A Vision of the City as a Live Organism

Imagine a city of staggering, sometimes menacing beauty. Its history is bloody, but it carries on, becoming more mesmerizingly strange with each era.

Now imagine that the city is sentient. It has agency and consciousness; it decides who gets to stay and who needs to leave. It’s both a physical place and an ambient spirit that constantly inhabits different forms; it can seduce a visitor and twist time backwards. A talking, typing version of that city somehow ends up in a WhatsApp group for people who have had a terrible time visiting it, where it responds to the influx of complaints: “COME ON, KIDS,” it writes at one point. “Don’t go to the city and then get all scandalized by city life.”

In her new novel, Parasol Against the Axe, Helen Oyeyemi turns Prague, where the British writer has lived since 2014, into such a place. The novel is organized around the chaos that is unleashed when a trio of alienated friends—Hero, Thea, and Sofie—reunite in the city for Sofie’s bachelorette party. The details of their friendship and its dissolution, kept hidden from the reader for most of the novel, have an unmistakable aura of fantasy. All that the reader knows for certain is that the three women used to share a house in Dublin, and that they once had a very close, bordering on obsessive, friendship. Since then, they have not been speaking.

Many of Oyeyemi’s novels are adaptations of fairy tales: Snow White, in Boy, Snow, Bird; the English story of Mr. Fox, in Mr. Fox; Hansel and Gretel, in Gingerbread. Parasol Against the Axe shares a literary language with those folk stories. It features at least one prince charming, silkworms who feed on human hair, and clocks that serve as confidants. The novel seems to be arguing that the stories people tell about themselves and others form not just the ideas that shape the world, but sometimes the world itself. A city, for instance, is composed not just of buildings, roads, and bodies, but also of the impressions and observations of those who perceive it. This is what makes the people, places, and relationships that populate the book so entrancing, but also inevitably fragile. Stories can be made and just as easily unmade.

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Oyeyemi’s plot is layered and sometimes baffling, taking many seemingly nonsensical turns. In one of the novel’s extended conceits, the city of Prague assumes the form of a book called Paradoxical Undressing, which appears to be a collection of short stories set throughout the city’s history. The book’s contents change depending on when it’s opened, and by whom. It also, disconcertingly, makes frequent, personal demands of its readers.

Hero and Thea both spend much of the novel reading Paradoxical Undressing and pondering the messages it gives them. (These lengthy, strange, joyful passages are a highlight of Parasol Against the Axe; I could happily read dozens more.) As a vehicle of the city’s impish, occasionally tyrannical character, Paradoxical Undressing doesn’t stop at telling Prague’s stories: It orchestrates them, too. For instance, the city seems determined to banish Thea, who was born there and left as a child. “That’s all you’re getting: now begone,” one chapter she reads concludes. “Begone, I said.”

Paradoxical Undressing also suggests that Prague exists only because people see it, perceive it, and tell stories about it—that if millions of eyes failed to see it in millions of different ways, it might detach itself from the ground on which it was built and take off in search of someone who would. In one brief and telling chapter featuring Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor is approaching Prague when he’s asked by a city astronomer to describe his surroundings. When he fails to provide an adequate answer, the entire city sails away.

The effect of this is mind-bending. Parasol Against the Axe is a book about a physical place, the stories that make up that place, and the disembodied plane on which those stories and that place meet—say, a strange church where Hero encounters a cohort of worshipful mice, a Latin-speaking woman accompanied everywhere by two goats, and a couple of ambulatory statues. The extent to which the church and its inhabitants are real, as opposed to a kind of lucid dream induced by the city, is entirely unclear. In fact, throughout the novel, there is little clarity or definition to be found, just an overwhelming sense of immersion in a completely bizarre, completely enthralling world—one in which the bonds that hold together things like cities or friendships are dangerously tenuous.

That’s where the relationships among Hero, Thea, and Sofie come in. The three women don’t seem to have ever had much in common. That is, aside from their excessive, inexplicable hunger to merge with one another, adopting the qualities they most admire in the others as their own: Hero, the portrait of reserved strength; Thea, the enigma; Sofie, the paragon of girlishness. Over time, their intimacy dissolved the boundaries among them, creating a codependent relationship as mesmerizing as it was violent.

For much of Parasol Against the Axe, the details of that original blending remain maddeningly out of reach. Early in the novel, Oyeyemi writes that their friendship began to break apart when Sofie “didn’t dare to live under the name they’d chosen—the name they’d voted on, a single first name for all three of them.” It’s a deeply strange sentence that arrives out of the blue, and the history it touches, which involves a period in the women’s lives when they engaged in some shared endeavors that were at best unethical and at worst fraudulent, won’t be illuminated for a long time to come—and then only partially, because each member of the trio has different ideas as to why their friendship fell apart. But what’s clear is that their overbearing drive to control one another remains so intense that it seems almost like a wish to obliterate—an “If I can’t have you, no one can” kind of obsession.

Read: When history doesn’t do what we wish it would

Prague shares something of that drive, seeking an active hand in almost everything that takes place within its boundaries. It’s sometimes depicted as a spirit that lives within its residents, who are in turn expected to serve as something like ambassadors for the city. Their primary objective is to tell the city’s stories. An example: One night, Jitka, a cheerful young resident, bullies Hero into paying for a ride back to her hotel in a wheelbarrow, during which Jitka tells her about the strange activities going on behind seemingly every door they pass. (At one address, a history professor fascinated by King Wenceslas makes custom chain-mail vests, “sexy as well as stabproof.”) Jitka is exacting about stories: Learning them, relaying them, and above all understanding them. After witnessing a brutal run-in between Hero and Thea, in which Hero is left with a gruesome wound, Jitka is annoyed by Hero’s inability to explain exactly why the two are so connected, and so dangerous, to each other. “Do you yourself know the fucking story of you and that woman?” she demands.

How strange to watch Hero, Thea, and Sofie, three damaged people, try to find a way to resolve the anguished love that draws them together. How sad it is to encounter the truth that no two (or three) people ever have the same tale to tell. And yet, how exciting Parasol Against the Axe makes that fact seem: not a sorrowful old saw, reminding readers to think carefully about perspective and take any heartfelt narrative with a grain of salt, but a prompt to be more curious about life. If no two people have the same story, well, how wonderful—that just means more stories.