Air by Christian Kracht review – a metaphysical jigsaw puzzle

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. D…