(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
One of the things that makes reading such an escapist pleasure is when an author takes a well-worn concept, one that should by rights have no fresh mileage or capacity to surprise left in its tired, narrative-driving bones, and totally and utterly turns it gloriously on its head.
It is a joy to behold a trope get revitalised, and the buoyancy is high all the way through The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown, whose debut fantasy novel proves you can take something as hackneyed as time travel and give it such an imaginative new gloss that you scarcely recognise your old reading companion.
The novel starts reasonably conventionally with Cassie Andrews, a young bookseller in New York, living an almost comatosely quiet, small “l” life in New York City, where she shares an apartment with bestie Izzy and she comes to know lovely old customers such as Mr Webber, a kindly and voracious reader who gives a mysteriously plain book with one perplexingly oblique message in it – “This is the Book of Doors. Hold it in your hands and any door is every door.”
It stymies Cassie at first who like most people in the third decade of the twenty-first century doesn’t believe in magic and certainly doesn’t believe it can imbue a small brown book with the power to turn her bedroom door into a portal to cities like Venice or Paris.
He didn’t imagine they’d find anything the next day. They hadn’t found anything in the nine months he had been travelling with Azaki, but he was happy to go along for the ride, happy to learn all about the hidden world of magic books.
But it does, and at first she and Izzy have a ball, racing from place to place, with Cassie recreating the great European trip she took after the death of her grandfather who raised her when her parents manifestly could not.
It’s all fun and games, and while Cassie and Izzy have questions, many, MANY questions (how could you not?), whatever strangeness might be attached to this book and what it can do is well and truly outweighed by the magic, quite literally, of how it can enliven and change up their lives.
But everything comes with a price, and Cassie and Izzy soon discover through eventual new ally and friend Drummond Fox, a man who possesses a library of similar books, some of which can do great joy like bring joy or healing while others can administer life-ending despair or pain, and who knows that there are fiendishly dark souls out there who will stop at nothing to get all the books into their wickedly narcissistic hands.
It’s a tough sell convincing two people who have only seen the fun fair, rollercoaster side of this secret world of magical books but soon the violence and murderous hell that Fox speaks off finds them and they have no choice but to run in order to keep the book, the book of all the magic books, out of the hands of someone so unspeakably evil that even the other villains of the book collecting set feat her beyond all reason.
(courtesy official author site)
This initial race through a door in a deli to somewhere far, far away sets in train a thrillingly intense, and imaginatively alive sequence of events that see Cassie, Izzy and Drummond discovering just how terrible, but also how good people can be.
Apart from being a whiz-bang, mind-f**king trip through magical realms far beyond anything in our limited mortal realm has ever seen, The Book of Doors is also a graphically alive love letter to the power of books and their capacity to mould, change and shape lives.
Even before Cassie gets her hands on the Book of Doors, books have saved her grief-soaked life again and again, and while she, and many other readers only ever escape in their minds – though that, of course, is fantastically powerful in and of itself; it saved this reviewer time and again during all those years of bullying at school and of nothing else, The Book of Doors reaffirms how much we that kind of storytelling salvation – and while the magic is now actual and real, the effect is the same for her and everyone else is involved.
And that, really, is what The Book of Doors so beautifully special.
Yes, it is fun of heart-thumpingly big and epic action and some astoundingly clever ideas about the way our world works out of sight of most people, but it is also intimately lovely too, speaking volubly and affectionately about belonging and of community and of how reading can bring all those things to pass.
Cassie held up the Book of Doors. ‘In exchange for this. I’m sorry, Drummond, but if you want the Book of Doors, you’re going to have to buy it from the Bookseller first. I promised I’d give it to her if she kept Izzy safe.’
We owe to much to books and The Book of Doors acknowledges that great debt in ways that will beguile you with mesmerising intensity.
Through all of its dazzling reinvention and its ability to turn all kinds of tropes and traditions on their head, the novel never loses sight of what drives people like Cassie and Drummond – that books and knowledge can do so much good, and while there are evil souls out there who want to misuse or obliterate it completely, they really don’t have a chance against people who believe in how good reading and books and knowing worlds, and place and people far beyond your own can be.
What Brown has done with superlative masterfulness is take this idea that books and reading can transform people and worlds for the better and stretch it fully and wholly satisfyingly across a grand and spacious tableau, one that is rich and emotionally intimate even as it occupies a gorgeously, thunderously impressive narrative landscape of real imagination and endless heart.
The Book of Doors is quite simply a rare and preciously magical book of its own, a story that takes some old ideas and gives them vim and vigour, in much the same way that Cassie life is fundamentally shaken up, and in so doing, it reminds and excites us once again about the magical power of books and reading and how words upon a page, bolstered by the belief who read them, can remake the world around for the better and make lives once hollow wan into something quite delightfully, joyously alive again.