Helen Oyeyemi is a bamboozler, a discombobulator, a peddler of perplexity. She crushes fables and fairytales down to a powder and then laces her fiction with it like some kind of literary hallucinogen. Her novels should come with pharmaceutical warning labels: do not operate heavy machinery under the influence. Symptoms may include slurred realism and a persistent allegorical itch.
In her most recent books, the British author seems to have been experimenting with how much expository and explanatory weight she can jettison to make space for filigree and romp. In 2019’s Gingerbread, the result was something akin to immersive theatre – an invitation to explore. What we lost in orientation, we gained in play space. Gingerbread could be read as a novel about Brexit insularity, the tenacious forces of social immobility, or just a high fantasia about stupendous biscuitry.
Oyeyemi’s seventh novel, Peaces, is set on a train, a chimerical engine so scaled and silvered it seems almost creaturely. Inside its carriages, the laws of physics don’t quite apply; the air crackles with ontological doubt (“If you stuck out your tongue it would dance there, right at the tip: the fizz of conditionality”). Trains provide a “sticky mix of enclosure and exposure”, Oyeyemi writes; an “incubator for intense encounters”. This one – The Lucky Day – comes replete with a postal sorting office, portrait gallery, sauna and holding cell. Not to mention a glass-panelled greenhouse car. And that’s what Oyeyemi has built here: a hurtling hothouse of a novel.
In the wilds of “deepest Kent” we join Otto and Xavier Shin – a mesmerist and his ghostwriter lover – as they embark on their “non-honeymoon honeymoon”. The trip is a gift from a wealthy insomniac aunt (“she looks so tired nobody realises she’s rich”), and they are accompanied – as always – by Árpád, Otto’s companion mongoose, 30th in a distinguished line of companion mongooses stretching back two centuries (mongooses should travel before they hit middle age, Oyeyemi explains, “otherwise they get narrow-minded”).
Otto and Xavier share The Lucky Day with three others: a composer-cum-driver, a debt control officer (mystical trains are expensive), and the train’s owner, theremin virtuoso Ava Kapoor, who – rumour has it – never disembarks. Is she a recluse or a captive? When our lovers catch a glimpse of her through a window, they can’t tell if the sign she’s holding says “HELLO” or “HELP”.
It’s all so drenched in quirk and whimsy – the leashed mongoose, the theremin, the brocade fainting couch in the train library that is “the colour of Darjeeling tea in the fourth minute of brewing” – the stuff of Wes Anderson fever dreams. But, unlike Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, the legacy of empire is wild and wakeful on Oyeyemi’s train, not just elaborate wallpaper. The Lucky Day was once a tea smuggling train, with shady connections to the East India company. With old money come old cruelties. “I’m sure almost no one deludes themselves that all their ancestors were decent,” Otto reminds us.
As The Lucky Day lurches through a landscape our lovers don’t recognise, Peaces lurches in and out of time and memory, accumulating symbols and backstories like clues to a grand whodunnit. What do a burning house, days-of-the-week boxer shorts, a board game duel, a handful of emeralds, a contested inheritance and a man in a peacock-green scuba suit have in common? Why is it that each of the passengers sees a different image emerge from the white-on-white paintings in the gallery car? Just as we suspect Oyeyemi has lost control – as her locomotive careens into Dadaist chaos – Ava arrives brandishing an envelope bearing the officious little stamp of the “Agency for Introducing a Sense of Proportion into Novel Writing”. Whether that missive delights or maddens will depend entirely on the reader.
By the time Oyeyemi’s wilfully disproportionate train has stopped, a unifying character has appeared in silhouette: the artist who painted those shapeshifting canvases. As his connection to our cast is drawn out, so is a parable of connection, of the ways we shapeshift to fulfil each other’s desires. Peaces turns the existential terror of feeling unseen into a corporeal reality. How easy it is to lose yourself – or erase someone else – with the heat of your own wanting. To live unseen is a tragedy, but Peaces continues Oyeyemi’s career-long project of helping us to unsee – unsnarling the neural knots that childhood fairytales tied in us: those tales of sovereignty and dominion, of limp princesses and their flaxen-haired suitors, of snowy purity and moral absolutes. White-on-white. “Here’s to unseeing the world,” Ava rejoices.
What we lose in orientation in this novel, we gain in a kind of merciless velocity. It’s hard not to feel like a passenger aboard this book, a little queasy from watching the narrative blur and judder. But for all of her twee excesses, there are few writers who can match Oyeyemi’s creative glee. On a first read, Peaces works best when you stop trying to solve it, and instead surrender to that exuberance. Far better to sit back and revel in this book’s queer sensualities and the sherbet fizz of its wit; to enjoy the company of platinum-furred, jewel-hoarder Árpád, lithe as Nijinsky reincarnate; or perhaps try to imagine a melody that makes a “theremin sound as if it was looking back on a long life of crime”. Then when it’s over, return – clear-eyed – for a second trip.