(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
Create a real sense of fantastical otherworldliness is not as easy it sounds.
Surely, you reason, it’s simply a case of letting your imagination run free and allowing it to express itself in ways that defy any and all caveats of our actual reality?
But while that seems temptingly easy to do, the truth is that is any fantasy world you conjure up must feel real enough to be relatable; in other words, there must be a humanity and a realness that gives us a point of identification, something upon which to hang our emotional hat on.
Without it, it’s all just fantastical fun and vibrant imaginative wonder with not much else to recommend it; the god thing about The Elsewhere Express by Samantha Scott Yambao is that it takes us on a journey to a world brilliantly and immersively and magically different to our own and yet one which roughly corresponds with many of the emotional touchpoints we need to really relate it to it over the course of a wholly engrossing novel.
The beauty of The Elsewhere Express is that while there is a great deal of relatability to it, courtesy mainly of the lead characters, Raya and Q, who are whisked off the subway and planted onto the titular train with no warning or explanation, it also features a million miles away from our present reality which a story like this also needs to really prosecute its fantastical premise.
‘What are Echoes?’ Raya leaned over the side of the ship. The moon’s reflection broke apart over dark waves. ‘All I see is the moon.’
Lily’s eyes followed the ripples of pale light. ‘That’s not the moon, Ms. Sia [Raya].’
Truth be told, for all its inherent relatability, there is a logic and an honesty to The Elsewhere Express which is confronting, almost cruel at first.
Shorn of our usual concerns about courtesy and civilisational niceties, the magical train on which Raya and Q find themselves doesn’t have time for excessive mollycoddling.
It may have your best interests at heart, or says it does anyway, but it can also be brutally dismissive and seemingly lacking in empathy with those who fail to meet its stringent demands cast into a weird purgatory from which there appears to be no coming back.
What’s interesting is that Raya and Q, but mainly Raya, a lost soul who was born as a way of being a spare-parts option for her chronically ill older brother and who wonders if she has a purpose apart from that, is that they push back on aspects of the train that they find cold, cruel or just plain dismissive.
But equally as important is that it turns out they need the train far more than they think they do.
Each of these characters is carrying a great weight of grief upon their ailing shoulders, and while they go through the paces of day-to-day life, almost on autopilot, what their time on The Elsewhere Express reveals to them is that by simply putting one foot in front of the other for no discernible reason that they are merely surviving and are not even remotely cross to anything we might conceive of as thriving.
(courtesy official Samantha Scott Yambao)
Dreamy and poetical in its lush and inventively imaginative prose, The Elsewhere Express is a book that truly embodies a raw and demanding humanity, granting its otherworldliness, and its out there with train cars set with meadow grass and oceans made up of dreams and memories, an emotional muscularity that makes it far more than a just a technicolour dream writ large.
There are so many times that you marvel at the author’s ability to dream up something whimsical and Alice in Wonderland-ish unusual, and you wonder at how your dreaming mind conjured things so far beyond our usual lived experience.
But then you marvel anew at how she is able to imbue these aspects of life on this most wondrously extraordinary of places with insights about the human condition, especially when it lacks to corrosive grief and the hollowing out of a purposeless life, and really speak to your heart in ways that are very real and very confronting but in the most necessary and healing of ways.
Raya might fight what the train represents and is trying to do to her and for her at first – Q is there for a different reason altogether and fights the train, with which he has a startling, dream-filled history that surprises those even on The Elsewhere Express itself – but eventually she comes to understand that this could be the place where she finds purpose and meaning, two very things she needs desperately that magically come to her in the most bizarrely wonderful of places.
The train came to a stop, the sound of water lapping outside it.
‘Which Raya boarded the crystal train?’ Q said as the train car’s doors slid open. ‘The one who wants to go home or the one who wants to stay?’
Much of their grappling with the truth of who they are and what they’re feeling – if the train does them any good, and all for its unusualness, it does in spades, it’s forcing them to dig down far below the surface of their barely-lived existences – comes at the hands of a battle against a malignant force which has made its way onto the train and could destroy it and everything its trying to achieve.
This battle drives much of the later action-filled narrative, but no matter how actively intense the storyline gets, The Elsewhere Express always has time for the kind of emotionally intimate moments that both characters need if this off-the-charts experience is to do them any lasting good.
It’s the quieter moments that really speak to the characters, and to readers alike, and while you might wonder sometimes if the train is more of an escape for many of its once real-world inhabitants who seem disinclined to do the work required to get them off the train, in the end, at least for Raya and Q, it becomes the engine of real change for the rest of their lives.
Lyrically and gorgeously alive in truly astonishing and poetically lush ways, The Elsewhere Express is imaginative with a capital “I” and technicolour vibrancy that also has some darkness at its heart, both invasive and inherent, which takes readers on a magically fantastical journey through the most extraordinary of places but which knows that the most amazing place of all is the human soul and it’s there that the real magic of the novel takes place, not just while the story is told but you suspect, well beyond it too.