A reclusive interior designer named Paul travels from his home in Orkney to the Norwegian coastal city of Stavanger for a most unusual commission. A datacentre housing a vast internet server is located by a fjord on the outskirts of the city, and a prestigious arts magazine is paying him a large sum of money to give it a makeover. They want him to paint the interiors white – “not just any white, but the perfect white, the singular white”. Shortly after he arrives, a freak weather event causes a power outage, and Paul goes missing; meanwhile the magazine’s jaded editor, Cohen, takes an overdose of barbiturates.
In alternate chapters a very different tale unfolds, set in a distant medieval world redolent of Norse mythology. A man, referred to only as “the stranger”, is nursed back to health by a nine-year-old girl who has shot him with an arrow after mistaking him for a deer. He is being pursued by a vengeful duke, and persuades the girl to join him on the run. Together they leave their plague-ridden town, traverse a barren wasteland and discover a subterranean stone city whose inhabitants live a communal existence, subsisting on seafood and kelp.
The reader experiences Christian Kracht’s new novel, Air, in a state of absorbed bewilderment: how on earth will these two narratives come together? There are obscure connections here and there – in a painting of Merlin and Lancelot that hangs in Paul’s home, and in passing references to neopaganism and Arthurian legend – and one startling anachronism, when the stranger shoots several of the duke’s henchmen with a modern handgun. After Paul’s disappearance, Cohen snoops through his bag and finds an instruction manual for 3D-printing a ceramic pistol. The mechanics of it all are tantalisingly opaque, but it seems as though the outage at the datacentre has produced a glitch that has jumbled up time, space and consciousness, opening a portal between a modern subjectivity and a medieval fantasy world.
During his first meeting with Paul, Cohen speculates that if a person’s thoughts can reside in physical space, as in a digital server, they might eventually transcend that person’s organic life. “What if memory could just persist? Would an entity in data storage have an ego, a self, or not?” Later on, the stranger becomes eerily conscious of himself as a character; he experiences an uncanny sense of deja vu, and has “the definite impression that the world was flattening, in a harmonious way, as though everything were becoming two-dimensional”.
This metaphysical jigsaw puzzle is the ethereal expression of a thoroughly mundane middle-aged ennui. Paul laments “this disgraceful world, with its lack of boundaries, Instagram, and the horrors of vernacular architecture”. He dreams of buying a property on a remote Inner Hebridean island populated only by feral horses. “No electricity, no heating, no phone reception. It was the perfect house.” Cohen is fed up with the modish aesthetics of Nordic chic (“cottagecore lichen restaurants, desaturated colours, that lonely European periphery”), and believes “the wars of the future would be waged out of boredom”.
Swiss author Kracht, who is in his late 50s, has built 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 dull, world-weary sardonicism. Paul and Cohen are archetypes of cosmopolitan privilege, their bland self-hatred conveyed in quietly damning cultural references – to Muji stationery, or Paul’s “90s normcore” wardrobe – and an emotionally inert prose, unfussily rendered in Daniel Bowles’s translation from the German. When Cohen overdoses, it is “not out of sadness … but because he just didn’t care”.
Amid such spiritual malaise, there is a bracing, wishful escapism in the sublime visions of natural beauty that punctuate the fantasy narrative: immense ice sheets and rock formations, migrating birds, the aurora. Cohen’s desire to redecorate the datacentre likewise has the feel of a therapeutic intervention: “Hopes, ideas, and memories amassed in such large quantities … painting this space white would ensure order, and clarity …” It’s a slightly ludicrous notion, but also just the kind of thing a dangerously overwrought mind might come up with – an attempt to declutter the psyche through a visual cleanse; a grandiose exercise in self-help.
The narrative artifice is somewhat flimsy, and the exposition oddly perfunctory at times. Yet the novel’s rough-hewn quality befits its evocation of a fuzzy, porous reality. Air is perhaps best understood as a parable – a warning, as it were, from the present. If consciousness, constituted in material infrastructure and therefore intrinsically vulnerable, can be corrupted or distorted like a radio signal, then the spectre of madness might never be too far away. Kracht has taken a familiar premise – brooding creative types, bored of their own cleverness – and made it suggestively strange.
