We’re stuck in old stories. He closed his eyes. We’re all stuck in ancient stories.
The Door on the Sea is the first book in Tlingit writer Caskey Russell’s The Raven and Eagle series (trilogy?), and it rules.
billed as “the Tlingit indigenous response to The Lord of the Rings”, it is true on one level that the basics of the narrative and characters resemble “generic” epic fantasy. our protagonist is Elān, a boy on the cusp of adulthood, caught between what he’s good at — storytelling — and what he wants to be — a warrior — who finds himself unexpectedly chosen to lead a sea voyage to recover a powerful weapon of the otherworldly Koosh, who have begun an invasion of his world. he is accompanied by a mixed crew: the experienced warrior Caraiden, who served with Elān’s hero grandfather; the young warrior Ch’eet, brother of Elān’s former best friend; the (literal) wolf Chetdyl; Hoosa, a “bear-relative” more comfortable among black bears than other humans; the blunt, tradition-bound Kwa, who makes it clear that she does not want to be led by an inexperienced captain who’s studying to be a teacher, not a warrior; and, of course, the raven, who is foul-mouthed, deceitful, and also, unfortunately for Elān, the only being who knows where the weapon may be found.
the novel diverges from “normal” epic fantasy in two ways. first, its quest is not overland but oversea, from Elān’s home village of Naasteidi on the island of Samish across the archipelago inhabited by friendly Aaní and Deikeenaa people towards the unfriendly islands of the Yahooni, enslaved by the Koosh, and the mainland, home of the cannibal giants. Russell draws heavily on Tlingit traditions, but the novel is also (gleefully — something I’ll return to in a moment) “anachronistic”, both in that it creates a fantasy society with its own rules and traditions — while obviously rooted in Tlingit culture, Aaní culture is not simply a copy/paste of it into a secondary world — and in that it integrates technologies and tropes common to Euro-medievalist fantasy: iron metallurgy, canoes rigged with European-style sail configurations, writing, and others. while, on one level, I would have liked to see Russell push the idea of Tlingit epic fantasy even further, I think this mix helps bridge what I suspect some readers will experience as a significant gap between their expectations for fantasy and Russell’s use of Tlingit culture.
I say the novel is gleefully “anachronistic” because the most compelling and most enjoyable aspect of the novel is its narration, which addresses its audience (frequently directly) in an extremely opinionated voice. I have observed in the past that I often find myself wanting more from “non-Western” fantasies. Rebecca Roanhorse’s Between Earth and Sky is my go-to example of this: while it borrows the — for lack of a better term — visual aesthetics of a range of Indigenous cultures, it nonetheless feels, to me, very conventional, both in its narrative and in its narration. The Door on the Sea, in contrast, is one of the only English-language fantasy books I’ve ever read whose narration itself feels genuinely in conversation with oral storytelling, and it is delightful. while the text is obviously a written composition, its conversational style, ranging from fast-paced and direct narration to drily — sarcastically — didactic passages that provide both world-building and practical information mediating between Elān’s world and ours feels like actual oral storytelling. I was reminded (and I don’t make this comparison lightly!) of Fionnlagh MacLeòid’s Gormshuil an Rìgh, one of my favorite Gaelic novels (read more about it in English here). when I began reading, I also compared it with The Hobbit, but where Tolkien’s narrator is both very English and rather academic, I’m about 80% confident that Russell’s narrator is simply the raven:
If you’re not familiar with the nautical life, learning the names of all the parts on a sailboat can be more difficult than sailing. Elān grew up nautical and so knew those names well. A mast is the wooden pole that points straight up in the air, which you attach the sail to. The boom is a wooden pole attached near the bottom of the mast to make an L shape. The boom points toward the back of the canoe. The bottom of the sail is attached to the boom. A sheet is not a sail! A sheet is a rope attached to the end of the boom to move it back and forth to catch or spill wind. A halyard is a rope that raises a sail. Battens are stiff pieces of wood or bone that fit into pockets in the sail to keep it taut. The bow is the front of the canoe, the stern is the back, starboard is the right side, and port is the left side. A cleat is a piece of metal that you can attach a rope to. With this knowledge, you now know how to sail.
“With this knowledge, you now know how to sail”!!!! I was frequently cackling to myself as I read this book.
but while it is often funny, it is not a light book: this is a book where a lot of people die, badly. there are battles, briskly narrated. there are moments of respite. and there is the recurring problem, one Elān turns over and over in his mind but does not yet have an answer to: where does “tradition” come from?
as refreshing as the narration is the way Russell handles this question. this is a book about The Power of Stories, something I often (I would even say typically) find trite at best, but it approaches this from a different angle from many other fantasies, in part because everyone around Elān already accepts that stories have power and that stories can be a tool for imagining alternate futures, even if they think they have already imagined an adequate one. the question is which stories we give power to, and also where that power comes from. the novel is interested in the way stories — even stories that have been useful and beneficial for a long time — serve as tools for managing or controlling difference in a world full of contradictions (indeed, a world where everything contains a contradiction). what do we do with stories when they have outlived their purpose? what do we do with stories when they seem to “work” for everyone but us? is it possible to tell a story that does not attempt to “solve” (at best) or conceal (at worst) difference and contradiction but rather welcomes them in?
Elān doesn’t yet have an answer, but I am very much looking forward to seeing how this line of inquiry — Elān is, after all, a scholar in training — develops in later books.
there are a lot of other things I like going on here. there’s a hint of science fantasy in the portrayal of the Koosh (something I’m sure will be explored in later books), who in some ways obviously evoke the settlers who have disrupted Tlingit ways of life over the past few centuries but who I think resist a too-easy allegorical reading of that kind, particularly in light of some of the questions about the Aaní, Deikeenaa, and Yahooni that are raised later in the book. also, I suspect it won’t be developed, but I must say that Elān has a Vibe with Ch’eet and I’m into it.
there are things I might have liked to see get more development, but I suspect the biggest one of those — the book’s handling of violence — is going to come to a head very quickly in subsequent books, and the novel as a whole is so engaging that I don’t at all begrudge it for not covering every single base it could have, particularly since it’s Russell’s first novel. I really, really enjoyed this book and I hope more people will give it a shot (and talk about it, and perhaps even give it awards). I would pair this — and again this is not a comparison I make lightly — with Laurie J. Marks’s Elemental Logic series, and if I were teaching it I think I might assign it alongside Audre Lorde’s “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”. really good stuff.
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