Think about a metropolis of staggering, typically menacing magnificence. Its historical past is bloody, however it carries on, changing into extra mesmerizingly unusual with every period.
Now think about that the town is sentient. It has company and consciousness; it decides who will get to remain and who wants to depart. It’s each a bodily place and an ambient spirit that consistently inhabits completely different varieties; it might probably seduce a customer and twist time backwards. A speaking, typing model of that metropolis in some way leads to a WhatsApp group for individuals who have had a horrible time visiting it, the place it responds to the inflow of complaints: “COME ON, KIDS,” it writes at one level. “Don’t go to the town after which get all scandalized by metropolis life.”
In her new novel, Parasol In opposition to the Axe, Helen Oyeyemi turns Prague, the place the British author has lived since 2014, into such a spot. The novel is organized across the chaos that’s unleashed when a trio of alienated associates—Hero, Thea, and Sofie—reunite within the metropolis for Sofie’s bachelorette social gathering. The main points of their friendship and its dissolution, saved hidden from the reader for many of the novel, have an unmistakable aura of fantasy. All that the reader is aware of for sure is that the three girls used to share a home in Dublin, and that they as soon as had a really shut, bordering on obsessive, friendship. Since then, they haven’t been talking.
By Helen Oyeyemi
A lot of Oyeyemi’s novels are diversifications of fairy tales: Snow White, in Boy, Snow, Fowl; the English story of Mr. Fox, in Mr. Fox; Hansel and Gretel, in Gingerbread. Parasol In opposition to the Axe shares a literary language with these folks tales. It options at the very least one prince charming, silkworms who feed on human hair, and clocks that function confidants. The novel appears to be arguing that the tales folks inform about themselves and others type not simply the concepts that form the world, however typically the world itself. A metropolis, as an example, consists not simply of buildings, roads, and our bodies, but additionally of the impressions and observations of those that understand it. That is what makes the folks, locations, and relationships that populate the e-book so entrancing, but additionally inevitably fragile. Tales will be made and simply as simply unmade.
Oyeyemi’s plot is layered and typically baffling, taking many seemingly nonsensical turns. In one of many novel’s prolonged conceits, the town of Prague assumes the type of a e-book known as Paradoxical Undressing, which seems to be a set of quick tales set all through the town’s historical past. The e-book’s contents change relying on when it’s opened, and by whom. It additionally, disconcertingly, makes frequent, private calls for of its readers.
Hero and Thea each spend a lot of the novel studying Paradoxical Undressing and pondering the messages it provides them. (These prolonged, unusual, joyful passages are a spotlight of Parasol In opposition to the Axe; I might fortunately learn dozens extra.) As a automobile of the town’s impish, often tyrannical character, Paradoxical Undressing doesn’t cease at telling Prague’s tales: It orchestrates them, too. As an example, the town appears decided to banish Thea, who was born there and left as a toddler. “That’s all you’re getting: now begone,” one chapter she reads concludes. “Begone, I mentioned.”
Paradoxical Undressing additionally means that Prague exists solely as a result of folks see it, understand it, and inform tales about it—that if thousands and thousands of eyes didn’t see it in thousands and thousands of various methods, it’d detach itself from the bottom on which it was constructed and take off looking for somebody who would. In a single temporary and telling chapter that includes Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor is approaching Prague when he’s requested by a metropolis astronomer to explain his environment. When he fails to offer an enough reply, the complete metropolis sails away.
The impact of that is mind-bending. Parasol In opposition to the Axe is a e-book a couple of bodily place, the tales that make up that place, and the disembodied airplane on which these tales and that place meet—say, an odd church the place Hero encounters a cohort of worshipful mice, a Latin-speaking lady accompanied in all places by two goats, and a few ambulatory statues. The extent to which the church and its inhabitants are actual, versus a type of lucid dream induced by the town, is fully unclear. Actually, all through the novel, there may be little readability or definition to be discovered, simply an amazing sense of immersion in a very weird, utterly enthralling world—one through which the bonds that maintain collectively issues like cities or friendships are dangerously tenuous.
That’s the place the relationships amongst Hero, Thea, and Sofie are available in. The three girls don’t appear to have ever had a lot in frequent. That’s, apart from their extreme, inexplicable starvation to merge with each other, adopting the qualities they most admire within the others as their very own: Hero, the portrait of reserved energy; Thea, the enigma; Sofie, the paragon of girlishness. Over time, their intimacy dissolved the boundaries amongst them, making a codependent relationship as mesmerizing because it was violent.
For a lot of Parasol In opposition to the Axe, the main points of that authentic mixing stay maddeningly out of attain. Early within the novel, Oyeyemi writes that their friendship started to interrupt aside when Sofie “didn’t dare to dwell underneath the identify they’d chosen—the identify they’d voted on, a single first identify for all three of them.” It’s a deeply unusual sentence that arrives out of the blue, and the historical past it touches, which includes a interval within the girls’s lives after they engaged in some shared endeavors that had been at greatest unethical and at worst fraudulent, gained’t be illuminated for a very long time to return—after which solely partially, as a result of every member of the trio has completely different concepts as to why their friendship fell aside. However what’s clear is that their overbearing drive to manage each other stays so intense that it appears nearly like a want to obliterate—an “If I can’t have you ever, nobody can” type of obsession.
Prague shares one thing of that drive, in search of an energetic hand in nearly every little thing that takes place inside its boundaries. It’s typically depicted as a spirit that lives inside its residents, who’re in flip anticipated to function one thing like ambassadors for the town. Their major goal is to inform the town’s tales. An instance: One night time, Jitka, a cheerful younger resident, bullies Hero into paying for a trip again to her resort in a wheelbarrow, throughout which Jitka tells her in regards to the unusual actions occurring behind seemingly each door they go. (At one deal with, a historical past professor fascinated by King Wenceslas makes customized chain-mail vests, “attractive in addition to stabproof.”) Jitka is exacting about tales: Studying them, relaying them, and above all understanding them. After witnessing a brutal run-in between Hero and Thea, through which Hero is left with a ugly wound, Jitka is irritated by Hero’s incapability to clarify precisely why the 2 are so linked, and so harmful, to one another. “Do you your self know the fucking story of you and that lady?” she calls for.
How unusual to look at Hero, Thea, and Sofie, three broken folks, attempt to discover a technique to resolve the anguished love that attracts them collectively. How unhappy it’s to come across the reality that no two (or three) folks ever have the identical story to inform. And but, how thrilling Parasol In opposition to the Axe makes that reality appear: not a sorrowful outdated noticed, reminding readers to consider carefully about perspective and take any heartfelt narrative with a grain of salt, however a immediate to be extra inquisitive about life. If no two folks have the identical story, properly, how fantastic—that simply means extra tales.
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