Sarah Brooks’ fantasy debut is set on the Trans-Siberian Express.
follows the trajectory of a fever dream. In 1899, in a version of our world, a train leaves Moscow for Beijing. As the journey moves through the bright tundras of Siberia, reason and civilisation give way to a primordial frenzy.
For the next 400 pages, we stay almost entirely within the carriages of the Trans-Siberian Express, while resources become scarcer, machinations and manipulations are rife, and the landscape grows actively hostile to those travelling through it. The most compelling of these narrative threads is Weiwei’s, who works on the train and nimbly navigates between the haves in first class and the have-nots in third.
Against the familiar archetype of a British explorer seeking what he calls a “new Eden”, there is a more disturbing question raised of whether the distinction between humanity and the natural world is only illusory.Brooks takes great pleasure in blurring the boundaries between human and animal, as well as between real and imagined. Stanislaw Lem’sis often recalled, as the forms of life in the natural world increasingly reflect those in the characters’ minds.
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