Peaces

Helen Oyeyemi

Allen & Unwin

Otago Daily Times, September 4th 2021

It is not often as a reviewer that I am lost for words, but Helen Oyeyemi’s astonishing and beautiful new novel is almost impossible to summarise.

The story opens as Otto and Xavier Shin, accompanied by their mongoose Árpád Montague XXX, embark on their non-honeymoon honeymoon – a 5-day “Lakes and Mountains” tour. Which lakes and mountains are not specified on the ticket, nor the countries through which they will pass. All they know is the name of the train and carriage in which they are travelling, information “just imprecise enough to stir [the] imagination”, and a description that applies as much to the reader as to the read.

That this will be no ordinary journey is immediately apparent. For a start, the carriages are identified not by number but by name and include a library car, a postal-sorting carriage, a portrait gallery, a sauna, a greenhouse, and a bazaar. The first car they enter is upside down, and when they eventually find Clock carriage – their allocated berth – it has no internal lighting, leaving them literally and figuratively in the dark.

As the pair soon discover, the train is deserted except for themselves and three others: its owner, Theremin Viruoso Ava Kapoor, driver and head of security Allegra Yu, and Laura de Souza, a representative of a company to whom Ava is deeply in debt. Despite their diverse backgrounds, it soon becomes clear all are connected in a way that Otto begins to suspect is more than coincidental. And at the centre of it all stands a sixth character, Přemysl Stojaspal, a man singularly conspicuous by his absence. Despite being employed to play him to sleep at night for several years, Ava insists she has never met the man (whether this is due to her own wilful blindness, some peculiarity on his part, or the fact that he does not exist at all is unclear). For her kindness to his son, Přem’s father has made Ava the sole beneficiary of his considerable fortune. This inheritance is, however, contingent on her being of sound mind on her thirtieth birthday and, as each of the travellers share their individual story, Otto becomes convinced that Přem has brought each of them together on the eve of the anniversary in order to enact an elaborate revenge.

The story unfolds with a dreamlike logic, with recurring images and themes playing out through multiple iterations: Women choke on stones;  men seek retribution for a misappropriated fortune; Otto encounters indescribable or indiscernible strangers. Even Přem’s deft orchestration of events mirrors the way Ava manipulates invisible forces to draw music from the air. Somebody is clearly being gaslit, but it is not clear who: Ava? Přem? Otto? Xavier? You and I?

Maybe it is all of the above. Otto is, after all, an unreliable narrator: “truthful [but] not with words…You’d be stupid to take anything [he] says at face value.” And oh, what words they are! Vividly surreal, the writing resounds with an Alice-in-Wonderland absurdity that is by turns hilarious, terrifying and utterly compelling. Every scene brings a fresh revelation, and it is impossible to guess what lies beyond the next corner. In the end I decided to stop trying to make sense of things and just went along for the ride.

Peaces is the perfect antidote to the bizarreness of today’s reality, and the first thing I wanted to do when I turned the final page was to go straight back to the beginning and start again.