Gene Wolfe will always be one of my favorite authors because of the Book of the New Sun (and to a lesser extent the Books of the Long Sun and Short Sun). I've read several of his other works now, and I think the reason I like the Book of the New Sun so much is because it has the least ambiguous plot of all of his works that I've read so far. Many of his books have the characteristic of having a beginning but no real end. The climax or conclusion is merely an ending point, as if the story could go on or could have ended earlier. This is strongly apparent in "There Are Doors". That doesn't make it a bad book though, or not worth reading.
One of the things I like about Gene Wolfe is a quality he shares with Neil Gaiman. Oftentimes, his stories have a dreamlike, not-quite-real property. The difference is that with Wolfe there's the surety of an underlying reality. Gaiman has made clear that his stories don't necessarily have an underpinning of reality; they can be self-contradictory and highly symbolic without feeling absurd. With a Wolfe story I always get the sense that there's something going on under the surface, and if only I could figure it out I would be able to understand what's going on in the story. With all that said, let me get to the actual book.
"There Are Doors" is the story of a man (we never learn his name, really) who meets and falls in love with a woman. One day she tells him she has to leave and warns him about passing through doors that look significant (the title is taken from her warning to him). He doesn't understand her, but predictably enough, he finds a door and accidentally goes through it. He enters into a world where his lover is a goddess (both mythical and real; she's a movie star as well). The other major difference is that in this world, men die after having sex. Their immune systems collapse for some reason.
According to this reviewer, "There Are Doors" is an homage to Phillip K. Dick (with some references to Kafka as well). With the elements of paranoia, mental illness, and the lack of sureness in the reality of the world, this certainly is a reasonable parallel. Unlike Dick though, Wolfe's writing often does not come to an easy conclusion. Dick's work, like Wolfe's, is often very thought provoking. "Minority Report", "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", and "A Scanner Darkly" were awesomely provocative, but all of them included solid plot-based stories. Comparing "There Are Doors" to any of those isn't really fair, as Wolfe didn't include a compelling story like any of those.
Of course, one can criticize Wolfe's book for exactly that point without comparing him to Dick. Wolfe is a master of language, even when using it as simply as he did in this book. It gives it a completely different texture from other works of his, like the New Sun. Plus he does something many writers just can't manage to do; he gives his main character a voice that sounds different from other characters. Tolkien exemplifies giving different characters different voices. Tolkien also wrote a slammin' plot-based story that's still the archetype for fantasy, but you can easily complain about character development. Point being, no book has it all. Wolfe's often don't focus on the plot as much as character interaction (that is, interaction between the character and the world, other characters, and whatever animate or inanimate objects populate it).
The story of this book is simple enough; once Mr. Green (which we think we discover the main character's name to be) passes into the alternate world, his search for his lost love begins. But almost immediately after it has begun, it ends with him having an accident and being put in the hospital. We find out there that Mr. Green was a mental patient in his own world. The deeper implication is that perhaps this world is nothing more than a mental construct in his own mind. A few events occur and Green is sucked into some kind of conspiracy by a paranoid psychotic named North. After being nearly blown up, he returns by accident to his own world a month later. There is some skewing of time evident, as he was only in the alternate world for a few days. He ends up being in his own world for years before returning to the alternate. He does manage to return, and in the end finds his goddess, only to be relegated to the role of something like servant. In the end, he departs again to find her in her true home with a map that shows no roads or cities.
This book isn't easily understood, but I'm not going to find fault with it for that. Counting Heads was far too easily understood, but that didn't make it a good book. Karen Armstrong points out that mysteries don't always exist to be solved, but rather to be contemplated. This book may be such a mystery, and is definitely worthy of being contemplated.
