All Aboard
All aboard
A review of Thomas Keneally’s latest novel, The People’s Train. This review has also been published on Politico.ie.
Since the days of Margaret ‘There Is No Alternative’ Thatcher, many (if not most) people have accepted as natural that economic prosperity can only be achieved through a free-market economy that flourishes as speculators make it big on the international markets. Few governments in the West, despite their political allegiances, have made any serious effort to embrace a different system over the last two decades. Even in the midst of the current collapse, official response has been to attempt to return things to the previous status quo, and public response, while angry, remains largely inchoate.
In the current atmosphere, the sheer audacity of what the Russians attempted to achieve from 1917 onwards can look naïve at best, and malevolent at worst, especially with the knowledge of the later atrocities and failures of the Soviet regime. Drummed as we are today with the message of ‘there is no alternative’, it’s hard not to look at the Soviet experiment cynically, yet its core message – that not only is there an alternative, but that it can be achieved – was taken utterly seriously by many men and women whose standards of integrity still stand up today.
Evoking the sincerity of this belief and its potential to change the world is tricky business for any writer looking back through the miasma of 20th-century opinion, but Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s Ark, is more than qualified to take on the challenge. In his latest novel, The People’s Train (recently out in paperback), a Russian emigrant to Australia in the early years of the 20th century tells his story of organising strikes and fighting for workers’ rights in Brisbane, before the action moves to Russia and the heady countdown to the October Revolution. The Australian part of the book is presented as a memoir by Keneally’s hero, Artem (Tom) Samsurov, who gradually reveals the details of his journey down under; the perilous escape from a tsarist prison camp, treks across Siberia and journeys by boat through Japan and China. Artem is a committed revolutionary who believes nothing less than a complete overthrow of the capitalist system will be sufficient to bring equality to the world.
Keneally does a wonderful job of bringing this character to life; too often revolutionaries in fiction come across as either hysterical or dully obsessed with political theory, but Artem is portrayed as a thoughtful, self-aware man who nevertheless cannot and will not compromise on his ideals. He is utterly believable as a man of his time and milieu, and the conflicts he faces with his fellow emigrant Russians and with the radical female lawyer he finds himself in a complicated attachment with are entirely believable.
Australia’s labour history is not a well-known topic, but the Brisbane of The People’s Train is full of agitation, strikes, union meetings and corrupt police, and the feel of a country still trying to establish a conclusive identity is powerfully evoked. Indeed, the titular train is an idea for a worker-owned monorail serving Brisbane, conceived by one of Samsurov’s friends. It remains unbuilt, serving as a symbol for the ever-retreating dreams of the young radicals. Australia is represented in the Russia-set section of the book by Paddy Dykes, a young journalist with the Australian Worker, who asks many of the book’s crucial questions about the nature of revolution and what happens when theory meets reality.
The Australian story is more engaging than the Russian; the familiarity of the story of the Russian Revolution leads to a slightly rushed narrative in the second part of the book that isn’t helped by various brief, cameo-like appearances by historical figures. However the pace recovers at the end; the momentous events of history are mirrored by equally turbulent upheavals in the minds of the central characters, with a last line that will take its place among the great endings of fiction.
Keneally leaves the question open as to whether the failure of the Soviet project was due to corruption of the original ideal, or whether the seeds of tyranny lay within it from the beginning. His characters are telling their story as they see it, nothing more. In an age where this period tends to be either glamourised or subject to revisionism, Keneally has succeeded in conveying what it was actually like to live during this unforgettable time.
One of the best historical novels of the year.
The People’s Train by Thomas Keneally
Sceptre, August 2010 (paperback)
£7.99
More Posts from Slenderfire-blog and Others
Bull’s-eye view
The camera lens as a ruthless eye – it’s a well-worn cliche, but one that keeps demanding to be used. Photographs, even the most carefully shot, can reveal elements utterly unplanned by the photographer and the subject, from an previously unnoticed tower in a landscape to the lines in the face of a movie star clinging to youth. Since its invention the camera’s capacity to invade privacy has been readily exploited, leading to excitement and anxiety in equal measure.
Another common, but apposite cliche, is the idea that the photographer somehow violates their subject – even if the latter is willing to be photographed – by capturing their raw, unmediated image. As Henri Cartier-Bresson put it: ‘The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.’ Referring to the subject as ‘prey’ sounds slightly terrifying, but is probably a sentiment familiar to many photographers. Even inanimate objects and views become a kind of prey in the avaricious aperture of a camera.
It’s the camera’s invasion of human privacy that is the focus of an exhibition beginning at the end of the month in Tate Modern, entitled Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. Grouped under various themes that range from the obvious (sexually explicit or graphically violent shots) to more subtle examples of voyeurism like government surveillance and street photography, the sample of images available online indicates an exploration of humanity’s secret moments. Some are shocking, like the terrified face of a young South African man clinging to the side of a building while a jeering crowd urges him to jump, some are unsettlingly banal, like the couple kissing at the New York Tortilla Factory, but all share that strange intimacy that comes when a photography ‘steals’ a moment that a subject would never intend to be recorded.
One photograph from the exhibition that captures a thing rather than a person is a powerful image of a British army watchtower at the Crossmaglen security force base in South Armagh. On an otherwise normal-looking street the watchtower looks utterly unnatural, bristling with wire fencing and multiple aerials. Obviously this photo was illicitly taken, and yet the tower looks somewhat ridiculous, rather than threatening. Its incongruity highlights the unnatural political situation that gave rise to its creation.
Ideas of reality and artificiality are thrown into relief in Walker Evans’ 1927 Street Scene (above), where the hatted man viewed from above, bathed in intense shadow, look like figures from the set of a film noir. The fetishisation of the past in film and art often means that genuinely contemporary images end up looking like pastiches.
The value of this exhibition is not just the interesting images that will be on show, but the questions it raises about the function and power of photography, which are even more relevant now than in the past, considering we are under more surveillance now than ever before.
I hateeeee that we are stuck with Ian Leslie as an alternative voice to the mainstream Lennon/McCartney narrative. I don't want to rely on this man, and he possibly has the means to really shift the narrative/affect beatle literature/media. Our society depends on the perspectives of men (fuck this, but it is true unfortunately), particularly white men, especially on topics as mainstream and "male dominated" (absolute bullshit) as the Beatles. Like, we can't even get a queer white man on this!! What the fuck? That man has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to the absolute queer shit storm that is Lennon/McCartney.
Hi! You don't mind playing a game with me?
If you could ask each Beatle only one question however without any consequences what would you ask them~?
Hi!!! Sorry I took a while to get to this, what a fun ask!!!!
I am presuming they will tell me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (including things they maybe actually forgot in the meantime).
This is very hard, because of course I'm nosy about specific historical facts.
So, here are my thoughtful, more open-ended questions that I think would lead to something pretty insightful:
Ringo: How have your feelings on the Beatles breakup changed over the years and did Get Back have a specific impact?
George: What role has forgiveness played in your relationships and how do you feel about your willingness to forgive?
John: How do you reconcile your need to be authentic with the inherent performance of fame?
Paul: What are you most afraid could happen to your legacy once you're no longer with us?
And here are my kneejerk "EXPLAIN THIS!!!!"-type questions. Imagine me throwing a chair before yelling these. (also I avoided questions where the answer might depress me too much or that presume things I'm not actually sure about lol)
Ringo: What happened that one time on tour you went on some sort of bender and were maybe suicidal? :(
George: The Maureen affair. Please Elaborate.
John: What was going through your mind when you told Hunter Davies you slept with Brian in Barcelona?????
(still hoping Davies' archive might give me some clue regarding this one, once it becomes available....)
Paul: I Demand Your Actual Unfiltered Yoko Take, Sir.
taxman is one of the funniest beatles songs ever
Another regular conversational pit stop during our calls was the guests I was interviewing on my radio show on any given week, especially if they were rock stars. Inevitably, John would have some spirited opinions to share about his competition. One time, for instance, I casually mentioned an upcoming booking with Mick Jagger.
“Why are you interviewing him?” John asked.
The truth was, I was interviewing Jagger because he was holding a concert in L.A. to raise money for victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua. (His wife, Bianca, was Nicaraguan.) But for some reason I foolishly blurted out, “Because the Rolling Stones are probably the greatest live touring band in the world.”
“Isn’t that what they used to say about us?” John coolly replied.
“But the Beatles aren’t touring anymore,” I said, stepping on a landmine. “The Beatles as a group don’t exist anymore. And the Rolling Stones are as important a presence as anybody in rock ’n’ roll.”
“The Rolling Stones followed us!” John shouted. “Just look at the albums! Their Satanic gobbledygook came right after Sgt. Pepper. We were there first. The only difference is that we got labeled as the mop tops and they were put out there as revolutionaries. Look, Ellie,” he went on, “I spent a lot of time with Mick. We palled around in London. We go way back. But the Beatles were the revolutionaries, not the Rolling Pebbles!”
Excerpt From, ‘We All Shine On’, Elliot Mintz
crossing a picket line, abusing striking workers AND littering, all before 9am smh. No one deserved a slap more that day.
Also not convinced by that teacher's assertion that Lennon would be on the picket with them, unfortch. Rich guys are still rich guys.
Anyway, important to remember that wealth is the greatest corrupter, even of our faves.
What did goddess mean by this?
considering that a lot of people are labelling the person on the far left of the first photo as ringo, i just want to compare the clothes in these two photos to prove that it is, in fact, klaus, because i believe these were taken on the same day.
fuckkkkkkk offffffffffff
Some writing and Beatlemania. The phrase 'slender fire' is a translation of a line in Fragment 31, the remains of a poem by the ancient Greek poet Sappho
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