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

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The impact of the more sensitive anecdotes and descriptions is sometimes weakened by adding music which can sometimes drown out the speech and only detracts from the emotional weight of the story. Esse Es Percipicrafts a mood of conspiracy in which some aspect of authenticity has been mislaid. If you reroute the story along the lines of a different cultural figure you’ll find that it still rings true. Here’s one I prepared earlier: From that exact moment, fiction, along with the whole gamut of literature, belongs to the genre of drama, performed by a single man in a Paris Review interview or by actors before a Writers’ Festival Panel. In other words, the mannerisms, lifestyle choices, political opinions, daily routines and career trajectories of the Writer are the grist on one side of a publicity machine which expels, on the other, artefacts of public consumption for a digitally connected feedlot of aspiring writers. When I told my friends that I was applying to become a train guard, most of them thought it was a joke. I had been a writer for nearly 10 years by then, and most people assumed it was a writing stunt, that I had run out ideas, that I had turned to method-writing, that I was going what they called Full-Bukowski. The book writes itself! they would say, laughing, and while I would nod, smiling, briefly imagining the book I might one day write, none of this could have been further from the truth.

Sometimes you manage to find a book that truly speaks to your soul. The kind of book that you can’t imagine having lived without reading. This was that book for me. the scene, like all scenes, like all people, was not good or bad. It was toxic and supportive and elitist and welcoming. It was full of hate and love. The scene was an experiment. We were depressed and excited and scared and motivated. We were anxious.

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Train Lord is not so much a book about trains as an account of an unfinished process of healing. At its weakest it’s a self-help book, with too many passages quoted from “cod philosophers”, such as the discredited British journalist Johann Hari, that are left unexplored and unexplained. But as it flits between the genres of memoir and short-story collection, it beautifully captures the complexities of illness and of coming to terms with life as an adult. Mol recalls childhood memories and present-day intimate conversations with a tenderness that rivals Karl Ove Knausgård, though his prose is more cluttered and less succinct.

This is a love story,” Mol writes in Train Lord. “I fell in love with writing, and then I stopped. I’m trying to figure out if I can fall in love again.” He can also do observational comedy, especially when it comes to the intricacies of railway life. On one occasion he is “riding up front” with the driver, “smoking cigarettes and listening to jazz from a transistor radio with our feet on the dash”, when his workmate tells him of a signaller ahead who, because his arm is missing, can’t wave it as the job requires. Confused, the protagonist Domecq presses further. ‘Do you mean to tell me that out there in the world nothing is happening?’ To which the executive replies, ‘Very Little.’ Before ushering Domecq out of his office, he issues a caution: Train Lord is a memoir that must incessantly justify its own existence to those who are reading it. Consider the following passage: Mol describes his early schooling in the Alt Lit movement, whose writers trade in relentless millennial sincerity. His ongoing project, his compulsion, is to relate every single crying jag, every romantic agony, every session with patient parents who assure him yet again that everything will be OK in the end (which, after a relapse, it will). He even feels like sobbing in the midst of a throbbing orgy.

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The only person who gets to control how you feel is you. Most people spend their entire lives hurting, or being hurt, but that hurting only brings more hurt until your whole world becomes pain.” https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/56677/how-not-to-write-a-novel-by-sandra-newman-howard-mittelmark/9780141038544 Then again, the narrative slips in and out of reality with such ease that it’s hard to know whether to take him at his word. A haunting vignette about a childhood love interest totally absorbs us but is then revealed as largely fictitious in a discussion between the author and his father. “We can never tell the whole story because truth, unlike people, cannot be isolated, and therein lies its beauty, its attraction,” says Mol. The wordplay of this sentence, in which beauty and attraction “lie” within truth, is the most convincing evidence of Mol’s inner turmoil as a writer and as a man. His stylistic tics – such as beginning chapters with “know this” or “understand this” – can be irritating, but his intrepid self-reflection turns a narrator who is upfront about his suboptimal behaviour into a likeable character. ADAPTED FROM THE BOOK TRAIN LORD, PUBLISHED BY PENGUIN MICHAEL JOSEPH: A GUARDIAN, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AND SYDNEY MORNING HERALD BOOK OF THE YEAR