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
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