Train Lord: The Astonishing True Story of One Man's Journey to Getting His Life Back On Track

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His doctors can't figure out how to fix him. He suffers a breakdown. One evening, high on pain killers, Oliver Googles the only thing he can think of: 'full-time job, no experience, Sydney'. An ad for a train guard appears and, desperate, Oliver takes it. ADAPTED FROM THE BOOK TRAIN LORD, PUBLISHED BY PENGUIN MICHAEL JOSEPH: A GUARDIAN, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AND SYDNEY MORNING HERALD BOOK OF THE YEAR

That’s not to say that writers no longer exist, or that writers are no longer creating stylistically inventive work, but that every emerging writer experiences the following double-bind: that given how ubiquitous it has become to access information about anything writing-adjacent, we find ourselves more concerned with the attendant anxieties of wanting to be a writer than the anxieties of actually writing. All the while we subject ourselves to the self-flagellatory belief that this purer, more authentic commitment to the craft is no longer accessible to those of us who compulsively over-analyse it. We all know, and resent knowing, that as Mol recalls, ‘the first rule about writing was that you never called yourself a writer’.Mol has every opportunity here to construct a pointed critique of the ways in which institutions prey on aspiring writers by not only promising them the possibility of subcultural fame but by requiring that the majority fail so as to persist as consumers of additionally manufactured solutions; or even of the ways in which emerging writers can come to enjoy the terms of their own exploitation. Instead, Mol averts to these insights only when they function as a conduit for his own redemptive character arc. Part monologue, part performance art and part essay, Train Lord collapses genre and form to create a stunning portrait of pain, creativity and failure. Achingly authentic, funny and poignant, this is a breathtakingly honest study of humanity from one of Australia’s most exciting emerging writers. Train Lord is a memoir. The author’s life was drastically changed by chronic pain. He manages to get a job working on trains and eventually things start changing.

Meanwhile, its members were criticised for their unabashed solipsism, for revelling in the concerns of the privileged, for asking how many angels can dance on the head of a ketamine spoon. But such accusations actually undersell the intelligence of the alt-lit writers who strive to incorporate every possible critique into their book’s designs. The issue, if any, is that the alt-lit writer is too aware of his own privilege such that he feels the need to create an entire body of work publicly excusing it. Connor Thomas O’Brien correctly diagnosesthe alt-lit phenomena as:

And there is Bruce, a mysterious octogenarian colleague who entered the railways 15 years after retirement and “failed his practical exam three times because he kept falling asleep in the guard compartment”. Mol clearly identifies with his workmates but – somewhat jarringly within a sector with such a strong collective identity – this doesn’t extend beyond idle chitchat. “I never learned anyone’s name – except Bruce,” he observes. There are occasional nods to the realities of industrial relations – such as the possibility that bosses will scrap guards altogether – but Mol’s narrative is fairly distant from the workplace politics more present in the railways than in almost every other industry worldwide.

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The way of the train is also the way of the boarding school, the convent, the prison and the psychiatric hospital,” Jenny Diski wrote in her 2002 travel memoir Stranger on a Train, in which she interweaves the story of a trip around the United States by Amtrak with her memories of incarceration in mental hospitals in her youth. She is taking the journey to write a book but her stated intention is “to keep still”. Her hope is for “a substantial journey without going anywhere exactly, meetings and conversations which also would go nowhere”. But lying in her sleeping compartment, she finds that “all the separate stories, all those minds and hearts took on volume and mass, occupying the empty space in my compartment, squeezing out the very air before spreading to the corridor outside and the entire train”. With the help of two expert spookologists: Stephen Volk - horror writer & mastermind behind the BBCs infamous 'GHOSTWATCH', and Dr Ciaran O'Keeffe - famed ghostbuster & parapsychologist, we're attempting to figure out what gives us the heebie jeebies, so that we can all go away and write the world's GREATEST EVER GHOST STORY. I now know what it’s like to be a pinball, bouncing around in different directions, heading off who knows where, having impact and being impacted upon…..and then there’s the pain.