Air runs two timelines in strict alternation: Paul, a reclusive Orkney-based interior designer, flies to Stavanger to paint a fjord-side datacenter 'the perfect white'; when a storm knocks out the power, he disappears. In the parallel track, an unnamed stranger — hunted by a duke in a Norse-mythic medieval world — is nursed back to health by a nine-year-old girl who shot him with an arrow, mistaking him for a deer. The two threads feel categorically incompatible, and Kracht sustains that incompatibility almost to the end. The bridging mechanism is a glitch. Cohen, the arts magazine editor who commissioned Paul, overdoses on barbiturates — 'not out of sadness… but because he just didn't care' — and while snooping through Paul's bag finds an instruction manual for 3D-printing a ceramic pistol. The same pistol, it turns out, that the medieval stranger uses to shoot the duke's henchmen. The datacenter outage has apparently opened a portal between a modern subjectivity and a fantasy world, corrupting time, space, and consciousness the way a power surge corrupts a server. The philosophical payload arrives early, via Cohen: 'What if memory could just persist? Would an entity in data storage have an ego, a self, or not?' The stranger begins to feel himself flattening, 'as though everything were becoming two-dimensional' — a character becoming aware of his own fictionality. This is Kracht's sharpest move: the medieval world is not a dream or a metaphor but a data artifact, a consciousness persisting in degraded infrastructure. The novel's emotional substrate is gen-X disgust with itself. Paul hates 'this disgraceful world, with its lack of boundaries, Instagram, and the horrors of vernacular architecture.' He fantasizes about a remote Inner Hebridean island with feral horses and no phone reception. Cohen is exhausted by Nordic chic — 'cottagecore lichen restaurants, desaturated colours, that lonely European periphery' — and believes 'the wars of the future would be waged out of boredom.' These are precisely rendered archetypes of cosmopolitan privilege, their self-hatred encoded in brand references: Muji stationery, 90s normcore. The satire is quiet and damning. Kracht's previous novel Eurotrash — International Booker-longlisted, a wealthy mother and son on a sentimental Alpine road trip — had a playfulness that Air deliberately abandons. What replaces it is a world-weary sardonicism that risks tipping into the very ennui it's diagnosing. Daniel Bowles's translation from the German is unfussy and serves the emotionally inert prose well; the flatness is intentional, not a failure of craft. The fantasy sequences earn their keep not through plot but through sensation — immense ice sheets, migrating birds, the aurora. The escapism is overt and Kracht doesn't apologize for it. Cohen's urge to paint the datacenter white — 'Hopes, ideas, and memories amassed in such large quantities… painting this space white would ensure order, and clarity' — reads as a grandiose self-help gesture, which is exactly what it is. It's slightly absurd, and the novel knows it. The structural wager doesn't fully pay. The narrative mechanics are 'tantalisingly opaque' in a way that sometimes tips into perfunctory — the exposition does the minimum required and occasionally less. But the rough-hewn quality is arguably appropriate to a novel about porous, glitching reality. Air is best understood as a parable: if consciousness is constituted in material infrastructure, it is intrinsically vulnerable to the same failures. Kracht has taken a premise — cosmopolitan boredom, metaphysical crisis — and made it genuinely strange, if not definitively resolved.
