"Prêm's Present": The Unsaid and Unseen in "Peaces"

Peaces, author Helen Oyeyemi's most recent work of weird magical realism, would probably not be characterized as a gothic novel. In fact, in a panel over Zoom a few months ago, she answered my question about possible further forays into the genre (as I freaked out and texted all my friends) with a solid no. White is for WItching, Oyeyemi's 2009 novel also reviewed on this site, was her contribution to the gothic genre, she stated, and ever since she's been determined to go in a different direction. And that was me told.

In light of this decision, Peaces probably can't really be qualified as gothic or Neo-gothic, and it's likely a good thing that Oyeyemi has mostly set the genre to the side--she already stuffs a great deal of tropes, hints, and stories-within-stories into her relatively short new novel. When it comes down to it, the main reason I'm reviewing it here is because I'm reading it for the third time and found that in order to consolidate my own thoughts about it, I needed to do some (hopefully) articulate fangirling.

Still, despite Oyeyemi's vehement renunciation of the genre, I have to admit that Peaces retains a sense of the gothic, if not the genre's defining tropes or archetypes. It's more the eerie vibe that permeates its second half, the overwhelming sense of the supernatural, and the vague darkness into which many of the central characters have descended by the novel's end. Peaces is nowhere near as bleak as a gothic novel, and nothing can match the creepily somber ending of White is for Witching. And yet, you could also argue that Peaces makes some casual nods to the genre with its ghosts and memories that resurface from the past, namely the memory of one man in particular---the ever-elusive, quite possibly supernatural Prêmsyl Stojpal.

It's through Oyeyemi's own sly plotting that you don't really realize the significance of this character until halfway through the book, when the novel suddenly becomes a kind of dark fairytale. Yet Peaces doesn't start out being about Prêm at all, but rather the couple Otto and Xavier Shin, who at the novel's opening, are about to embark on something like a honeymoon, in the form of a cross-country train trip (I assume. The characters' actual location in the real world becomes slightly blurry as soon as the train pulls out of Kent, England. They might as well be in some distant otherworld--we know we're on the train, and that's enough). The train itself is as much of a character as the happy boyfriends are--named the "Lucky Day", it has its own confused backstory; once used for tea smuggling, now its owner, the deceptively harmless Ava Kapoor, apparently loans it out for private trips. It's definitely the quirkiest train I've ever had the pleasure of reading about, with seemingly endless themed cars, including a "Clock Carriage", a sauna car, and a kitchen filled with passengers' favorite snacks. When I first started the novel about half a year ago, I was expecting something between The Polar Express and Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.

And that was what I got, at least in part. I have to think that Oyeyemi knew what she was doing in this book, and she does a lot. A charming train, a mysterious new passenger, lots of random tangents, and, yes, there is indeed vanishing--quite a bit of it. Though not in the way you might expect.

Midway through the novel, the plot tightens and veers directly onto the subject of Prêmsyl Stojpal, a former acquaintance, of sorts, of Ava Kapoor, and, as it turns out, everyone else on the Lucky Day--not just Otto and Xavier, but Allegra, the train's conductor and Ava's girlfriend, and Laura, Ava's accountant. When Ava first mentions Prêm in passing, as the son of an old friend, we don't immediately recognize his significance, and it is only later, when we are given further--but still elusive--details about the man, that we start to wonder who or what he really is.

Otto's and the other characters' narration tend to meander, which confuses the nature of Prêm a bit more. What is clear is that he first met Ava when she was contracted by his father, Karel, to play music to an empty room. After accepting the eccentric and unusual gig, Ava eventually learned that the room in fact was never empty, and rather she was playing for a young man who apparently needed the music--a theremin in Ava's case--to get through the night. This unseen youth is Prêm, and though the book is often frustratingly vague about what, exactly, happens to him at night, we are left the barest of hints. Another character, who significantly has seen him, recall a teenage Prêm appearing out of nowhere in a dark room, managing to be in multiple parts of the room at once--"He switched on two more lamps and he seemed to be where they were, and also by the bookcase and also, quite horribly, sitting at my feet with his elbows on my knees." Yet Prêm never seems exactly malevolent, but on the contrary, almost absurdly helpful. He goes out of his way to be solicitous to this particular woman, offering her a mysterious "present". His confidence in his ability to offer such a gift, no matter how unattainable, seems to make him even more frightening, and the woman declines the offer with a horror that even she does not seem to comprehend-- "I must have misunderstood...He was saying nonthreatening things at a normal pitch, yet everything he said scared the hell out of me."

We get only a few more subtle hints of Prêm's nature--though always from the potentially unreliable voices of other characters. Apparently, as a child he was kidnapped from boarding school and then just as quickly returned once "the kidnappers saw what he was", one character presumes. Little more of this encounter is known, except that Prêm recalled the kidnappers crying in his presence--whether he inadvertently caused this reaction is left only to surmise.

So what is Prêm, and what exactly are these mysterious "presents"? The most explicit suggestion comes in a recollection of Prêm's first nighttime musician, a man self-conscious about his weight, who does not last the full night. He is discovered the following morning in a bathtub covered in leeches, which Prêm apparently considered the "easiest way" to make him skinny. Prêm's almost excessive willingness to help other people achieve their goals, and the horribly misguided way he seems to go about it, would normally be a fairly relatable human trait. Yet not only does Prêm sometimes appear and disappear in strange ways, or "bring leeches" from nowhere, or just generally let matters get out of hand in ways that hint at the supernatural, but we briefly learn that he himself seemingly appeared from nowhere at the age of ten, his parentage uncertain and Ava's friend Karel his only known guardian. Though other people have varying degrees of confusion relating to Prêm--Ava in particular, as we'll see--Karel is perhaps the only person who seems to have a sense of what his son is. As a result he is overprotective of his son, trying to restrict him from staying out late at night and threatening to sue the musician after the leeches incident so he stops talking about what Prêm allegedly did to him. At one point, his tongue loosened by a drinking binge, Karel calls Prêm his "creature", and at another point, when Karel refuses to leave his estate to his son in his will, an angry Prêm retorts, "So I die when you do, is that it?" Is Prêm some kind of Frankenstein's monster, created a fully grown child to help Karel through his loneliness, yet never able to achieve the amount of human helpfulness he aspires to? Then again, in a similar drunken moment, Karel is said to have asked Prêm if he "remembers dying as a child", recalling the incident in detail: "We buried you in the forest, your mother and I...with a green linden leaf. The brightest we could find, so you wouldn't need a nightlight." This memory, true or not, puts Prêm's existence under yet a new light. Perhaps he's some kind of changeling returned in place of the original deceased child, now finding himself capable of a generosity far exceeding that of the humans around him. Whatever he is, it is difficult not to feel sorry for Prêm as we continue to learn about his increasingly outlandish, forever fruitless attempts to be the person that other people want or need in their lives.

It's probably obvious that I could make guesses about Prêm forever and never get bored, but Oyeyemi is knowingly spare in her details about him, eventually turning our attention to Ava and revealing that she may have abilities nearly as odd and frightening as Prêm's. While Prêm has been known to perplex and unsettle the other characters, at least he is able to interact with them. Ava is unique because, as she says, she has never been able to see or hear Prêm. Not only did she spend years playing her instrument to an empty room, but she would show up at gatherings and see Karel and others talking and reacting to empty air.

Of course, Ava's own place in this equation is not made any clearer than Prêm's. Whether she truly can't see Prêm or merely refuses to acknowledge him (maybe out of an awareness of his nonhuman origins?) this "unseeing" sets her apart from everyone else who has ever met him. Every time I read the novel, I personally find it difficult not to pity Ava as much as Prêm, whatever her level of control over the situation. A similarly devoted friend, on the other hand, views Ava more or less as the villain of the piece (...peace...? Yep, I did that. Sorry) if such an archetype can really exist in Oyeyemi's fiction.

Either way, it is notable that while Ava's blindness to Prêm's presence seems unyielding, Prêm himself never stopped wanting to be noticed by her. Some characters suggest he had a crush, others simply think that he latched onto Ava as the first person to successfully play through the night for him. And significantly, not even Ava's girlfriend Allegra is always able to excuse Ava's behavior around Prêm, at one point accusing her in writing of "treating that man as if he was, literally, nothing."

Other characters describe Ava as almost excessively "rational", someone who "maintains sanity to an abnormal degree." Such phrasing suggests that Ava in fact has her wits well about her, whatever that might mean in this kind of book. Ava tells us that Prêm was never more than a spirit to her, and scarcely even that; her only claim of Prêm's existence is of a "sense of a listener, some reaction that forms when certain notes are mixed into air." "I have no personal knowledge of him otherwise," she insists, perhaps a trifle too stubbornly, and it may be this quality among others which leads narrator Otto, and other characters, to wonder whether it was Ava herself who has intentionally "unseen" Prêm.

Prêm himself certainly thinks so--which we learn when he returns, in a way, at the novel's end. To describe this return, it is necessary to go back to the two "protagonists" (I don't really think of them that way but I don't know what else to call them) Otto and Xavier Shin. At the beginning, though we see them interact and hear them go off on random tangents, ranging in topic from mongoose lineages to vengeful, gun-wielding board game champions--we know precious little about their actual relationship and what draws them to each other. Indeed, by the end, the reader still lacks the full picture, given only what the book has chosen to reveal. What we do know is that Otto and Xavier have been together for several years, are very much in love despite, or because of, each other's flaws, and are also just generally strange in the way that you come to expect Oyeyemi's characters to be. And later, we find that part of the reason they are embarking on this couple's train trip in the first place is because of, you guessed it, Prêmsyl Stojpal.

Only...is he Prêmsyl? Midway through the novel Otto and Xavier recall their experiences with various exes who were all highly enthusiastic about the relationship, leading them to offer "much too much" in their zeal to be exactly what their partner needs at that particular moment. (E.g. one of Xavier's ex's, Raúl, proposes marriage very early into the relationship). After the subsequent breakups, none of the former partners was ever seen again (this tendency to sudden vanishing, which Otto later calls a "missed his departure whilst blinking sort of situation", also made me think of Rumpelstiltskin for some reason, I guess because Prêm eventually gets so fed up with all these ungrateful people around him that I was picturing him stomping himself through the floor like Rump). When our protagonists put together the overeager personalities and sudden appearances/disappearances of these former boyfriends, they come up with Prêm once again--the only person who is so eager to be what others need that he is willing to continue reinventing himself and, subsequently, resurfacing into the world, as a new potential friend, lover, or, eventually villain, to each of these characters.

The villain part is of course never clear-cut. When Prêm finally comes back for revenge on his former friends, partners, and the one person who never allowed herself to be either, Ava, he appears as an entirely new person, now going by the name Yuri. Though most of his anger is directed at Ava, he is ironically unable to hurt someone who can't see him, so instead he takes it out on the train's four other passengers--and indeed, he genuinely seems to loathe Otto and Xavier for preferring each other's human flaws to the perfect partner that Prêm himself tried to be. Yet despite his eventual resorting to violence and bullying, Yuri is not completely immune from our sympathy--as he says, he has spent his life trying to be there for other people, only to be "unseen" and/or under-appreciated at every turn. Who wouldn't give up at that point, deciding that the only way to have an impact on the people you care about is to kick them around a little? Something of Yuri's desperation shows in the way he finally reveals a little more about his origins, which he admits are not exactly typical. "All right, so Prêm hadn't yet learned stability," he says of his original incarnation. Prêmsyl, he explains, "was paying his way", "still getting used to the system", trying as many different "transport options" as he can until his "dream of a pedestrian existence" comes true. What exactly Yuri means by such a dream is never made explicitly clear, though he does describe wishing he would appear in photographs, so that his bonds with other people could be "irrefutable." However, the main reason he's tracked down all of these people and met them on the Lucky Day is to get back at Ava, whom he clearly blames for the lack of success in his many lives.

The result of Prêm/Yuri's return--or haunting, or revenge spree, we can call it many things--is one that has a profound impact on each of the train's passengers, one which, to me, was far darker than anything about the novel's whimsical beginning could have led me to expect. Suffice it to say that by the end, Prêm is not the only character who is suffering in some obscure way at the hands of Ava Kapoor. Though we are never explicitly told what is entailed by the process of being "unseen", Yuri is quick to tell all the passengers that they "could not envisage...the things that had happened to Prêmsyl Stojpal, to the truth of that person's life, from the moment Ava Kapoor had arrived at his father's house and unseen him." When the very "truth" of that particular life was placed in peril, Prêm was forced to seek out another. Yet the baggage that comes with being unseen seems to follow him everywhere, through every one of his lifetimes.