British writer Helen Oyeyemi’s glorious ninth novel, Parasol Against the Axe is a maximalist belter, proffering a vision of a hen-do weekend in Prague in dizzyingly delicious prose, featuring a revolving cast of acrobatic characters – each more infuriatingly brilliant than the last – who skip away and stick their fingers up at you if you prod them, because they won’t be pinned to any page and you can bog off if you’re going to interrogate anything so routine as a conventional plotline!
This is Oyeyemi’s celebration of Prague, in all the city’s elusory beauty, and it is rollicking with metatextuality. Various threads of narrative are spinning in time, but the novel centres on a triad of frenemy relationships between Hero Tojosoa, Dorothea Gilmartin and Sofie Cibulkova. Decades of resentment result in a quagmire of pass-agg texts and last-minute flights as Sofie holds her wedding in her home city, and her ex-friends trickle in unannounced, in all their petty jealousies and betrayals.
Oyeyemi excels in delineating the sly awkwardness of stringing out a friendship with someone who you no longer like, in the queerness that squeaks in shared intimacies between women.
Crucial to this ambiguous ménage a trois, is a magically contradictory novel called Paradoxical Undressing, a book which continually pops up in conversation, offering a different story to whichever reader rummages through its pages, like a hall of mirrors. A mirage of its tales is embedded within the text, speaking to the rich, troubled history of Prague, where the past and present crouch in tandem.
This is a defiantly irreverent novel, liquorice-like in its wonder. Some readers will adore it, others might ask questions like ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!’ Personally, I lapped this novel up. If you are nourished by electrifying, experimental writing and a resplendence of fictional morsels, Parasol Against the Axe is the perfect book. If you are willing to open these pages, let the story grab you by the horns and thrust you into the thrumming call of its costumed crowds, pray it will be kind to you. Sometimes, the best novels are better than friends.
Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi is out now (Faber & Faber, £16.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.
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