Adam Thirlwell’s first novel in eight years is set in Paris in the period around the French Revolution. When we first meet Celine, she is a peripheral figure at the court of the dauphin; at 19, she has recently been married off to Sasha, a 46-year-old minor government official and ruthless “fascist”. She has also become the focus of a series of pamphlets, provenance unknown, containing pornographic fictions based on her life. In the early pages of the novel, Celine has been made into a kind of symbol of all that is rotten at the heart of French high society, and is attempting to deal with the fallout from her unjust erotic infamy – most pressingly its effects on her thuggish and abusive husband. Along with her friends Marta and Julia, Celine hosts a series of glamorous parties, a deliberate gambit to attract writers into her orbit, as a means of wresting back control of the narrative of her life. (“In a world made of writing,” we are told, “malevolent writing could only be erased by more writing.”)
This might make the book sound like a relatively conventional work of historical fiction, but it is nothing of the sort. Thirlwell has never been one to play it straight – his 2012 novel Kapow! employed enough typographical trickery to outdo Max Porter; 2013’s collection Multiples was a sort of multilingual parlour game of literary translation – and as the use of the word “fascist” to describe an 18th-century French civil servant might suggest, his deliberate deployment of jarring anachronism is more than just a startling textural effect: it’s at the centre of the book’s artful design.
As the story unfolds, it becomes increasingly apparent that Thirlwell is doing something strange and playfully subversive with the form. We get political intrigue happening in “a suburban gas station”, people putting their possessions in storage in a “warehouse off the northern freeway” and getting “takeout from Balthazar”. The characters themselves converse in the rhythms and cadences of contemporary speech. (“The fuck is this?” asks one character of some pills she finds in a friend’s bag, prescribed by a “wildcat analyst”.) There is often, too, a chronological indeterminacy in the narrative voice itself, so that the past of the story and the present of its telling seem to collapse within a single sentence. The nervous atmosphere at the beginning of one of Celine’s parties, for instance, is described as “like how people waiting for the boss to join a difficult conference call so that it can start maintain a sprightly conversation about their children that in fact is anxious and distracted”.
The plot is filled with event and intrigue; at its most basic level, it’s a deeply contemporary story about a woman using the limited forms of power at her disposal to hollow out a space of agency in a violently patriarchal world. In this sense, it recalls Lauren Groff’s recent novel Matrix, about a group of 12th-century nuns who turn their convent into a kind of proto-feminist utopian project. But Thirlwell, in his at times impenetrable way, is a more playful writer than Groff. As it progresses, The Future Future is increasingly untethered to the conventions of realism, so that in one pivotal section of the story, Celine gets drunk with her friends at a party and wakes up in the year 2251. There then commences a cartoonish and strangely lovely sequence in which Celine is conveyed to the moon, by means of a spaceship she just happens to stumble across. She lives for a time there among friendly aliens, a welcome visitor to their sophisticated egalitarian society, in which gender is fluid and exclusive romantic relationships are unthought of. There is something charmingly old-fashioned about Thirlwell’s break with the conventions of realist literary fiction; Celine’s lunar sojourn recalls both the science fiction of Jules Verne and the wild allegorical imaginings of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
The Future Future is a slippery book, and the experience of reading it is one of continually attempting to grasp its various meanings and intents. This is, in a way, fitting, because Thirwell’s subject, power, is inherently evasive; he is interested especially in language as an instrument of power that both masks and reveals its machinations. As a friend of Celine’s puts it to her during one of her celebrated soirees: “It looks like a party. But don’t get it twisted. This isn’t a party. This is power, baby.”
At times, this slipperiness can be frustrating, as though Thirlwell is gesturing elegantly but vaguely in the direction of meaning. For all the wildness of the book’s plot, and for all its formal trickery, the prose maintains at all times a wistful distance from the events it narrates. He has an affection for the sort of near-aphorisms – “A legend is a story about the way no world ever realises that it’s surrounded by another world, until it is too late” – that I couldn’t help hearing in the airy tone of an Adam Curtis voiceover.
But despite its artful aloofness and occasional frustrations, Thirlwell’s prose is hypnotic and coolly beautiful. The writing is full of dreamlike leaps, not just at the level of plot, but in its sentences, too. At one point, Celine surveys the aftermath of a forest fire, and we get this darkly gorgeous image: “In the burnt grass, an exposed toad was throbbing hysterically, like a terrified heart.” Elsewhere, there are descriptions that are somehow more poetic for their almost Beckettian refusal of lyricism: “Celine and Lenoir went out walking beside the river. The river was a colour. The sky was another colour too.”
The Future Future is a strange and evasive novel, but it has a beauty and a mysterious power that reflect its enigmatic protagonist. Even when I wasn’t quite sure what Thirlwell was doing, or why he was doing it, I was never in any doubt that he was very good at it.
• Mark O’Connell’s A Thread of Violence is published by Granta. To buy a copy of The Future Future by Adam Thirlwell (Jonathan Cape, £18.99) go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
