Rewilding: everyone is familiar with its ecological purpose but what of its cognitive potential? As a writer in early middle age – when long-held beliefs can start to feel deleterious, like cash crops depleting soil fertility – I find myself asking: can a mind be rewilded? A willingness to enter mental scrubland is certainly an advantage in a novelist, helping to bridge the gap between the world they are trying to simulate and the real world inhabited by the reader – that is, between the familiar and the strange.
The first few pages of any novel, consciously or not, represent a liminal zone between the two. In The Way to Work, I set myself the task of sustaining liminality, keeping my narrator on the threshold between the familiar and the strange. A man boards his morning train, unaware that the usual 8:08 service has been redirected to Purgatory. The train is sentient, of apparently infinite length, and stops at no stations. Its passengers are extensions of its character, human executors of its agency – none more so than the narrator, whose quest to reach the driver’s cab sees him finally consummate relations with the monstrous locomotive.
As he moves through the carriages the sliding doors close behind him, sealed shut, meaning that he can only go forward. As he advances he loses memory, though not as much as his fellow passengers, who are locked into cycles of idiotic repetition, endlessly replaying their interactions as sometime commuters of the 8:08 service. A daily journey is thus extruded into an eternal one, its familiarity becoming grotesque. It’s an exaggeration of the metonymy still inherent to the novel as a form, even in its many contemporary guises: taking an attribute of the world and letting it stand as an autonomous whole. Here, that attribute is rail travel, which constitutes the entire cosmos in which my protagonists dwell.
A novel isn’t just a narrative, it’s an environment: a habitat that cultivates characters, not one merely populated by them. Novels that accentuate this often have topographies which so dominate their characters as to permeate their being, blurring the distinction between their inner life and their external surroundings. Think of Heart of Darkness. So strongly does Conrad identify Kurtz with the river in the African interior, he is not just the object of Marlow’s mission, but the source from which an atavistic humanity flows back into civilisation, as though from some primeval past.
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In having Marlow recount events from the apparent safety of a vessel berthed overnight at Gravesend, Conrad is keen to point out that the river haunted by the rogue ivory-trader is connected to all rivers via the sea, including the Thames, a ‘tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth’. By extension, then, Kurtz is in the breast of all the shipmates who listen as Marlow’s tale unfolds.
This interlacing of human subject with environment dominates JG Ballard’s fiction. In Concrete Island, Robert Maitland’s vehicle is hurled into a roadside declivity from which there is no obvious escape, but he soon comes to prefer his exile to normal civilian life. The traffic rushing by overhead, far from reassuring him that he might re-join the rat race at any time, nourishes his appetite for isolation. Concrete Island seems more relevant now than ever, a prescient parable of a society atomised by late-capitalist development.
Both these novels influenced the topography of The Way to Work. On realising my train was a metallic equivalent of Conrad’s river, the melding of man and vehicle became inevitable. Like my narrator, I have racked up many train journeys as a commuter, many hours of confinement with strangers I never talk to. In the novel, these strangers become his eternal companions, reappearing as multiple doppelgängers as he advances downtrain. And – like Robert Maitland – he eventually professes himself content with this state of affairs.
The suffering he endures, as a denizen of Limbo, has a similarly aestheticized quality to that of Flann O’Brien’s protagonist in The Third Policeman. That novel purports to be set in Hell, but having consigned his murderous villain to the flames, O’Brien is reluctant to let him burn. Fans of the book need no reminder of the bizarre stunts and thought experiments devised by the three ‘policemen’ to confound his antihero.
Damnation, far from sanctioning punishment of this sinner, gives O’Brien a captive audience for a pageant of metaphysical set-pieces that feel more tantalising than torturous – most famously, the claim that cyclists gradually absorb the essence of their velocipedes as they sit in the saddle, all riders being part-human, part-bicycle. Even when a scaffold is erected for his supposed execution, it is done with such verbose raillery it’s all part of the ‘pancake’ of life after death.
Despite his express intention, O’Brien effectively downgrades Hell to a ‘secular’ Purgatory, where old earthly concerns are reappraised with idiosyncratic flair, the human mind rewilded to demonstrate its power to astonish: on every page the sheer audacity of thinking that is celebrated as the cardinal virtue of our species.
As a writer of speculative fiction, I begin stories with no idea of where they will lead. One doesn’t necessarily set out to envision Purgatory, but once you realise that that’s what you’ve done, you’ve a duty to manage the affairs of your patrons, come up with games to keep them occupied. I’ll leave the reader with a selection from The Way to Work.
Why Not Sneeze?, London or Yorkshire and Antonym are the most popular entertainments on-board. In Why Not Sneeze?, players compete to be the first to sneeze in a confined space. In London or Yorkshire, players take turns to utter either of those place names until someone is adjudged to have said Yorkshire when they should have said London, or London when they should have said Yorkshire, according to rules that change arbitrarily with each rotation. As for Antonym, all you do is think of a film title, convert each word into its opposite, and folk have to guess what it is. So here’s your starter for ten: Everyone Hates Everything Cold. The answer is on p.169 of The Way to Work.
The Way to Work by Sean Ashton is published by Salt Publishing
