Christian Kracht's 'Air' is a literary shot across the bows of modern ennui, careening wildly between two worlds: our own suffocating digital realm and a medieval fantasy land where myth and reality blur like a fractured mirror. This mesmerising novel hurtles readers on a white-knuckle ride through interconnected storylines that refuse to yield their secrets until the very end.
One thread follows Paul, an Orkney-based interior designer with a penchant for the perfect white, as he jets off to Norway for a surreal commission: painting the interiors of a data centre. But just as his brushstrokes begin to take hold, a freak power outage plunges him into the unknown – and leaves Cohen, his jaded arts magazine editor, staring into the abyss. In a world where Instagram reigns supreme and vernacular architecture is all the rage, it seems even the affluent are not immune to the pangs of ennui.
Meanwhile, in a realm as unforgiving as it is beautiful, 'the stranger' – wounded by a nine-year-old girl's bullet – embarks on a perilous journey through plague-ridden towns and barren landscapes. Pursued by a vengeful duke, they stumble upon a subterranean stone city whose inhabitants live communally, their lives sustained by the bounty of the sea. The contrast between these two worlds is nothing short of jarring – but it's exactly this disjuncture that allows Kracht to tackle the big questions: what does it mean to be human in an age of digital excess?
Through a dizzying array of anachronisms and subtle connections, Kracht weaves his magic. A modern handgun glints in the medieval sunlight; Arthurian legend looms large over the fantastical landscape. And at its heart lies a mind-bending conceit: that a data centre outage has created a 'glitch' – a portal between worlds – allowing us to glimpse the infinite possibilities hidden within our own consciousness.
Kracht, ever the satirist of affluent society, delivers his trademark skewering of Instagram-fuelled despair and the sterile beauty of vernacular architecture. But it's in the contrast between these worlds that we find a glimmer of hope: a vision of a life lived in harmony with nature – one that transcends the digital detritus of our modern lives. Translated from German by Daniel Bowles, 'Air' is a clarion call to resist the siren song of ennui and rediscover the beauty that lies just beyond the edge of our screens.