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Automatic World
by Struan Sinclair
Toronto: Doubleday
Canada, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-385-66470-7 272 pp., $29.95 cloth.
The story you are thinking of begins with a train. . . . a steam train; and the foot, a mechanical foot. You will begin with what you know and more will come to you. The train, the foot, the aftermath. It begins with the train, with the temporal trick that means the train arrives in the town of far away Mither Harbour even as it leaves St. William's Arch. It is autumn, it is dusk. These are the details you must fill in. . . . Where. When. How. Why. So much causal netting to be carefully unsnarled. (1)If ever there was an odd beginning to a novel, the first four pages of this one would be up there in the running for oddest. And yet, these introductory pages contain nothing but the truest truths about the book.
What are the elements? Trains, you say. This is a story of trains.
The characters, the themes. First, the characters: an inventor's dream of a folded world. The vengeful drudge. The girl with her misspent affections. A suicide father, his grieving son. Next, the themes. Storytelling. The long recuperation. Loss, yes; but also miracle constructions. Filial love and quack cookery. Grief and old prosthetics. Repetition, overlap, a pair of red gloves. Themes to organize, to structure and be satisfied. Themes, too, that diverge. Trains to link but also to sequester--four trains for four stories. (3)
The notes I've compiled while reading this book look like a chart for exploring the moon. These jottings consist of arrowed lists--amended, appended, broken down with underlinings, amorphous circlings. It's a novel of prosthetics gone walkabout, following a route of extended detours.
By page 17, my own (real?) world is spiralling itself into the novel. Onto the page, as if to read about his kind, lands a housefly. He flirts alongside the line: "thirty thousand pieces to each eye" before I shake him away. And then I blink, wondering whether I should have let him stay there. Perhaps he could have served as a six-legged guide to this novel that reinvents itself every few pages.
Scenes shift from settings that could be dungeons to high-tech visions of after-death clean-up crews, efficient as ice.
Our task--our mission--is to remove painful reminders and ensure future safety. Our patented process, recognized by many leading law-and-order organizations, allows us to clean what our rivals cannot see. Pathogens and micro-organisms. Filial love. The laciest, palest lies.
Alf and his gang work steadily. Their respirators hum, and the fans in their goggles. . . . They find the raised edge of good intentions, whisk them up and away. They funnel last chances dozens at a time. (49)Automatic World is anything but automatic; it is a carefully controlled experiment using nothing more than language and form. From its poetically rhythmic opening to the flick of its final page, this is a book that is quite unlike its companions on the shelf. Its nearest relative might be David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, another book with broken chapters and a structure tight as the plaits of a mountaineer's rope.
At precisely the halfway mark, the reader is brought abruptly back to the train. The narrator intrudes with semi-congratulatory remarks: "You have made it this far. One or two have made their excuses and left--appointments, fatigue--but the room is still half full. What have you covered?" (120) The narrator continues, offering summations, questions, even directives. "Use your imagination . . . Play with order, play with sense, but whatever you do maintain connections." (123)
And then the second half unfolds itself like a distorting mirror. Words and phrases reappear; characters come back for more--of the same and the not-the-same. Sections of a book within a book are found, re-found again. Images collide and ricochet as I imagine particles in a centrifuge must: the distended gullets of people from the future serve as contrast to the tiny throats of whales; sputum dribbles over chins; corpses lie in bathtubs. Houses disassemble; time becomes undone.
This ambitious novel from Winnipeg's Struan Sinclair is difficult to contain in the space of a review. It sprawls, bulges, pokes untidy straws out of itself. Dense as poetry, it demands careful reading. It requires consideration, reflection, puzzlement. It is not a lazy beach read, but rather a deepening distraction. Give it its full measure of time. Let it fill you even as it devours.
Heidi Greco has always enjoyed trains. She claims her best train ride ever was crossing the plains of Australia, rumbling along from Perth to Adelaide.
Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.