“All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.”
Nietzsche knew what every writer secretly hopes is true—the written word is a fearsome and mighty power.
In Alix Harrow’s debut fantasy novel, The Ten Thousand Door of January, words, specifically written words, have the power to open Doors. Doors with a capital D are much more interesting than ordinary doors. Doors exist at the weak boundaries between worlds. They are elusive; they give passage to places beyond. And Doors don’t seal well, things are always slipping through them—people, magical objects, ideas, art. Things that provoke change.
Image by Dean Moriarty from Pixabay
January Scaller is seven years old when she discovers a blue door in a field. There is nothing behind it and so she writes a quick story about a capital D, magical Door and a girl who opens it. For a moment she absolutely believes her story is true and tries her blue door again. This time she opens the Door to find on the other side, a bluff above a white city at the edge of a sea. January discovers her words have the power to give her access to new worlds.
January was told her mother died when she was an infant. Her father is mostly absent, traveling the world, collecting artifacts for Mr. Locke, a pale-eyed businessman and chairman of the New England Archaeological Society. As January’s guardian, Locke has absolute power over her. When she tells him about her discovery of the blue Door and the strange city beyond it, he destroys the Door and the diary in which she wrote her small, powerful story. Locke orders the “temerarious” January confined to her third story room in his castle at the edge of Vermont’s Lake Champlain until she can be “a good girl and mind her place.”
His use of the term “place” is intentional. January is mixed race; her skin is “coppery-red” like her father’s, and she has her mother’s round, lighter eyes. Mr. Locke calls her an “in-between sort of a thing” and lectures her on why she must meet his behavior expectations:
“Power, my dear, has a language. It has a geography, a currency, and—I’m sorry—a color.”
Locke often reminds her that it is due to his privilege of skin color and money that she doesn’t have to face the racism of early 1900’s America.
Here is another work of speculative fiction where the female protagonist is locked in a tower. In January’s case it’s both a physical and a class/race isolation. Back in 2015 Amanda Baldeneaux, C.S. Peterson and I discussed the locked-in-a-tower trope in a blog post entitled, “The Rapunzel Complex.” We concluded that female protagonists with agency facilitate their escape from the tower through the power of words. Harrow’s story supports this theory. January defies the virtual and physical tower of Locke House by writing mini-stories that create Doors that lead to the things she wants. She writes the words on anything she can find—scraps of paper, the back pages of The Jungle Book. And when everything has been taken from her—home, family, freedom, even paper and pen—she endures self-inflicted pain to create the words of her escape.
When January is seventeen she finds a leather-bound book authored by Yule Ian Scholar of the City of Nin, year 6908. The book becomes another kind of Door for her—reading its story helps to mitigate the loneliness and boredom of her locked-in-the-tower days. The excerpts from the book read like sections of a scholarly paper inserted into the story and even include footnotes. Like January, Yule Ian Scholar comes to understand the immense power of the written word:
“Words and their meanings have weight in the world of matter, shaping and reshaping realities through a most ancient alchemy. …all stories, even the meanest folktales, matter. They are artifacts and palimpsests, riddles and histories. They are the red threads that we may follow out of the labyrinth.”
And, I would add, out of the tower.
January learns from this book that her father has been traveling the world following bizarre stories, folklore and myths, which he discovers are the indicators of the presence of a Door. But someone known as the Founder is following him, destroying each Door after he leaves it.
The Founder personifies the imperialistic, privileged class of the early twentieth century. He and his followers fear the social, political and economic chaos that tends to collect around Doors. Their goal is to systematically eliminate the avenues for change and revolution so they can maintain their elite economic and social status while controlling the definitions of right and wrong in the world.
Bust of the god Janus, Vatican museum, Vatican City. Photo credit: Fubar Obfusco Wikimedia Commons.
January, named after Janus, the god of doorways, transitions and time-duality, is an “in-between” young woman with the power to open Doors (even ones the Founder has closed) and is a threat to this privileged establishment. Harrow reveals in an interview what inspired these narrative choices:
“In grad school I studied empire, race, and environment in British children’s literature and found that many of my beloved childhood fantasies were also colonial fantasies. Like, think about Narnia: a fantasy realm in desperate need of four white foreign kids to come rescue and then rule them, populated by talking animals instead of indigenous people.
So The Ten Thousand Doors is in one sense an effort to subvert the problems that plagued my childhood fantasies books. To turn them inside-out and backwards, to make them about home-going rather than conquest.”
Once free of the tower, home-going becomes January’s quest. But in order to achieve her goal she must learn the truth about who she is in the world without Mr. Locke’s privileged protection. And she must trust her ability to wield the power of the written word to overcome the Founder and his allies, and start her journey toward family and home.
Locked-in-a-tower stories often require a robust backstory narrative to support the lack of opportunity for action in the present. Yule Ian’s scholarly story-within-a-story serves as forward-moving plot while January is trapped in the tower. In addition to the backstory, Harrow adds another layer of narrative complexity to the novel—a frame structure. The novel opens and closes with the voice of a retrospective January writing her story for someone specific. We don’t know until the closing part of the frame who her audience is, which has the effect at the opening of the narrator speaking directly to the reader. And, in the closing frame when January reveals the intended recipient of her story, Harrow uses another device to draw the reader into an intimate, one-way dialogue.
Some may find this choice authorial and heavy-handed. I loved it. In the current reality of blatant racism, reprehensible immigration policies, and childish, divisive tweets, a reality in which the written and spoken words of the news have the power to ruin the whole day, Harrow (in the voice of January) challenges her readers:
“If you’re some stranger who stumbled over this book by chance—perhaps rotting in some foreign garbage pile or locked in a dusty traveling trunk or published by some small, misguided press and shelved mistakenly under Fiction—I hope to every god you have the guts to do what needs doing. I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return.”
These words move me. They challenge me. They have power.
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