The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands
Sarah Brooks
Flatiron Books
Fiction, Fantasy
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: In the 1800s, a great change overtook Siberia, altering the landscape and birthing monsters and driving survivors mad as often as it killed them. Walls were built to protect civilization, shutting out the Wastelands and their wildness. But in losing Siberia, Russia and China - and, thus, the world - lost a lucrative trade route. Thus, half a century later and after countless false starts and setbacks (and deaths), the Trans-Siberian Company built an immense train like no other, laying iron rails across the shifting landscape from Moscow to Beijing, and becoming perhaps the most powerful business in the hemisphere. Now trade flows again, and the elite see the Wastelands as just another tourist destination, for all that setting foot off the train is forbidden and "incidents" are still known to happen. The now-classic travel guide, Rostov's The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands, has brought many a curiosity seeker to the rails... though many ignore the author's warnings that the Wastelands will always change that which passes through them.
Marya's father used to supply the glass for the Trans-Siberian Company train, a very unique and demanding formula designed to keep the transformative, toxic influences of the wilderness away from the cargo and paying passengers. But something went terribly wrong on the last journey, something that nearly ended the service for good, even though not a single person aboard remembers just what. All the Company knew is that they needed someone to blame, and they decided that person should be Marya's father. He died from the shame and loss of face... and, perhaps, something else, something he contracted during that fateful incident. The Company took all his notes and papers, but Marya is determined to clear his name, for her own sake if nobody else's. Armed with a new identity and Rostov's tome, she steps aboard...
Weiwei was born in Third Class to a mother who died shortly afterwards, and has lived her whole young life on the train, attuned to its rhythms and moods in a way even the Captain is not. The Wastelands fascinate and scare her, for all that their strangeness is as familiar to her as her own heartbeat. She feared her beloved home, the train, would never move again after that last terrible, unremembered trip, and is thrilled when it's returned to service... but something is off-kilter long before the behemoth leaves Beijing. The normal rituals have not been performed. The Captain, normally a constant and steadfast presence, is locked away in her cabin rather than reassuring her crew. And there's a peculiar presence in the cargo carriage. Is it the Wasteland playing tricks on her mind, as it plays tricks with the minds of so many people? Or is something from outside already on board?
Henry Grey was a promising naturalist until he was humiliated in front of his peers for a dreadful error while presenting his ideas on natural mimicry, but he has a plan for an audacious comeback. He has a theory that, unlike what many people think, the Wastelands are not a land of unknowable chaos and possible diabolic influence, but a window into the dawn of Creation and a crucible in which God's own will might be glimpsed, if only someone will be bold enough to study it scientifically and without superstition. If he could bring a few specimens to present at the grand Exhibition in Moscow, he would redeem his reputation and launch a scientific revolution, he is sure. The Company has very strict policies about those who attempt to exit the train in the Wastelands, let alone try to bring items from it on board: they are willing to not only submit the violators to "train justice" by tossing them off the moving cars, but will seal away and allow to perish entire train fulls of people if there is the least suspicion that contamination from outside has gotten in. But great discoveries demand great risk.
These three lives, and many more, will be utterly transformed in this fateful journey across Siberia.
REVIEW: This was the second book I picked up during my last Barnes and Noble trip (the other being Dungeon Crawler Carl); I wanted something different in tone, and the blurb promised wonderful and strange things. (That, and it was a standalone, which is nice now and again.) While I tore through Dungeon Crawler Carl like a parched camel at an oasis, this one took longer to get through. It was the reading equivalent of a strange dish served at a high-end concept restaurant, where there's nothing objectively wrong with it, but I found the service somewhat cold and distant, the ingredients confusing, and the taste hard to describe, making for a generally unsatisfying, if still admittedly different and interesting, experience.
Set in an alternate-history mid-19th century, there's a bit of a steampunk vibe in the immense train and the clash of cold, cruel corporate powers against wild nature that refuses to conform to human ideas or fit into human logic or reason; the very landscape changes between one trip and the next, with colors that can induce madness and creatures that seem half-ethereal and half-demonic. It's little wonder that many people and some churches see the Wastelands as a portal to Hell; many people lost their lives during the unexplained event that transformed Siberia, and despite the massive Walls protecting China and Russia there are still opportunists and rebels who attempt to enter the wilderness only to be driven mad or unmade by the forces at work. To even conceive of a transit like the Trans-Siberian Company train is the epitome of hubris, fueled by the epitome of greed, and after half a century of more-or-less success, it has led to the epitome of arrogance as the Company ignores the warning of the previous trip and sends their train out across the Wastelands again, perfectly willing to sacrifice its crew and passengers in the name of profit and the appearance of total domination over the land, an appearance badly shaken in the public eye by that last incident.
What was the incident? What actually happened? Nobody knows, and only glimpses are ever remembered. The Wastelands cannot, do not, and will not fit into human perceptions, let alone human descriptions. At first, this creates an intriguing mystery, along with the bizarre, half-glimpsed, half-suggested nature of the altered Siberia through which the train travels. At some point, though, forever being told that the characters (and thus the reader) cannot possibly comprehend what happened, what is happening, and what could or will happen becomes a tiresome dodge. If it's all too metaphysical and grand for me to understand any of what's happening, or why, then why should I care?
"Who cares?" became my mental refrain by the halfway point, and mostly persisted to the end. Marya, under an assumed name (lest the Company figure out who she is and what she aims to do, defy their declaration that her father was to blame and prove something else went wrong with their precious train), frets that she'll be found out by the "Crows" - company agents - or the other passengers more than she actively seeks evidence... but who cares what she finds, when I couldn't care much about her? Weiwei discovers a stowaway of sorts that smacks of Wastelands through and through (it takes place early on, so hardly a spoiler), yet still - in defiance of everything drilled into her from her first breath, in defiance of her loyalty to the captain, in defiance to sheer human instinct - decides that she's imagining the oddness... so who cares when "Elena" turns out to be more than she seems? And who cares what Elena's motives are? And Henry Grey, a man so blinded by religious conviction and hubris that he's as fanatical in his own determination that Siberia is a "New Eden" as the Russian cleric who spends the whole trip preaching about hellfire and brimstone, such a flat caricature of an obsessed zealot who is so obviously going to do something monumentally stupid to endanger everyone... but who cares? I never really liked any of the characters, and only occasionally found them interesting; they were all prone to paralysis in the face of decision and boneheaded actions when intelligence was called for (not always, but enough times to induce a few eye rolls).
Anyway, eventually things happen, more or less, building to an utterly surreal and drawn-out finale that featured some remarkably bizarre imagery, but which ultimately was so strange I'm not entirely sure it wasn't all meant to be a fever dream anyway. I'd say some parts of the ending felt unearned for some characters, but that would require me to have cared much about them by that point, and I generally did not.
If you're a fan of surreal alternate histories, the clash of man and machine against chaotic and untameable life, or tales with strong metaphysical and religious subtexts, and you don't mind a somewhat distancing narrative voice that can't always show or tell readers what's actually going on or why, you'll likely enjoy A Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands more than I did. As it is, while I can't say I hated it, and while I can't say it didn't deliver on its promised surreal aspects with some distinct and vivid imagery, it just plain was not my cup of cocoa.
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