When it came to discussing Air by Christian Kracht, my book group didn’t do much discussing. Rather, it was an hour of questions and speculation –

• was it an Arthurian myth?
• the row boat, the screw, the gun – where did they come from?
• is it a VR game?
• why are they traveling south to the North Sea?
• is it a commentary on climate change?
• is it a story about belonging and outsiders?
• does the main character fall into a memory bank?
• …and what the hell was going on with the horses?!

And when we had exhausted turning this story every which way, someone said, ‘Maybe it was all a dream…?’ There was a sharp intake of breath – not because every creative writing teacher ever has said it’s a narrative cop-out, but because the world Kracht created could feasibly be a construct of one of the character’s imaginations. And then we found evidence for that.

Basically, this book messed with our minds in a most entertaining way. I can’t even really tell you what it’s about, short of saying there’s a guy, an interior designer, tasked with finding the perfect shade of white to paint an Elon-Musk-esque-person’s data storage facility, which he describes as the ‘…world’s reservoir of collective memory…’.

Every single photograph from among the quintillions of recollections recorded on mobile phones was stored there. The storage capacities were beyond comprehension. Every wedding, every cherry blossom season in Japan, every birth, reactor accidents too, swarms of insects, kittens playing with woolen balls, people disfigured by war, palm trees at sunset – five billion photos a day. And this was it…’).

That’s spliced with the story of a little girl and a stranger in the (seemingly medieval) past… but is it the past? And is the interior designer guy in the future? You can’t be sure.

…he’d heard that the wars of the future would be waged over water. And Cohen replied: no, the wars of the future would be waged out of boredom.

Did I ‘like’ this book? Hmmm… I was certainly engrossed, and as someone in my book group declared, “It’s a total mindf*ck.”

What I did enjoy was the satire. When I read Kracht’s last book, Eurotrash, it took me a while to recognise that he wasn’t pretentious, he was being funny. I got the joke from page one of Air –

These cottagecore lichen restaurants, desaturated colors, that lonely European periphery, the two-dimensionality of the landscape, the grumbling, taciturn Scots, and so forth – that was just Protestant child’s play compared with the ash blonde Slavic neopagans in their white garments with red embroidered hems.

Kracht’s humour is also evident in the more meaningful commentary –

No, you had to have been an islander for five generations. Only then did you belong. And this is how it really should be in this disgraceful world, with its lack of boundaries, Instagram, and the horrors of vernacular architecture.

The meticulously curated world of the interior designer – hilariously over-the-top and leaning heavily into every Scandi-Japani aesthetic trope you can imagine – was perfection (and provided a wonderful contrast to the alternate world, which was wild and untamed).

I also loved the sense of colour. Not sure that I’ve ever said that about a book before, however, the way that Kracht describes colour creates this incredible feeling of flatness, that’s almost tangible. It’s impressive.

Nothing but verdant grey hills, sheep, and waist-high walls of ancient stones that vanished into the vastness of the landscape. Not another soul, and everywhere the sea, on all sides, slate colored and pleasantly unwelcoming. He couldn’t recall the route to the Orkney Sourdough Bakery actually being this far. For an hour, he cycled through the drizzle.

…that dreadful white solitude, that colorless vacuity which hemmed him in from every side. He could just as easily have run in the opposite direction. It made no difference. It was all equally horrifying and crystalline and hopeless. 

This book is translated from German by Daniel Bowles. Full marks to Bowles – Kracht’s spare writing and precise humour could have easily been lost in translation.

In summary, my enjoyment and appreciation of this book increased as my book group discussion progressed – I recommend you read it with a support crew!

3.5/5

…he slathered some fermented butter over the surface of the bread and from the cabinet fetched the Blackthorn salt, collected from the salt pans in Ayrshire on the west coast of Scotland. Blackthorn salt was filtered through something called a tower of thorns. Bearded young artisans had brought an old salt factory that hadn’t been used since the Second World War. They’d taken soothing photographs of kelp strands draped across flat stones, and posted these on Instagram, then hung blackthorn bushes in the tall wooden frame, and put the graduation tower back into operation.