Book Review: Doorways in the Sand, by Roger Zelazny

There is a lot to love about Zelazny's writing that is utterly present in Doorways in the Sand.

Now, I've given Zelazny a small amount of shit in the past, at least in the limited context of this blog, but only in the interest of being an honest reviewer.  I now feel obligated to give the old boy some love, publicly and on the Internet, at the cost of my nil critiquing cred, but fortunately that won't be necessary; I actually read Doorways, and enjoyed it as much as I've enjoyed any other book ever.



A further word on what I like about Zelazny's work.  In the Amber books, the main character (one or the other) spends the majority of his time talking to one of five to twenty supporting characters about the weird stuff that's happening, and how he has no idea what's going on.  Usually the supporting character will have something useful to say, either an actual piece of information or some unrestrained yet informative speculation about the true nature of reality, that will advance the plot and lead to (often) another conversation.  The conversations themselves are either clever verbal fencing matches or nostalgic reminiscences, both of which I find compelling in their own ways.  Weird stuff sometimes happens, too, because otherwise whither the plot, but it always feels like the action just serves to break up the conversations into manageable chunks.

I know this sounds terrible, but it's definitely not.  The astounding dialogue in these passages serves well to give depth to a large number of complex characters, and to solidify the "what-the-hell-is-going-on" feeling, for which sudden revelation of what the hell has been going on at the end is an ample payoff.  Zelazny can tie up a plot better than anyone except Doyle, except that Zelazny makes you feel smart for figuring out the resolution of smaller plot points he's elided.

Just so Doorways in the Sand.  Perhaps it is not necessarily a compliment to say that one of a writer's books is similar to another, but Doorways is more like Amber, in all the best ways, than anything else I've read since.  Aside from the style, which I think I've fairly well covered, there are three more points I'd like to hit.

First, the protagonist.  He's a Zelazny protagonist, in all the best ways, so he's clever, analytical, and sarcastic; but his background is that he's an eternal undergraduate, having taken pains to stay in college for over a decade while never assembling enough credits in any one major to be forced to graduate.  Obviously this character was made to appeal to me personally, and no more need be said there.

Next, the chapter structure.  Doorways is often mentioned in lists of books in which Zelazny experimented with unorthodox plot structures, and with good reason.  Except for the first few chapters, each starts in medias res, with the protagonist in some kind of danger, and then jumps around from there.  A lot of the fun in this book comes in trying to figure out exactly how to get from A to B.  Zelazny plays with several different structures, and pulls them all off naturally, with only one or two scenes feeling like a strain on credibility.  I've thought long and hard about how to diagram some of the more interesting chapters using only text, so here goes.

A few chapters are pretty simple:

                                   ----------------2---------------
----------------1-----------------
                                                                    ----------------3------------

So here, the events of the story goes from left to right, but the book tells them in order from top to bottom.  This is your typical in medias res chapter.

Some of them looked like this:

                         --------------2-------------
-----------1------------
                                                                               -------------4------------
                                                     -------------3-----------

My very favorite chapter looked something like this:

                                                                                      ---------6---------
                                                                 ---------5----------
                                      ------------4-------------
                  ---------3---------
        ----2----
---1---

I don't remember exactly how many segments there were, and I don't have the book in front of me, but 6 is not unreasonable.  This reminded me positively of a certain Seinfeld episode, but was much less awkward.  Indeed, the weird structure supported the aforementioned "what-the-hell-is-going-on".

Finally, it's been said (and I'm sure I've read it somewhere) that you have to know a lot to read Zelazny.  He often makes truly obscure references, literary or scientific, which I get only some of the time, with the same feeling of accomplishment that accompanies finishing a crossword (or so I'm told).   The same is true, writ larger, of Doorways.  Most of the plot concerns the effects of the protagonist putting himself through an alien machine which flips him, left-to-right, in the manner of the two-dimensional creatures in Burger's Sphereland (helpfully alluded to early on).  At this point, the book becomes a lot more enjoyable if you know about stereoisomers, which I mainly remember as the most confusing thing I learned in chemistry.

In brief, complex molecules can come in two varieties, which have the same composition and bond structure but are mirror-images in shape.  It is not easy to convince yourself of this, but the left and right hands are a common example: no matter how you rotate a left hand (freed of the wrist or not), you can't make it into a right hand.  A similar phenomenon happens with molecules, where you can get right-handed and left-handed varieties of the same substance with different properties.  This mostly has to do with how they interact with other right- or left-handed molecules, but it's an important difference; almost all of the amino acids in the human body are the left-handed kind, for example.

Zelazny gets to use delicious words like stereoisocar, which describes the suddenly-British-style motor vehicle the protagonist gets around in.  Finally, the flipping is highly relevant to the plot's lithic MacGuffin, although no more should be said there.

What more can be said?  This is an excellent, excellent book, especially if you ignore the blurb on the back, although this could well be said of every book that has ever been blurbed since the Gutenberg Bible ("A non-stop thrill ride!" --John Dee).  The best characters are a pair of alien cops who go disguised as a kangaroo and a chain-smoking wombat.  Oh, and I had somewhat of a moment when a middle chapter opened with the protagonist beating the snot out of his advisor for daring to get him awarded a Ph.D.  If only we all had that problem.