Parasol Against the Axe
Helen Oyeyemi, Faber, £16.99

 
AN exuberant tale of shifting perceptions, Helen Oyeyemi’s eighth novel explores the pleasures of storytelling, the paradoxes of friendship and the complex identity of the city of Prague.
 
Oyeyemi is a dazzling prose stylist – there isn’t a dull or clumsy sentence in the book – as well as a subtle and erudite player of literary games. Parasol against the Axe is “ludic” storytelling, in which the author takes liberties with language, philosophy and the reader’s expectations of how a story ought to work.   
 
A metafictional gauntlet is flung down in the opening chapter, which reveals that Prague isn’t merely the story’s setting but also a character and narrator. Following this, we wander through a series of stories within stories; exploring the contested territories of literature, where the marvellous meets the mundane and truth collides with illusion.
 
We meet Hero Tojosoa, an ex-journalist who has travelled to Prague to attend the hen weekend of her old friend Sofie and to avoid reading a mysterious letter. In her luggage is a gift from her teenage son, a novel called Paradoxical Undressing. On Hero’s initial reading, the opening chapter concerns an idiosyncratic bookshop and the discovery of the fragments of an old manuscript embedded in its walls. These, in turn, relate the story of a bizarre love triangle involving a 16th-century nobleman and his two doctors.
 
Following a ride across the city in a rickshaw-wheelbarrow, Hero returns to Paradoxical Undressing to discover the first chapter has been replaced by one about a corrupt and manipulative judge. Later, we learn the book varies from reader to reader. Alternative openings feature a cold war misinformation project, a feud between pop singers and the exploits of a Jewish woman working as a nightclub “taxi dancer” during the Nazi occupation of the city.
 
The protean nature of Paradoxical Undressing isn’t confined to its first few pages. The biography of its author changes over time. Characters and events leak into contemporary reality.   
 
Oyeyemi's storytelling is ambitious and encyclopaedic – to a fault. It’s as if she has raided the larders of metafiction and magic realism and then tipped every ingredient she’s found into a single cooking pot.
 
For example, there are walk-on roles for a golem, sentient statues and the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan; a morally improving mind game is played out by an imam and the personification of Prague; and the disintegration of Hero’s most intense relationship is presented – Rashomon-style – from multiple subjective viewpoints. Then there are intertextual nods to various precursors. I was reminded of the nested narratives of Calvino and Potocki; the complex interaction of text and reality in the work of Borges; the urban fabulism of Bulgakov; and the swirl of recurring characters in Schnitzler’s La Ronde.
 
Oyeyemi’s explorations of landscape and place are witty and innovative. The problem with Parasol Against the Axe is that its bizarrely intersecting storylines become its purpose and meaning, rather than a means of illuminating human experience. It’s a clever and funny novel but one lacking in warmth.