storytelling technique has been used a few times in speculative fiction, but not many authors use it, so it added a unique touch of style to the novel.
In my opinion The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is exceptionally good dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction. I've read quite a lot of this kind of novels and I can say that this one clearly stands out due to its epic story, beautiful prose, well-created world and combination of many elements. Science fiction novels like this one are unfortunately very rare, because most authors tend to avoid writing epic literary novels and forget to pay enough attention to the prose, characterization and worldbuilding.
Here's a bit of information about the story:
- In the prologue Aleksandr Tuvim explains how he was shown mercy by General Schmidt and how he began to write the history of Joshua City by General Schmidt's request.
- The real story begins after the prologue: Nikolas Kovalski is a medical student who's interested in finding a cure for the nekrosis disease that is caused by tainted water. He has a brother, Marcik, who has joined the Guard, and a friend called Adrian Talbot. William Adams is the mayor of Joshua City who has quite an intriguing past. As the rotting-sickness spreads, Mayor Adams tries to stay in power and control things...
There are quite a lot of characters in this novel, but the authors focus the narrative nicely around Nikolas, Marcik, Adrian and Mayor Adams. Nikolas is the hero of the story and he begins to lead the resistance movement called The Underground.
The characterization is good, because the characters are three-dimensional and have pasts and secrets of their own. The authors write fluently and fascinatingly about the characters' lives and gradually reveal things about them to the readers. In my opinion the characters are brought vividly to life by descriptions about their lives and childhood experiences that have defined and shaped them to be what they are now. They have endured and experienced many things, but they all have survived into adulthood and have to deal with what's going on in the society.
The worldbuilding is rich and memorable. As the story begins to unfold, the world opens up to the readers in a wonderfully vibrant and vivid way. The descriptions of the places, happenings and people feel realistic and the authors are capable of evoking images of a city where clean water is scarce and technology hasn't advanced much.
The events take place in Joshua City, which is one of seven city-states in a post-apocalyptic alternate reality. In the Before-Time the water went bad and the plague began to spread, people died and whole nations were wiped away. When the Seven Cities were built, people entered the After-Time. Soon there was a war and lives were lost, but The Seven Cities came together and agreed that as long as one of them has clean water, none shall go thirsty. This was called The Baikal Treaty and it has lasted until now. Unfortunately the water has gone bad again and times are dark as the rotting-sickness spreads in the world.
The nekrosis disease is a fascinatingly disturbing disease, because it eats the flesh. As a big fan of dark fantasy, horror, new weird and weird fiction, I was fascinated by this disease and its symptoms. Reading about the medical training was also fascinating for me, because the authors wrote surprisingly fluently about medical courses, corpses and procedures.
The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is a massive novel, because it's over 700 pages long. It's possible that there are readers out there who are frightened by its huge size, because most new speculative novels are much shorter, but they shouldn't be frightened by it, because it's a beautifully written quality novel and every page is worth reading. It's a relatively fast read, because once you begin to read it you won't be able to stop reading until you've reached the last page. (I can mention that it didn't take long for me to read this novel, because I enjoyed the story.)
The Doors You Mark Are Your Own contains many well-known and popular dystopian and post-apocalyptic elements and themes (politics, social commentary, resistance issues etc) that many speculative fiction readers are familiar with, but they're delivered in an entertaining and beautifully written format. It's amazing how well the story flows and how good it is, because it doesn't feel heavy or sluggish. Normally massive novels like this tend to have unnecessary filling and plenty of annoying fluff in them, but not in this case. It's great that the authors have managed to avoid using unnecessary filling material and concentrated on writing an atmospheric story.
The authors blend elements of Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and even Golden Age Hollywood in such an easy and effortless way that you can't help but wonder how they've managed to keep all the threads in their hands. Their epic story sparkles with ambition, style and originality.
I was amazed by the quality of the prose, because Okla Elliott and Raul Clement write beautiful literary prose that attracts quality-oriented readers. The beautiful and nuanced prose highlights all the fine points of the epic story in an excellent way. It was easy for me to see that the authors have constructed the story carefully and have spent time honing and polishing the prose.
I noticed that this novel has echoes of great literary classics in it, but the story treads boldly along its own path, because it's pure speculative fiction from start to finish. The combination of speculative fiction and literary storytelling works perfectly, because the dark story comes to life in the hands of the authors.
I think that speculative fiction readers will like The Doors You Mark Are Your Own, but I also think that readers who don't normally read speculative fiction will enjoy reading it. Because this novel reads like a historical novel, readers of historical fiction may find it interesting. This novel can also be recommended to readers who enjoy reading new weirdish novels, because its literary contents and certain happenings may be of interest to them.
I look forward to reading the next novel, because it'll be interesting to read what happens in it. Because the authors seem to love storytelling and have written this novel out of love for storytelling and are good at writing literary prose, I'm sure that next novel will be worth waiting for and will please the readers.
I give this novel full 5 stars on the scale from 1 to 5 stars. I was very impressed by it and its literary qualities. (It's possible that certain readers may not understand the subtle beauty of this novel, but I honestly think that quality-oriented readers will praise it as much as I do.)
The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is a stunning and ambitious literary speculative fiction novel that should be read by all who enjoy reading well written fiction, because it's one of the best, biggest and most literary novels of its kind. It's an unforgettable vision of a dystopian and post-apocalyptic world that is ravaged by a horrible disease and social unrest.
Excellent and beautifully written speculative fiction!
The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is a literary dystopian masterpiece of an epic scope that nicely differs from other new speculative fiction novels. It's the first part of the Joshua City Trilogy.
This novel has been written in a slightly different way than other new speculative fiction novels. The text has been translated from Slovnik and other languages into English, so the actual authors are merely "translators". The story was originally written by a fictional person called Aleksandr Tuvim and it was decoded into English by Okla Elliott and Raul Clement so that people could read it. This kind of storytelling technique has been used a few times in speculative fiction, but not many authors use it, so it added a unique touch of style to the novel.
In my opinion The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is exceptionally good dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction. I've read quite a lot of this kind of novels and I can say that this one clearly stands out due to its epic story, beautiful prose, well-created world and combination of many elements. Science fiction novels like this one are unfortunately very rare, because most authors tend to avoid writing epic literary novels and forget to pay enough attention to the prose, characterization and worldbuilding.
Here's a bit of information about the story:
- In the prologue Aleksandr Tuvim explains how he was shown mercy by General Schmidt and how he began to write the history of Joshua City by General Schmidt's request.
- The real story begins after the prologue: Nikolas Kovalski is a medical student who's interested in finding a cure for the nekrosis disease that is caused by tainted water. He has a brother, Marcik, who has joined the Guard, and a friend called Adrian Talbot. William Adams is the mayor of Joshua City who has quite an intriguing past. As the rotting-sickness spreads, Mayor Adams tries to stay in power and control things...
There are quite a lot of characters in this novel, but the authors focus the narrative nicely around Nikolas, Marcik, Adrian and Mayor Adams. Nikolas is the hero of the story and he begins to lead the resistance movement called The Underground.
The characterization is good, because the characters are three-dimensional and have pasts and secrets of their own. The authors write fluently and fascinatingly about the characters' lives and gradually reveal things about them to the readers. In my opinion the characters are brought vividly to life by descriptions about their lives and childhood experiences that have defined and shaped them to be what they are now. They have endured and experienced many things, but they all have survived into adulthood and have to deal with what's going on in the society.
The worldbuilding is rich and memorable. As the story begins to unfold, the world opens up to the readers in a wonderfully vibrant and vivid way. The descriptions of the places, happenings and people feel realistic and the authors are capable of evoking images of a city where clean water is scarce and technology hasn't advanced much.
The events take place in Joshua City, which is one of seven city-states in a post-apocalyptic alternate reality. In the Before-Time the water went bad and the plague began to spread, people died and whole nations were wiped away. When the Seven Cities were built, people entered the After-Time. Soon there was a war and lives were lost, but The Seven Cities came together and agreed that as long as one of them has clean water, none shall go thirsty. This was called The Baikal Treaty and it has lasted until now. Unfortunately the water has gone bad again and times are dark as the rotting-sickness spreads in the world.
The nekrosis disease is a fascinatingly disturbing disease, because it eats the flesh. As a big fan of dark fantasy, horror, new weird and weird fiction, I was fascinated by this disease and its symptoms. Reading about the medical training was also fascinating for me, because the authors wrote surprisingly fluently about medical courses, corpses and procedures.
The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is a massive novel, because it's over 700 pages long. It's possible that there are readers out there who are frightened by its huge size, because most new speculative novels are much shorter, but they shouldn't be frightened by it, because it's a beautifully written quality novel and every page is worth reading. It's a relatively fast read, because once you begin to read it you won't be able to stop reading until you've reached the last page. (I can mention that it didn't take long for me to read this novel, because I enjoyed the story.)
The Doors You Mark Are Your Own contains many well-known and popular dystopian and post-apocalyptic elements and themes (politics, social commentary, resistance issues etc) that many speculative fiction readers are familiar with, but they're delivered in an entertaining and beautifully written format. It's amazing how well the story flows and how good it is, because it doesn't feel heavy or sluggish. Normally massive novels like this tend to have unnecessary filling and plenty of annoying fluff in them, but not in this case. It's great that the authors have managed to avoid using unnecessary filling material and concentrated on writing an atmospheric story.
The authors blend elements of Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and even Golden Age Hollywood in such an easy and effortless way that you can't help but wonder how they've managed to keep all the threads in their hands. Their epic story sparkles with ambition, style and originality.
I was amazed by the quality of the prose, because Okla Elliott and Raul Clement write beautiful literary prose that attracts quality-oriented readers. The beautiful and nuanced prose highlights all the fine points of the epic story in an excellent way. It was easy for me to see that the authors have constructed the story carefully and have spent time honing and polishing the prose.
I noticed that this novel has echoes of great literary classics in it, but the story treads boldly along its own path, because it's pure speculative fiction from start to finish. The combination of speculative fiction and literary storytelling works perfectly, because the dark story comes to life in the hands of the authors.
I think that speculative fiction readers will like The Doors You Mark Are Your Own, but I also think that readers who don't normally read speculative fiction will enjoy reading it. Because this novel reads like a historical novel, readers of historical fiction may find it interesting. This novel can also be recommended to readers who enjoy reading new weirdish novels, because its literary contents and certain happenings may be of interest to them.
I look forward to reading the next novel, because it'll be interesting to read what happens in it. Because the authors seem to love storytelling and have written this novel out of love for storytelling and are good at writing literary prose, I'm sure that next novel will be worth waiting for and will please the readers.
I give this novel full 5 stars on the scale from 1 to 5 stars. I was very impressed by it and its literary qualities. (It's possible that certain readers may not understand the subtle beauty of this novel, but I honestly think that quality-oriented readers will praise it as much as I do.)
The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is a stunning and ambitious literary speculative fiction novel that should be read by all who enjoy reading well written fiction, because it's one of the best, biggest and most literary novels of its kind. It's an unforgettable vision of a dystopian and post-apocalyptic world that is ravaged by a horrible disease and social unrest.
Excellent and beautifully written speculative fiction!
August 24, 2015
"Sweeping literary epic" is the perfect definition of this book. Even at 701 pages, I carried this book with me at all times, reading on the subway, reading every spare minute at work, reading in bed until 3:00 AM...even reading at the sink while brushing my teeth.
There is a huge cast of characters, but none of them get lost in the crowd. They are all unique, but also multifaceted. The people (and that's what they feel like, not merely characters in a book) on these pages seem to truly breathe and dream and live.
The storytelling itself reminds me of Russian literature, spanning many lives and locations, revealing the thoughts and the hearts of sometimes even the most insignificant (or are they?) of characters. The authors do a wonderful job of showing just how many lives are connected in events, even if the players themselves have no idea of the reach of their actions.
As I approached the final pages, I didn't want the book to end...and then I saw those magical, smile-inducing words: "To Be Continued...." I cannot wait to see what stories lie ahead.
There is a huge cast of characters, but none of them get lost in the crowd. They are all unique, but also multifaceted. The people (and that's what they feel like, not merely characters in a book) on these pages seem to truly breathe and dream and live.
The storytelling itself reminds me of Russian literature, spanning many lives and locations, revealing the thoughts and the hearts of sometimes even the most insignificant (or are they?) of characters. The authors do a wonderful job of showing just how many lives are connected in events, even if the players themselves have no idea of the reach of their actions.
As I approached the final pages, I didn't want the book to end...and then I saw those magical, smile-inducing words: "To Be Continued...." I cannot wait to see what stories lie ahead.
September 2, 2015
If you enjoy classic Russian lit with a scifi twist, then Doors is a solid treat for you. Even though set a few centuries after the collapse of our civilization, it is more steampunk than post-apocalyptic, a world of smaller horizons has regained early 20th century technology, and politics of the era.
June 22, 2015
I absolutely loved this book. As soon as I finished it, I was torn between immediately rereading it and lending it to a friend so they too can experience Joshua City! A powerhouse of a novel.
September 12, 2015
Reviewed by RJ at http://ineedanotherbookcase.blogspot....
In this pseudo-translated historical text, originally written by an author from a time in our own alternate distant future, we learn of a world before that time yet occurring after the fall of our own (or possibly our recent past). As stated by the book’s own summary, this “blends elements of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Golden Age Hollywood.” The main story itself is that of a world that had been nearly destroyed due to events not limited to, but largely centered on, the contamination of the world’s water, causing nekrosis in all those it infected. However, various dying cultures managed to come together and settle around a clean water source and survive, though on a much smaller scale than they previously existed. Now, that same contamination has reappeared and tensions are growing within and amongst the various cities. In the greatest and most powerful of these cities, Joshua City, the leader uses this reemergence as an excuse to declare war on the others, starting with the herdspeople of Ulan-Ude, as the first step in gaining power of all seven cities. However, this military campaign has led to civil unrest within Joshua City’s own borders. The foremost of the points of view shown to us belong to that of Nikolas, Marcik, and Adrian.
As noted in the summary, this book is fictitious but still possesses a very real air about it. Along with footnotes, there are moments within the false history/story—which is to say, not including the prologue(s)—when the nonexistent original author, Aleksander Tuvim, and the two real authors but self-described translators, Okla Elliott and Raul Clement, will pause the story and speak to the readers directly, elaborating on certain events in this history, providing both their own opinions and context on matters in such a way that it adds to the wonderful blurring of the line between historical retelling and fictitious story.
Though not a completely encompassing element of the The Doors You Mark Are Your Own, the book almost comes off as a ‘before’ story that so many popular series in entertainment lack. This isn’t to say that the story isn’t outstandingly brilliant in its own right, but it is still an interesting element to consider. In most stories, movies, or shows—most good ones, anyway—that begin with the key conflict already ongoing will have, at some point, a character briefly address the history of how and why the conflict came to be. While that may address and clarify some key points, the audience is still left wondering about other details. Given that this is the first installment of a lengthy trilogy, I’m interested to see whether the series will stay anchored in the current setting of Nikolas, Marcik, and Adrian’s timeline, as this book is itself just a ‘translation’ of Tuvim’s documentation of recent historical events, or if the story will precede to see change in his time, as the ‘translators’ of the book are well into the future of Aleksander Tuvim’s timeline. Regardless, the book as a whole is marvelously crafted and has left me wondering just how the story will proceed.
What is in a name? At the end of the 8 page prologue—which is nothing when compared to the bulk of the book—a pivotal character (really, the pivotal character) in Tuvim’s modern day has a flashback. While it means nothing at the time, it carries with it an implied weight. At first the reader is only left to wonder at what it might mean, who are the people mentioned in it, what is so important about the name, what does ‘Messenger’ mean? In fact, the prologue as a whole is well executed, giving bits of information to the reader, dropping names and events, keeping the reader curious throughout the book as they wait to actually see it unfold, see how the present came to be. The prologue’s vagueness is perfect and it’s a promise of an exciting story to those who read on, a promise that it keeps.
Nikolas the Revolutionary. A doktoral student turned revolutionary, and younger brother to Marcik. Nikolas is a realist, aware of how the world works, with ambition and the wherewithal to achieve his goals; he is also aware that he doesn’t know everything and, as such, is always able to concede to that fact. While he may sometimes come off as arrogant, he does what he believes is best for the largest number of people, which brings about the obvious pros and cons of any philosophy closely resembling “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” He wanted to become a doktor because he believed that he would be able to find a cure for the nekrosis caused by the water contamination. When he found he couldn’t work within the system to help the people, he instead decided to change the system in order to help the people. One problem with his character development is that his progression in certain areas fall slightly into the category of ‘Instant Expert.’ It isn’t much, but to even be in this category to a small degree is disheartening for a book with events that are otherwise very realistic and well thought out. At the same time, while he gains high skill levels almost unbelievably quickly, he utilizes them in a believable way, making it a hard point to judge. Do we attribute his growth speed to being a ‘natural’ or a ‘genius’ and overlook it or do we let that point stand out as a flaw in the story? I’ll leave that decision to each individual reader.
Marcik the Soldier. A Guardsman, a soldier of Joshua city, and older brother to Nikolas. We are introduced to a Marcik who suffers in no small part from arrogance, similar to his brother Nikolas. However, where Nikolas at least has acceptable reason for his arrogance, Marcik has none, being an unlikeable character upon his introduction. During his military training, as well as the experiences he has while active, he is broken of that arrogance, and fully comes into his own as a character whose tale is a blast to follow. We follow him for the entirety of his military career: leaving home for basic training, being deployed and surviving through many small encounters, getting captured and tortured, and many, many, many more events that to merely name would ruin.
Adrian the Nurturer. A doktoral student who roomed with Nikolas in his first semester of school and is an ardent believer in the god of the Book of the Before-time. Where Nikolas is a realist, Adrian is an idealist, aware of the limitations of reality, but chooses to look past them at what could be rather than what is most likely. That being said, Adrian is effected deeply when his ideals are actually confronted and destroyed before him. He spends much of the story doing good, but is always conflicted when weighing his thoughts and actions against his perceived correct moral thoughts and actions. Thanks to his time sent with Nikolas, Adrian spends a lot of time thinking about the morality and subjective nature of the world they live in and the events that unfold within it. What truly makes his character interesting is seeing why he is so important when the story already has two brothers on their own side of a revolution. Is he a neutral party who has the ability to sway either side? Or is it something more?
There are other characters who hold their own import, but it is around these three that the stories revolves, and the beauty of these three characters is simple. While Adrian is neutral but, arguably, a good character, neither Nikolas nor Marcik are good or evil. If you’ll excuse the binary, both teeter back and forth across the line between the two sides without ever fully falling into one. In fact, it is on questioning this binary of good and evil that the story ends, though with a promise of even more development in the next installment.
With a book this size, over 700 pages, there is going to be a fair amount of world building. This story is marvelously crafted, the characters are intelligently designed, and the events are both thrilling and thought-provoking. While this may come down to nothing more than personal preference, the book can take a while before sinking its hooks into the reader, as the majority of the world building takes place all at once in the beginning of the story. There are multiple stories all happening at once so, while it is written very well and is in no way boring, the first hundred or so pages are very exposition heavy. This is the way the world is, this is how people have their allegiances. Important stuff but it can take a decent amount of time to build steam. However, get through that (not to say there is nothing exciting or interesting happening, there is) and you’ll be rewarded with an enthralling story that seems to explode before your eyes.
As I said earlier, this book is beautiful. I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading and who I think could make it through all 700+ pages of this trilogy’s first installment. While some may be turned away by that length, and the promise of 1400 more pages, I know there are plenty of readers out there who will revel in that fact. To those readers, spend some time getting lost in this pure-baikal story.
Rating: 4.5/5
In this pseudo-translated historical text, originally written by an author from a time in our own alternate distant future, we learn of a world before that time yet occurring after the fall of our own (or possibly our recent past). As stated by the book’s own summary, this “blends elements of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Golden Age Hollywood.” The main story itself is that of a world that had been nearly destroyed due to events not limited to, but largely centered on, the contamination of the world’s water, causing nekrosis in all those it infected. However, various dying cultures managed to come together and settle around a clean water source and survive, though on a much smaller scale than they previously existed. Now, that same contamination has reappeared and tensions are growing within and amongst the various cities. In the greatest and most powerful of these cities, Joshua City, the leader uses this reemergence as an excuse to declare war on the others, starting with the herdspeople of Ulan-Ude, as the first step in gaining power of all seven cities. However, this military campaign has led to civil unrest within Joshua City’s own borders. The foremost of the points of view shown to us belong to that of Nikolas, Marcik, and Adrian.
As noted in the summary, this book is fictitious but still possesses a very real air about it. Along with footnotes, there are moments within the false history/story—which is to say, not including the prologue(s)—when the nonexistent original author, Aleksander Tuvim, and the two real authors but self-described translators, Okla Elliott and Raul Clement, will pause the story and speak to the readers directly, elaborating on certain events in this history, providing both their own opinions and context on matters in such a way that it adds to the wonderful blurring of the line between historical retelling and fictitious story.
Though not a completely encompassing element of the The Doors You Mark Are Your Own, the book almost comes off as a ‘before’ story that so many popular series in entertainment lack. This isn’t to say that the story isn’t outstandingly brilliant in its own right, but it is still an interesting element to consider. In most stories, movies, or shows—most good ones, anyway—that begin with the key conflict already ongoing will have, at some point, a character briefly address the history of how and why the conflict came to be. While that may address and clarify some key points, the audience is still left wondering about other details. Given that this is the first installment of a lengthy trilogy, I’m interested to see whether the series will stay anchored in the current setting of Nikolas, Marcik, and Adrian’s timeline, as this book is itself just a ‘translation’ of Tuvim’s documentation of recent historical events, or if the story will precede to see change in his time, as the ‘translators’ of the book are well into the future of Aleksander Tuvim’s timeline. Regardless, the book as a whole is marvelously crafted and has left me wondering just how the story will proceed.
What is in a name? At the end of the 8 page prologue—which is nothing when compared to the bulk of the book—a pivotal character (really, the pivotal character) in Tuvim’s modern day has a flashback. While it means nothing at the time, it carries with it an implied weight. At first the reader is only left to wonder at what it might mean, who are the people mentioned in it, what is so important about the name, what does ‘Messenger’ mean? In fact, the prologue as a whole is well executed, giving bits of information to the reader, dropping names and events, keeping the reader curious throughout the book as they wait to actually see it unfold, see how the present came to be. The prologue’s vagueness is perfect and it’s a promise of an exciting story to those who read on, a promise that it keeps.
Nikolas the Revolutionary. A doktoral student turned revolutionary, and younger brother to Marcik. Nikolas is a realist, aware of how the world works, with ambition and the wherewithal to achieve his goals; he is also aware that he doesn’t know everything and, as such, is always able to concede to that fact. While he may sometimes come off as arrogant, he does what he believes is best for the largest number of people, which brings about the obvious pros and cons of any philosophy closely resembling “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” He wanted to become a doktor because he believed that he would be able to find a cure for the nekrosis caused by the water contamination. When he found he couldn’t work within the system to help the people, he instead decided to change the system in order to help the people. One problem with his character development is that his progression in certain areas fall slightly into the category of ‘Instant Expert.’ It isn’t much, but to even be in this category to a small degree is disheartening for a book with events that are otherwise very realistic and well thought out. At the same time, while he gains high skill levels almost unbelievably quickly, he utilizes them in a believable way, making it a hard point to judge. Do we attribute his growth speed to being a ‘natural’ or a ‘genius’ and overlook it or do we let that point stand out as a flaw in the story? I’ll leave that decision to each individual reader.
Marcik the Soldier. A Guardsman, a soldier of Joshua city, and older brother to Nikolas. We are introduced to a Marcik who suffers in no small part from arrogance, similar to his brother Nikolas. However, where Nikolas at least has acceptable reason for his arrogance, Marcik has none, being an unlikeable character upon his introduction. During his military training, as well as the experiences he has while active, he is broken of that arrogance, and fully comes into his own as a character whose tale is a blast to follow. We follow him for the entirety of his military career: leaving home for basic training, being deployed and surviving through many small encounters, getting captured and tortured, and many, many, many more events that to merely name would ruin.
Adrian the Nurturer. A doktoral student who roomed with Nikolas in his first semester of school and is an ardent believer in the god of the Book of the Before-time. Where Nikolas is a realist, Adrian is an idealist, aware of the limitations of reality, but chooses to look past them at what could be rather than what is most likely. That being said, Adrian is effected deeply when his ideals are actually confronted and destroyed before him. He spends much of the story doing good, but is always conflicted when weighing his thoughts and actions against his perceived correct moral thoughts and actions. Thanks to his time sent with Nikolas, Adrian spends a lot of time thinking about the morality and subjective nature of the world they live in and the events that unfold within it. What truly makes his character interesting is seeing why he is so important when the story already has two brothers on their own side of a revolution. Is he a neutral party who has the ability to sway either side? Or is it something more?
There are other characters who hold their own import, but it is around these three that the stories revolves, and the beauty of these three characters is simple. While Adrian is neutral but, arguably, a good character, neither Nikolas nor Marcik are good or evil. If you’ll excuse the binary, both teeter back and forth across the line between the two sides without ever fully falling into one. In fact, it is on questioning this binary of good and evil that the story ends, though with a promise of even more development in the next installment.
With a book this size, over 700 pages, there is going to be a fair amount of world building. This story is marvelously crafted, the characters are intelligently designed, and the events are both thrilling and thought-provoking. While this may come down to nothing more than personal preference, the book can take a while before sinking its hooks into the reader, as the majority of the world building takes place all at once in the beginning of the story. There are multiple stories all happening at once so, while it is written very well and is in no way boring, the first hundred or so pages are very exposition heavy. This is the way the world is, this is how people have their allegiances. Important stuff but it can take a decent amount of time to build steam. However, get through that (not to say there is nothing exciting or interesting happening, there is) and you’ll be rewarded with an enthralling story that seems to explode before your eyes.
As I said earlier, this book is beautiful. I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading and who I think could make it through all 700+ pages of this trilogy’s first installment. While some may be turned away by that length, and the promise of 1400 more pages, I know there are plenty of readers out there who will revel in that fact. To those readers, spend some time getting lost in this pure-baikal story.
Rating: 4.5/5
July 4, 2015
From my review for Atticus Review:
The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is the first part of an ambitious amalgam of literary fiction spliced with post-apocalyptic and historical genres. Written by Elliott and Clement with the conceit that they are ‘translating’ a historical account written in ‘Slovnik’ by the fictional Aleksandr Tuvim, the saga reads on one level as an engrossing biography and social commentary of a speculative, future city-state. On another level it contains rich, interconnected character-driven narratives. Balancing epic world-building and other science fiction genre traits with literary depth, the authors take some of the best elements from across literature to fashion an addictively entertaining novel...
Read my complete review here.
The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is the first part of an ambitious amalgam of literary fiction spliced with post-apocalyptic and historical genres. Written by Elliott and Clement with the conceit that they are ‘translating’ a historical account written in ‘Slovnik’ by the fictional Aleksandr Tuvim, the saga reads on one level as an engrossing biography and social commentary of a speculative, future city-state. On another level it contains rich, interconnected character-driven narratives. Balancing epic world-building and other science fiction genre traits with literary depth, the authors take some of the best elements from across literature to fashion an addictively entertaining novel...
Read my complete review here.
May 25, 2015
Terrific
April 5, 2016
It took me a long time to finish this book. Although the first few chapters really grabbed me, when I had to put it aside because I was busy, it stayed put aside for a while. Still, it picked up after a slow middle, and I ended up really enjoying it.
The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is a combination of dystopian future-history, political thriller, and revolutionary philosophy. Its gimmick is to pretend to be a translation of a fictional writer who lived through a future revolutionary period. As I mentioned, the middle drags a bit while the narrative gets all of the characters into place, but it's an interesting story with interesting characters. I'm looking forward to the next in the series.
The Doors You Mark Are Your Own is a combination of dystopian future-history, political thriller, and revolutionary philosophy. Its gimmick is to pretend to be a translation of a fictional writer who lived through a future revolutionary period. As I mentioned, the middle drags a bit while the narrative gets all of the characters into place, but it's an interesting story with interesting characters. I'm looking forward to the next in the series.
May 12, 2016
Disclosure: Okla Elliot, one of the "translators," was a professor of mine at Ohio Wesleyan University. "The Doors You Mark Are Your Own" reads like a post-apocalyptic, dystopian novel if it had been written by Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy. It's a multi-layered work that touches on Fascism, revolution, religion, government surveillance, war, disease, art, philosophy, and more. It's a rich, fascinating, and rewarding work.
May 4, 2015
This started out great, but lost steam half-way through!
February 15, 2015
A 724 page epic post-apocalyptic story.
July 13, 2016
Well, what can I say? That I don't recommend this book to really anyone I guess. The authors clearly worked hard and put a lot of thought into this book/world, and it sort of breaks my heart to say too much negative about it. So, let's just say it lacks heart.
At page 460 I was done with it, but forced myself to skim/speed through the rest, because I truly was curious to see what happens. Well, I did that after failing to find a spoiler synopsis online.
So, here's what happens starting toward the page 460ish mark: Adrian loses his girlfriend and his mentor due to actions of Schmidt's men, blames him. However, when a girl he's tutoring is kidnapped by Elias, he blames Nikolas with equal hateful rage. Some academics are gunned down for refusing the draft which turns more public sentiment against the regime. Mayor's oracles turn out to be in his head. Pierre helps the underground. Nikolas and his brother Marcik each find out about the other, spare each other, then swear to get them later. That movie star cheating on her engineer husband dies suspiciously, he builds a fancy house, completes the train controller which is later used to hijack a train that's driven into the hub, destroying it and clinching the revolution for nik. Adams dies probably. Schmidt is a bigger hero and lives. And in a final scene with two messengers we find out they started the nekrosis (and trained Nik) to make another Great Calamity happen. But because one of them really likes Adrian, he starts using the I pronoun, which we're told will divide Messenger into factions next episode. Oh and nikolas is mayor.
At page 460 I was done with it, but forced myself to skim/speed through the rest, because I truly was curious to see what happens. Well, I did that after failing to find a spoiler synopsis online.
So, here's what happens starting toward the page 460ish mark: Adrian loses his girlfriend and his mentor due to actions of Schmidt's men, blames him. However, when a girl he's tutoring is kidnapped by Elias, he blames Nikolas with equal hateful rage. Some academics are gunned down for refusing the draft which turns more public sentiment against the regime. Mayor's oracles turn out to be in his head. Pierre helps the underground. Nikolas and his brother Marcik each find out about the other, spare each other, then swear to get them later. That movie star cheating on her engineer husband dies suspiciously, he builds a fancy house, completes the train controller which is later used to hijack a train that's driven into the hub, destroying it and clinching the revolution for nik. Adams dies probably. Schmidt is a bigger hero and lives. And in a final scene with two messengers we find out they started the nekrosis (and trained Nik) to make another Great Calamity happen. But because one of them really likes Adrian, he starts using the I pronoun, which we're told will divide Messenger into factions next episode. Oh and nikolas is mayor.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 24, 2021
I did enjoy this chunk of a book. Very much felt like a "War and Peace" inspired work, not just because of the Baikal setting and Russian names.
July 26, 2021
This was quite literally the worst novel I have ever read in my life. It's absolutely ludicrous to write a book about "extreme water shortage" which features a hero who somehow can constantly get drunk on dirt cheap booze despite being an unemployed medical school dropout who is simply too busy with plotting a pseudo-Marxist "revolution" to bother with actually working. The characters are all unpleasant, lazy, and rude and the whole vibe of the world constructed in this novel leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. I absolutely do not recommend that anyone actually waste their money on this.
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