A A reclusive interior designer named Paul travels from his home in Orkney to the Norwegian coastal city of Stavanger for the most unusual commissions. A datacenter containing huge Internet servers is located near the fjord on the outskirts of town, and a prestigious art magazine is paying large sums of money to refurbish it. He wants her to paint the interiors white – “not just any white, but complete white, singular white”. Shortly after his arrival, a strange weather phenomenon causes a power outage, and Paul goes missing; Meanwhile, Cohen, the magazine’s exhausted editor, takes an overdose of barbiturates.
A very different story unfolds in alternating chapters, reminiscent of Norse mythology in a distant medieval world. A man, referred to only as “the stranger”, was raised and nursed back to health by a nine-year-old girl who had shot him with an arrow, mistaking him for a deer. A vengeful Duke is pursuing him, and convinces the girl to run away with him. Together they leave their plague-stricken town, cross a barren wasteland and discover an underground stone city whose inhabitants live a communal existence, subsisting on seafood and seagrass.
The reader experiences Christian Kracht’s new novel, Air, in a state of confusion: how will these two narratives come together? There are vague connections here and there – in a painting of Merlin and Lancelot that hangs in Paul’s house, and references to neo-paganism and Arthurian legend – and a startling anachronism, when the stranger shoots several of the Duke’s henchmen with a modern handgun. After Paul’s disappearance, Cohen searches his bag and finds an instruction manual for 3D-printing a ceramic pistol. The mechanics of it all are extremely opaque, but it seems as if a malfunction in the datacenter has created a glitch that has disrupted time, space, and consciousness, opening a portal between modern subjectivity and a medieval fantasy world.
During his first meeting with Paul, Cohen speculated that if a person’s thoughts could reside in a physical space like a digital server, they might eventually outlive that person’s biological life. “What if memory simply existed? Would any entity in data storage have an ego, a self, or not?” Later, the stranger becomes deeply aware of himself as a character; He experiences an uncanny sense of déjà vu, and has a “definite impression that the world was being flattened in a harmonious way, as if everything was becoming two-dimensional”.
This spiritual conundrum is the supernatural expression of an entirely mundane middle-aged quandary. Paul lamented “this disrespectful world, with its lack of boundaries, Instagram and the horrors of vernacular architecture”. He dreams of buying an estate on a remote Inner Hebridean island where only wild horses live. “No electricity, no heating, no phone reception. It was the perfect house.” Cohen is fed up with the modern aesthetics of Nordic chic (“cottagecore lichen restaurants, desaturated colors, that lonely European periphery”), and believes that “the wars of the future will be fought over boredom”.
Swiss writer Kracht, who is almost 50, has earned a reputation as a satirist of Gen X affluence. The playful spirit that animated his previous novel, the International Booker-longlisted Eurotrash – in which a wealthy mother and son embark on a sentimental road trip through the Alps – gives way here to a bleak, world-weary cynicism. Paul and Cohen are archetypes of metropolitan privilege, their bland self-loathing expressed in quietly noxious cultural references — Muji stationery, or Paul’s “90s normcore” wardrobe — and an emotionally inert prose, rendered vividly in Daniel Bowles’s translation from the German. When Cohen overdosed, it was “not out of sadness… but because he didn’t care”.
Amidst such spiritual malaise, there is a daring, wishful escapism in the exquisite scenes of natural beauty that punctuate fiction: vast ice sheets and rock formations, migratory birds, auroras. Cohen’s desire to redecorate the datacenter also has the feel of a therapeutic intervention: “Such a huge amount of hopes, thoughts and memories have accumulated… Painting this space white would ensure order and clarity…” It’s a slightly strange notion, but it’s also the kind of thing that can come up with a dangerously overextended mind – an attempt to declutter the psyche through a visual cleanse; A grand exercise in self-help.
The narrative structure is somewhat weak, and the interpretation is oddly informal at times. Yet the novel’s rough-and-tumble quality is consistent with its evocation of an ambiguous, porous reality. The wind is perhaps best understood as a parable – a warning, as it were, from the present. If consciousness, which is constituted in the physical infrastructure and is therefore intrinsically vulnerable, can be corrupted or distorted like a radio signal, then the ghost of madness may never go away. Krach has taken a familiar premise – the contemplative creative type, bored by his own cleverness – and made it thought-provokingly strange.
