2 September 2026

Christian Kracht’s lumbering dream

A hackneyed plot makes it hard to take a new novel by the Eurotrash author seriously

Photo by Philip Brooks/ Millennium Images, UK

Christian Kracht’s new novel opens with a quote from Georges Perec’s Things (1965), in which a young couple’s life in 1960s France is described as “like an overly long routine, like an almost serene boredom”. In a further nod to Perec, who was a masterful describer of interiors, the first few pages of Air convey the minimalist decor of a “spacious, quiet room” in Stromness. We are shown a plate on which sits a croissant, a pair of tan sandals, a sheep’s-wool rug and an oil painting depicting Merlin and Lancelot. Almost belatedly, we are shown the owner of the room, who in possibly yet another nod to Perec, is A Man Asleep, the title of his 1967 novel.

Paul, the sleeper, furnishes properties that are for sale or rent. Apart from being Swiss, Paul’s only other defining characteristic is his aesthetic (and consumer) preferences. He eats artisan sourdough and blackthorn salt, wears fisherman’s sweaters rather than fleeces, rides a heavy old Swiss military bike and uses an “extra sharp serrated knife from Kyoto”. He likes living on Orkney because of “all those absent colours – everything washed out, lonesome, bleak, flat”.

At the start of the novel Paul receives a proposal from Cohen, the editor of a Norwegian decor magazine, to find “the perfect white” with which to paint a hangar for “a great deal of money”. At this point the novel appears as if it will be a satirical take on the cultural preferences of those who have turned the quest for simplicity and purity into a form of decadence. This would not be a great departure for Kracht, who, in previous works such as The Dead (2016) and the International Booker-longlisted Eurotrash (2021), has demonstrated his ability to walk gracefully the rarefied line between connoisseur and satirist of the cultural mores of the affluent. So it is disorienting when the narrative shifts to the perspective of a young girl called Ildr in what seems to be a medieval or fantasy world. Ildr shoots a stranger, who it’s quickly apparent is Paul. After he recovers, the two of them flee from a villainous duke.

Paul’s disappearance from a data storage facility in Norway during a solar flare later on offers one possible explanation for his presence in this other world. The arrival of a stranger to an alien planet or to a time in our past (who is actually from our present) is a well-worn set-up within science fiction and fantasy. In books such as Stephen R Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the aim of this device is to subject the character to experiences that transform them, usually for the better. For this to happen in a way that’s convincing and interesting, both the character and the world need to be well defined, but Paul and Ildr’s adventures are so generic they border on silly. In a cartoonish fight scene, Ildr shoots soldiers with a gun only she can fire; a dog becomes their faithful companion; there are places called the Stony Waste and the Frozen Sea; some believe in a vague religion called the Circle. In these fantasy sections, Kracht eschews his usual, elegant, multi-clause sentences for a lumbering, cliché-ridden prose that his gifted translator Daniel Bowles dutifully renders.

When elements from Paul’s previous life begin to appear – his sheep’s-wool rug, the editor Cohen, an increasing number of tan-coloured items – it is probably meant to suggest that everything in the fantasy narrative, and possibly also Paul’s visit to Norway, is occurring in some kind of dream state. It is thus entirely possible that the hackneyed plot and prose of the fantasy sections are intentional, and meant to reflect the poverty of Paul’s imagination, but the reader may find this intellectual justification scant comfort. The nature of the “reality” of the fantasy world also determines how one views the difference between how Paul acts in the different parts of the book. His paternalistic feelings towards Ildr, whom he strangely feels it is “his sacred duty to care for”, along with his wish to defend the people of “a tidy civilisation”, could either be a sign of personal growth or a vain wish to cast himself as a wise and caring hero.

Throughout his career Kracht has been an arch-provocateur, and it’s hard to know how seriously to take much of this novel. The nebulousness of Air is likely to divide readers into those who find it playfully enigmatic and those who suspect that its apparent insubstantiality and multiple ambiguities conceal something best described by the title of another Perec novel: A Void.

Nick Holdstock’s novel, Porcupine, about the art historian Aby Warburg, is published by Sagging Meniscus in December