Helen Oyeyemi’s latest novel is a story about stories; a tale that unpicks and exposes the threads that tie tales together. It’s set in Prague, with the city functioning as backdrop, cipher and, even, at times, narrator; the main characters slip, slide and transmute, and the bit-part players reappear in different roles and get-ups, like actors in a travelling theatre. Time in this city warps and winds backwards, contributing to the sense of the novel, and Prague itself, as a switchback ride: a “non-stop paternoster lift” that carries its passengers in circles rather than launching them along straight lines. The themes are love, history, identity, and – most fundamentally of all – the essential subjectivity of the act of reading; the notion that, when we open a book, we’ll each discover something different inside. Which, to be frank, makes for an interestingly high-stakes reviewing experience.
This is, of course, business as usual for Oyeyemi, to whom formal experimentation and narrative instability are meat and drink. Let’s start, then, with what appear to be the facts. Parasol Against the Axe is the story of a parched summer weekend in which two women, Hero Tojosoa and Dorothea Gilmartin, converge on Prague for a hen weekend. Hero and Thea were once as thick as thieves; these days they’re not speaking, and their motives for attending the bride-to-be Sofie’s celebration are wildly different. The weekend begins prosaically enough, with a whistlestop tour of the city’s untouristy sights (“the bright-bannered hypermarkets … the ”), after which Hero is deposited at a bed and breakfast buried in the twisting streets of the old town. Alone in her room, she picks up the “Prague book” her 14-year-old son bought her for the trip: a fictional novel-within-the-novel, titled Paradoxical Undressing.
