Five Feat… Trains

The second in an occasional series that gives me an opportunity to recycle posts on a theme, (the first was geographical – Surrey). This time the five books I’ve chosen all feature a rail journey, three by French authors, two American. I had enough to pick from a couple of times over, so this one may well reappear in years to come. The title links will take you to my full reviews. My five today are:

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen

This book is a thing of beauty. It stands out being an oversized hardback and invites you to pick it up and look inside … whereupon you’ll see all the intricate illustrations, sidebars and marginalia. Then reading the blurb, you’ll find out that it is the story of a 12 year old genius, Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, how he gets to be invited to go to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC and his journey to get there. Totally captivating already without reading a word.

TS, as he likes to be known, lives on a remote ranch in Montana. His father is a taciturn cowboy, his mother is a talented scientist totally obsessed with studying rare beetles, his sister is a typical teenage girl. His brother, Layton we soon find out died a few months previously. His is not a typical household, and TS is not a typical boy.He loves nothing more than to understand the world by mapping it – drawing illustrations, diagrams, and making lists. His mentor Dr Yorn submitted some of his work to the Smithsonian, not telling them he was only 12. So when they call inviting him to come and accept a prestigious award, TS sees his chance to escape Montana and make a pilgrimage to the home of learning, so he runs away and jumps a train hobo-style.

The Reader on the 6.27 by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent

Guylain Vignolles is a man of habit. He catches the 6.27 train in to work every day, he sits on the same hard orange seat, and once underway he takes a folder from his briefcase.

He opened it cautiously and exhumed a piece of paper from between two sheets of candy-pink blotting paper. The flimsy, half-torn page with a tattered top left-hand corner dangled from his fingers. It was a page from a standard six-by-nine-inch format book. Guylain examined it for a moment then placed it carefully back on the blotting paper. The carriage gradually fell silent. Sometimes, there was a reproving ‘Shh’ to silence the few conversations that had not petered out. Then, as he did every morning, Guylain cleared his throat and began reading aloud:

Guylain works in a dispiriting factory – a paper-pulping plant, operating a giant machine which is fed a constant diet of books – he hates his job. The random pages he reads to his fellow passenger are odd ones that have escaped the chomping jaws of ‘The Thing‘. Then, one day he discovers diary pages written by a lonely young woman called Julie – and he falls in love with her. Translated flawlessly as ever by Ros Schwartz.

Double Indemnity by James M Cain

Double Indemnity is a term from the American insurance world – in this case, a life policy that will pay double if the insured person dies falling off a train.  Walter Huff is an insurance agent, aiming to get his customer Mr Nirdlinger to renew his car insurance. When his wife Phyllis opens the door Huff is instantly smitten.

…but she was walking around the room, and I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. Under those blue pajamas was a shape to set a man nuts, and how good was I going to sound when I started explaining the high ethics of the insurance business I didn’t exactly know how.
But all of a sudden she looked at me, and I felt a chill creep straight up my back and into the roots of my hair.
‘Do you handle accident insurance?

Huff  sees a way out of slogging his guts out all day selling insurance, and together they start to plan the perfect crime using all of Huff’s expertise and Phyllis’ feminine wiles. Huff will do the pushing off the train though – you know he’ll get caught! Snappy dialogue and a doomed protagonist – just superb!

The Sleeping Car Murders by Sebastien Japrisot

Back to France, and this novel begins shortly after the Marseille night train has pulled into Paris. A young woman is found dead, sprawled on a berth in the sleeping car.

The woman was dark-haired, young, rather tall, rather thin, and rather pretty. A little above the opening of her blouse there were two marks of strangulation on her neck.

It appears most likely that the murder was committed by one of the other occupants of the sleeping car, all since departed into the Parisian morning. Inspector Grazziano and his men will have their job cut out to find out what happened. Is it a classic locked-room type murder, or are things more complicated than that? It ended up being both, and definitely a lot of the latter. (Translated by Francis Price)

Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal

Having read two other novels by de Kerangal (Mend the Living and Painting Time) both translated by Jessica Moore, now that I’ve read a third, I can aver that they are indeed a dream team. Moore just totally gets her author’s writing, which often has complex sentences, and technical vocabulary to boot. They come together in Eastbound to create one of those perfect novellas that I so adore.

The premise is simple. Two passengers on the Trans-Siberian Railway are fugitives from their lives. One, a young conscript, just can’t face his future in a brutal training camp in Siberia. The other, an older French woman, has followed her husband back from France to his new job as manager of a dam in Russia, but can’t cope with the loneliness there, so escapes to breathe – taking the first train that stops at the station.

This story has a timeless feel. Timeless in the sense that it could have been set in any period of the last century – it’s only the messages on her phone from Hélène’s husband, who clearly loves her, but is also letting her have her adventure, that jerk us into the here and now. It’s also timeless in that the journey goes on forever, with boring countryside only enlivened by the section where the train skirts the beautiful Lake Baikal. It feels longer than its 110 pages, but in a good way, thanks to Kerangal’s intensity and investment in her two protagonists.

Have you any favourite literary train journeys?

14 thoughts on “Five Feat… Trains

  1. rosemarykaye says:

    My youngest daughter used to love ‘Lucy Willow’ a children’s book by Sally Gardner about a little girl who lived on a train:

    ‘There were three things that marked out Lucy Willow as different. The first was that she lived on a train. The second was that she had a snail called Ernest as a pet. And the third, the most important of all, was that she had green fingers.’

    The train travelled up and down the track with Lucy and her family on it.

    Then of course there’s ‘The Railway Children.’

    Another book I enjoyed very much is John Hadfield’s ‘Love on a Branch Line’, in which a civil servant called Jaspar Pye is sent to Suffolk to close down an obsolete government department on a country estate. I think it was made into a TV series at some point.

    And Agatha Christie liked trains, viz ‘Murder on the Orient Express’, ‘4.50 from Paddington’ and ‘The Mystery of the Blue Train.’

    I do enjoy lists like these!

    • AnnaBookBel says:

      How lovely to be reminded of Lucy Willow – thank you. I read that with my daughter too, and I still have my aged Puffin of The Railway Children. I remember the BBC TV series of Love on a Branch Line vaguely – starred Michael Maloney if I remember – I actually have the tie-in book too – it’s been sitting on by TBR shelves ever since the telly did it! I haven’t read Christie since my teens, one of these days I’ll revisit her – maybe!

  2. kaggsysbookishramblings says:

    Inordinately fond of Murder on the Orient Express as it was my first Christie, and also her Mystery of the Blue Train. Second the recommendation of Stamboul Express. I didn’t actually get on with The Reader on the 6.27 myself… :/

    • AnnaBookBel says:

      I must re-read some Christie one day – after I finish the Maigrets perhaps – could be a while.

  3. litlove says:

    I read Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto a couple of years ago and that was very enjoyable, featuring a couple of police officers travelling back and forth on trains to try to break their chief suspect’s alibi. I’m another in the fan camp for Murder on the Orient Express. I think it’s one of Christie’s very best novels, much better than all those film versions lead you to believe! I have actually read the Reif Larsen (which began brilliantly but sort of petered out for me) and Double Indemnity (great but dark). However, I haven’t read that Sebastian Japrisot and would like to – I love his novels.

  4. Calmgrove says:

    Of these titles I think I’ve only read the Cain (https://wp.me/p2oNj1-5Fa) and that was relatively recently. There are train journeys galore in children’s fiction – Nesbit and Rowling for starters – but though I generally enjoy Patricia Highsmith I barely started Strangers on a Train before putting it by. Oh, and there’s Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps which includes a train journey …

    • AnnaBookBel says:

      Ha – the Buchan was on my list, sticking to books featured on the blog. I really ought to give the Highsmith a go though – I’ve owned a copy for long enough.

  5. thecontentreader says:

    Fantastic train novels. I have not read any of them, but hopefully will soon. I did go by train myself recently. Night train from Innsbruck to Hamburg, and daytrain Hamburg – Copenhagen – Malmö by day. It is so lovely to go by train.

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