The Way Through Doors by Jesse Ball
A while back I was doing some book reviewing* and I had heard some buzz about Jesse Ball’s The Way Through Doors (who knows from where at this point) and so I thought I’d put it on the list of books to review. A friend of mine happened to have it so I moved it way up the list and borrowed it. Truthfully, I didn’t know much about it other than the word ’storyteller’ had been used often and positively. I usually prefer my books to be written by a good storyteller so I was certainly excited.
From the start, I was pulled in. Yes, they were right, he is a storyteller. This is different, I thought; something new from what I have been reading, refreshing, but only at first. In short, it felt a little like this: Did you ever have a dream that seemed to last all night? Each moment something new, somehow related to the previous moment, yet almost painfully familiar. You then wake up trying to remember all of the details – how was it all connected? Then, after a few minutes of trying to remember, you then wonder what you were doing wasting all that time trying to remember those details. They don’t matter! And really, in the end, you’re glad that the dream is finally over.
The premise is intriguing and seemingly simple enough: a young pamphleteer gets a job at the request of his uncle at the office of the Seventh Ministry as a Municipal Inspector, who’s “authority is both unlimited and nonexistent”; meaning, he can do whatever he wants, which becomes quite convenient. Things are going well for Selah. Then he witnesses a woman being hit by a taxi and takes her to the hospital. She has amnesia and Selah spends the rest of the novel trying to help her discover who she is. Simple, right? Sort of. Ball throws the reader into the story, swiftly and deftly; it isn’t necessary to understand why Selah helps this woman and why he goes through so much trouble to do so. However, it is important to know that most of the events happening in the novel are actually stories that Selah is telling this mystery woman to help discover her identity and help her regain her memory. A clever trick that is not easily deduced (unless, of course, you read the synopsis on the back of the book).
These stories’ plot twists and turns pull the reader along through a maze of tall tales and yarns. At first, I went willingly: I gladly closed my eyes and let Ball lead me through. But it didn’t take long for that trick to get tiring. I felt like each page was another way for me to be shown that Ball is a great storyteller – what could he think of next! Something new is added: another ancient tale, another door, another thinly veiled postmodern attempt at being a traditional story. It gets even more gimmicky: there are no page numbers, just line numbers but they don’t correspond, e.g. lines 560 through 570 could have been 30 lines. Why should any boundaries exist in Ball’s storytelling? Unfortunately, he created his own boundaries by the limits of his storytelling abilities. Each new tale had hints of the previous to the point where, shall I dare say, it became formulaic.
My dislike for The Way Through Doors may seem like traditionalism but I was willing to follow Ball through his doors. I was just more interested in where the doors would lead than who my guide was.
*more on that later…