Not Such a Literary Byway: The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow

I can’t in all conscience call this a literary byway, since the subject of this blog isn’t some dusty, half-forgotten relic but a book that’s very much alive and kicking, having been published only three years ago and even been nominated for awards. But I’ve enjoyed it so much that I’d like to share that enjoyment with you, so here goes.

Looking back over my previous Literary Byway blogs, I notice that every book I’ve written about has had some element of the fantastical or speculative about it. The Ten Thousand Doors of January is also a fantasy, sort of. You might assume from this that I’m an avid reader of the genre, but you’d be wrong.

Yes, I loved The Lord of the Rings when I first read it at the age of eighteen, and I still do. It led me to its predecessors in the genre, mostly in the now-classic Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, but apart from Terry Pratchett, who was a delightful law unto himself, I’ve read very little fantasy for many years, and what I have sampled hasn’t, by and large, impressed me much. Ursula K. Le Guin’s rather bad-tempered verdict on post-LOTR fantasy, written some years back in the introduction to Tales of Earthsea, sums up the reasons.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivialises. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude… The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, moulded in bright-coloured plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

A bit harsh maybe, but yes. Whereas Tolkien’s well-springs were ancient Celtic and Nordic mythologies, most of the stuff that’s come since seems to have been inspired by him, at second- or even third-hand. Hand-me-down inspiration. Replaceable, interchangeable.

Alix E. Harrow’s debut novel is not like that. There’s not a warrior or a wizard, an elf or a dragon in sight. The Ten Thousand Doors of January is not like any other fantasy I’ve ever read.

The time is the first years of the twentieth century; the place Vermont, USA. January Scaller lives in a mansion with her guardian, the rich and powerful Cornelius Locke, and his huge collection of exotic artifacts. She has never known her mother and seldom sees her father, who is employed by Locke and spends most of his time travelling the world searching for more items for the collection. A spirited, unruly girl, she chafes against the restrictions imposed upon her by her guardian’s expectations of conformity and good behaviour, and escapes the narrowness of her horizons and her loneliness by losing herself in pulp fiction and dreaming of adventure.

A not unfamiliar scenario, but then, when she is seventeen, she finds a mysterious book in equally mysterious circumstances. Voracious reader that she is, naturally she can’t resist looking inside. What she reads there will fundamentally change her life, in ways she could never have imagined…

That’s about as far as I can go, because the story is so full of twists and revelations that I’d be giving out spoilers otherwise. I can say, without giving away too much, that its basic premise is that there are doorways to other worlds, not just in the back of a wardrobe but in all sorts of hidden places. It’s been done before, but not quite like this. It is, we are told, the leakage from other worlds through these doorways that gives us our legends and folklore and magic and most of what’s rich and strange in this world. They were what brought January’s parents together, and that is why she is named, not for the month, but for the god the month was named after – for Janus was the god of, among other things, doorways.

I can also tell you is that this book is quite a bit more than a fantasy adventure story. It is a celebration of the power of words and stories and legends, a manifesto for the untamed and the wondrous and the marvellous, a protest against materialism and the stultification of the imagination. It is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, since January spends most of the book finding out who she is. Above all, it is a heart-wrenching – and ultimately heart-warming – tale of love and loss and redemption. It is the sort of book that leaves you smiling.

But what really makes it stand out for me is the engaging exuberance and adventurousness and wit of its prose. January’s voice is one of the strongest and most distinctive I have encountered in fiction. She has the power of words, more literally than you can imagine (Hah! Is that a spoiler? Nah, more of a teaser.), and she uses them to great effect in telling her story. It got to the point where I became quite disappointed if I went for more than two or three pages without encountering an image or or a phrase so precisely apt and so vividly evocative that it brought forth a little mental gasp of delight and admiration. Like this:

Then she laughed – a wild, whooping laugh that rolled over the water to Yule like summertime thunder.

He smiled – a predatory, life-hungry smile, and God help you if you’ve ever seen a smile like that on a human face – and I ran.

Her voice was strangled, almost swallowed by emotion: bitterest betrayal, jealousy, and the sort of rage that leaves bodies in its wake.

I once said that there are books I can read and re-read for the sheer pleasure I get from the quality of the writing. The Ten Thousand Doors of January looks set to become one of them.