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“A great many books are firmly closed despite the general impression that they’re wide open — they’ll jovially present their back cover as page one and be baffled that you thought there’d be more.” This may be how Parasol Against The Axe introduces its protagonist — “Some of these adamantly closed books are also people,” the line goes on — but it couldn’t be further from the truth when it comes to the novel itself.
Outwardly about a woman called Hero Tojosoa who travels to Prague for a hen party, Helen Oyeyemi’s latest quickly plunges readers into a literary labyrinth that features a vast cast and a loose relationship with time. We read much yet learn little about Tojosoa: she is an “ex-journalist” living beyond her obvious means in Dublin with her teenage son; her Italian passport lists her birthplace as Vatican City; she is fleeing a mysterious letter whose contents she refuses to read. More to the point, in her Prague suitcase is a copy of Paradoxical Undressing, by the Sydney bartender turned author Merlin Mwenda.
This novel within a novel is no more straightforward than Parasol Against the Axe. The first time Tojosoa picks it up, it concerns the extramarital affairs of a nobleman at the court of the 16th-century Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. But when she returns to the book later in the evening, following a delightfully delirious wheelbarrow-bound journey back to her hotel, a new first chapter has taken the place of the old one — this time about a judge in Prague who sets out to frame his son for sedition.
Tojosoa is not the only one in the city attempting to make sense of Paradoxical Undressing. If she is the “axe” of the title, Thea Gilmartin is, apparently, the parasol — a metaphor no more immediately explained and no less disorientating than the pair’s murky history. Their past is bound by literature, and, thanks to Paradoxical Undressing, so is their present. As their paths cross again in the Czech capital, the book’s form and content prove chameleon-like, changing when they’re not looking with the unpredictability of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller.
Playing with structure and perspective is familiar territory for Oyeyemi, whose previous works have pushed the postmodern into horror, fantasy and fairytale settings. Her 2011 novel Mr Fox, in which a writer finds himself confusing muse and mistress, warned of the dangers of listening too closely to your own characters. Peaces, her most recent, used a train and its wayward passengers to distort time and space. In Parasol Against the Axe, we must take the word of an entire city: Prague, where Oyeyemi has lived for the past decade or so, is both witness to and indignant narrator of the events of the hen party.
As a reader, you learn to take pleasure in the present, in the intoxicating confidence of each paragraph — Tojosoa’s facial expression is “the ‘read’ receipt that kills a conversational thread” or “a thumbs-up emoji sent in response to a confession of love” — safe in the knowledge that Oyeyemi will eventually circle back around to whatever question she left floating out of reach a page or two ago. At one point, Tojosoa asks what Gilmartin thought of her book and gets the response: “Think? I couldn’t. It walked all over me and wiped its feet on my hair.” As the reader, you sympathise; a stream of digressions and disguises leave you with little time to reflect.
Oyeyemi is aware that her fictions have to compete with readers’ realities, that many people will peer inside a frame and see a mirror rather than a work of art: “Hardly anybody talks about what it is they’ve actually heard or read,” contends one character. “We only say what we were thinking about while someone was trying to talk to us.” At times the book feels too conscious of this philosophy, carpet-bombing the reader’s attention span in the hope of a hit. And, much like a drunken wheelbarrow ride, once it has picked up pace, it doesn’t give itself quite enough time to stop, leading to a slightly bumpy landing.
Yet the author also knows that her flair for the fantastical is sure to outweigh the preoccupations of even the most heartbroken or distracted soul. Parasol Against The Axe is as brilliantly close a book to Paradoxical Undressing as it is possible to write without breaking into readers’ homes and switching their copies when they’re not looking. Which is about as exhausting as it sounds, but exhilarating, too — and isn’t that the point of a hen party?
Oyeyemi confidently captures the feeling of reading, of amassing books, of forgetting which titles you’ve started and which ones you cast aside after only one chapter, of confusing different authors — of suspecting, in short, that books have a mind of their own and the power to play tricks. Parasol Against the Axe certainly does.
Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi, Faber & Faber £16.99, 272 pages
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