Air, Christian Kracht (195pp, £12.99, Serpent’s Tail)
Big claims are being made for Christian Kracht’s new novel. The blurb compares Kracht to Jorge Luis Borges, whilst one of the back cover quotes claims the book is ‘a form of storytelling that reinvents storytelling itself’. Both of these would be hard to live up to, and unfortunately neither are true.
I can find nothing conceptually or philosophically lurking here, as there often is in Borges’ parables and narrative texts, nor can I see how Air reinvents storytelling. It is a book of two stories that slowly come together, mostly told in a simplistic folkore way: this happened then that happened, she said this and he replied. Although there are suggestions of mirrored and opposite worlds, and notions of time travel and historical displacement, they are not truly explained or made use of. They are asides, used it seems to suggest there is more to this story than is obvious. If only it was so!
Having pushed aside or ignored the elements of science fiction and fantasy world-building, Kracht gives many of the novel’s cast a happy ending as they sail away, whilst suggesting to readers that his book is somehow analogous to the scene depicted in and story suggested by a painting of Merlin and Lancelot. So magic, trickery, chivalry and the notion of a quest are also flagged up but made no authorial or narrative use of. The language throughout Air is cool and disengaged and the characters have little to encourage a reader’s engagement with them. They are cut-out figures on a model theatre stage.
I can’t but help compare them to Thomas Pynchon’s exuberant and comedic Shadow Ticket, which I was also reading at the time. Pynchon’s book is richly and marvellously strange, managing to both subvert and fulfil the detective genre it plays with, whilst also playfully undertaking huge narrative and chronological leaps between ribald, lusty and often surreal or perverse encounters and laugh-out-loud set pieces. In contrast – and remember Pynchon has been reinventing the novel for 50+ years, as have many other authors – Kracht seems merely clinically inept and vapid. Gaseous, one might say.
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Rupert Loydell
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