The Black Locomotive – Rian Hughes
PICADOR 2021
THIS IS PART TWO OF THIS REVIEW, AS CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/08/18/the-black-locomotive-rian-hughes/
My previous review of this author’s XX: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/09/22/xx-by-rian-hughes/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
Pages 170 – 185
“At CERN they have Segways.”
As I turn a page in my own embedded thoughts, I am also led towards “rotting sleepers”, rusted gates, the wilds of some countryside beyond the blight of London, a mazy bunker or quarry or wartime Churchill’s last ditch (or the Chief Engineer’s or the Fat Controller’s?) and back to the Smokebox Club or to Boy’s Own ripping yarns…
Can indeed this chapter be, I rhetorically ask, a secret sign toward our recovery in our own world today? Or at least halfway there?
Pages 186 – 195
“…the faint electrical fizz of a connection,…”
The Anomaly under the city and the Book about it as written with ‘Eagle’ diagrams of it plus various thumbnail samples. And I explore both in embedded contact with the Anomaly and the Book at the same time — yet meanwhile in the role of my earlier wide-eyed, awe-struck self as a boy, I also explore the somehow city-connected quarry or bunker in the distant countryside with its own lack of built-in obsolescence from an era of make-do-and-mend and Woodbine stubs.
“We were an integral part of its history. […] This interconnectedness is its vulnerability.”
Pages 196 – 209
“…he was eleven years old again.”
Two helluva inspiring cruces of both underground spaces. One, in London, vibratorily prehensile with the previous chapter’s bunker of “iron and history” and under a huge ‘weight of geology’ — with not an empty chair or throne but one still occupied with its own dead weight of backstory. The other, in the countryside, with a mass parade of polished ‘thoroughbreds’, honed to an unlikely readiness for action, a phenomenon that is absolutely believable, if equally incredible! Bravo to this book! Beeching, eat your heartwood out! Fossil fuel to our rescue — what an irony! This book takes a shunt from mere enjoyable readability toward awesome genius? Serious question.
“…Ultima Thule…”
Amazing inadvertent correlation within an hour – pages 162-163 here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/mark-samuels/#comment-2325
Pingback: Synchronicity Rampant
Pages 210 – 223
“…he felt the same childhood thrill, the promise of drama and bright lights and some grand finale yet to come.”
Enormously strong writing here in this chapter to match its soul of unimaginable weight and airiness, an apotheosis of many things, of all things, a ‘genius loci’ for the first time crystallised within the reader, including a pantheistic London as London (its stony aggregates and amorphous events as history and today’s hive mind alike), an apotheosis within a man’s body and mind, Cartesian or not, “the beautiful and brutal in close collusion” (and inferred collision?) — and, later, there is another man’s boyhood dream of, well, what is the title of this book, all burnished up and potentially bright and thrusting to serve? The only word not used in this chapter is ‘gestalt’. A word that sounds like a device with a dial to utilise the optimised power of steam!
“He offered promises, with hidden caveats. Terms and conditions apply.”
Said very quickly?
A tweet today
Pages 224 – 258
There must have been some sort of prescience when I earlier saw myself as embedded within this book — but it was, as it now turns out, NOT simply being akin to an embedded journalist in a terrestrial war who’s reporting, within security and patriotic constraints, and as fairly as possible, on the events of that war. I am now embedded in the structured phonemes and morphemes of the words themselves, and then in a cosmic history tantamount to a war involving warrior-gods of which none of us were aware, perhaps not even this author who is similarly embedded in his own autonomous words! All I know is that, when I was a boy, the name I called my Welsh grandfather was what I understood to be the translation of grandfather into Welsh: Ki.
I am also indeed embedded into the truth-fabricated essence of boyhood nostalgia itself, skimming along in burnished steaming beasts, with the ability for me to change the points of life literally and metaphorically. With sleepers as agents within the gestalt’s underbelly of co-vivid communion.
Pages 259 – 301
“‘What’s so secret about a railway club?’
George shrugged. ‘You know, I don’t know.’”
I shrug, too, and what indeed does it matter, as long as it works. And, by the skin of its teeth, it does! With the stories of members as naïve helpers — chaps and apps — alerted to the route and its necessary points. Chapesses, too!
I breathlessly continue — like the kid I once was in the 1950s — to skim across the morphing texts, across the huge latter expanses of this literary trip, a trip that forces its truth into the opened-up tracks of fiction. As well as embedded in the vast labyrinth whereto these tracks are heading, heads of steam toward the place where rails cross — the labyrinth where I am made to share, for real, the evolving gestalt of vast pasts and futures. The fullest stoking-up of empathy possible.
Riding the shrinking or swelling, even handwritten, fonts of XX again — a nostalgia built up after only a few months.
Pages 302 – 325
We know where to go — “The rails will see to that.”
But is a termination ever a terminus till it actually is? Duffy’s classic OFF THE TRACKS that I cross-referenced earlier now is in full mutual synergy with the sidings, storage huts and no man’s land as we zoom, not chug sedately, through them into the welcoming arms of our own terminus in an expressly irresistible reading-journey today… yet, is the terminus so welcoming if airbags are needed for violent canting? And someone called Ash, especially with a name like that, seems to be a member of our Smokebox Club! But in the same breath we are embedded onto the other parallel track by perhaps dubious dint of the Cosmic panoply involving someone sloughing off skin like an eel…
Pages 326 – 400
You must look at all the instructive pictures and data over several pages at the end, just as I begin to wonder whether I should tell you the current identity of the Chief Engineer, the First Mover or Cosmic Clock Maker, or merely someone you know? Like this author, or me, or even you yourself. This book will tell you. Boys will be boys. Girls, too. Boy’s Own or God’s Own, will London, and thus our whole world, survive as a better place because of its very ‘canting’ by this book and by this book’s sacrificial Christ upon an underground throne attached preternaturally to the Jungian Gestalt of all books, an idiosyncratic artist or creativist like anyone who will choose to read this book. And is such an entity resurrectable?
The terminus is reached. All change here.
This book already has a lot more within it to be stoked up…. “It has a spirit, an energy. A creative force. It manifests possibilities.”
Hopefully womanifests them, too, Austin.
“Maybe it could make a new Ki.”