Fiction Reviews
The Cautious Traveller's Guide
to the Wastelands(2024) Sarah Brooks, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99, hrdbk, 373pp, ISBN 978-1-399-60753-7
From the outset, the title grabbed me. The dust jacket is also impressive, being predominantly black and gold, whilst the hard cover is black but with the logo of the Trans-Siberia Company emblazoned in gold on the front. Inside, the hard cover, both front and back, is a layout drawing of the Great Trans-Siberian Express, 1899. So far so good, but what of the story?
It is set in 1899, but not quite the 1899 we know. Quite where this timeline departed from ours is never mentioned, nor is it relevant. The important thing is that in this timeline the Trans-Siberia Company runs a very special railway train between Beijing and Moscow. About a hundred years earlier a vast tract of the land between those two cities had started to change, it ceased to be the productive lands that were once home to many peoples and had slowly become wastelands, a place where strange fauna and flora were appearing. Nobody knew what was happening or why, but natural life in the wastelands was mutating into other forms. People retreated from the area and, to stop it spreading, a huge wall (incorporating the Great Wall of China) was built around it all. Scientific expeditions were sent into the wastelands to learn what was happening but nobody had ever returned, and so in time it became completely deserted of human life.
However, trade between the two distant cities was far too important to loose and going the ‘long way round’ was so expensive for some particularly valuable goods, and so time consuming for some people, that the Trans-Siberia Company built a railway line across the vastness of the wastelands. Construction was so dangerous that special trains were built, ones whereby all the work, the track laying and so on, could be done from within the train. Since then, the Trans-Siberian Express had been running back and forth despite the extreme hazards of the journey, with all journeys being straight through and at speed. Even then it was a fifteen day journey of continual hazard.
The train was huge, a masterpiece of steam engineering, with some carriages being two stories high. It was strongly built and tightly sealed, locked so that nothing from the wastelands could get in, lest whatever it was that was living there should escape the wastelands’ walls. It was also necessary to protect the passengers as travelling through the wastelands could have a devastating effect on them. Even looking out the windows at the kaleidoscope of strange shapes, unpleasant and unnatural movements within the scenery, as well as unusual colours, strange plants, and glimpses of strange animals (or monsters?), could have insidious strange effects on anyone, often referred to as the Wastelands Sickness. There was a doctor on board, complete with an infirmary carriage, to treat those people who became affected. Passengers in particular had a habit of become transfixed in strange thoughts, a process referred to as ‘disappearing’, and the staff were always on the lookout for anyone who might be succumbing. Covered windows and the company of others was always recommended. Riding the Trans-Siberian Express was not to be undertaken lightly!
There had been a journey when everyone bar the stokers had fallen asleep at the same time, for several days, some face down in their dinner plates, and all had shared the same dream. On the last crossing, when they had arrived in Beijing, nobody could remember anything at all about the journey. Some of the crew had not returned for this next crossing and there were others who said it was too soon after the last one.
The story opens as the train is about to depart from Beijing. We meet the main characters and the plot unfolds following a few of them.
Fifteen-year old Zhang Weiwei is known as the Child of the Train; her mother, travelling on her own, had given birth to her on the train but then died and, with no known family, the trainsfolk agreed she could stay with them. The train having always been her home and her plaything, Weiwei knows every nook and cranny, even the smallest of hiding places, and the fastest and sometimes the most discreet routes to anywhere.
The Professor, as he is known, works for the Society for the Study of the Changes in Greater Siberia and travels on the train for nearly all its journeys. He is one of the few who can stare out of the windows all day without succumbing to its effect; he is an observer, constantly studying.
The train also has two new passengers of interest. Marya Petrovna Markova is not the young widow she claims to be; she is really Marya Antonovna Fyodorova, the daughter of the disgraced Anton Ivanovich, owner of the Fyodorov Glassworks in Beijing. It was he who had designed and manufactured the glass windows for the train but he had become the company’s scapegoat for whatever it was that had happened on the last crossing; he had died of humiliation and despair, and perhaps something else, but Marya knows that he was innocent and is determined to find out what really happened.
Dr. Henry Grey is a disgraced naturalist who is determined to reclaim his name by studying and explaining the wastelands and whatever lives in them. And then there is Elena, who really ought not to be onboard at all.
For the first half of the book the story ticked along gently without very much happening, though with much well-written detail filling it out. Through our characters we slowly got to know of the history of the train and the wastelands and about themselves, to understand something of their pasts and motivations. By moving from one character to the next then the next and so on, going round and round them, the pages turned pleasantly and with much imagery and sometimes poetic description but without the story advancing very much - just a continuing build up of background. Although very agreeably written, I was on the verge of feeling frustrated - when would something of significance happen? True, a problem had developed and the train had slowed down to conserve water and everybody was rationed (no baths, not even soup for dinner), but something more was needed to buck the story up a bit or I was going to get bored. And then they run into a huge storm and, I quote, ‘Ahead of them the line explodes’.
Forced to take to the old and no longer maintained lines, the second half of the book took off: much happened, and an interesting end ensued. It was one worth waiting for. But to tell you more would be to give away the surprises… No spoilers here.
I greatly enjoyed this book. It was very pleasantly, if somewhat slowly, written but I found the set-up interesting and inventive, an introduction to a new type of world in the form of the wastelands. Science fiction - or fantasy? The two merge in a story like this and they do so so well. Yet, I was not entirely convinced that the economics of building and running the railway really worked, and some of the occasional characters were obviously there just to add to the scene-setting and background, but these are minor matters.
All told, a good read.
Peter Tyers
See also Tim's review of The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands.
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