(courtesy Hachette Australia)
If you stop to think about, every time you open a book and starting reading the opening words on the first page, you are embarking on a journey of sorts, one without a defined ending and only the most beguiling of beginnings.
You think nothing of setting out on a grand quest to see how someone finds a happier life or new love or how they conquer a thousand different obstacles or evils on their way to, maybe not always a happy ending but a finish line of sorts.
What makes The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks so incredibly magical and utterly, compellingly immersive is that it takes you on a literal grand journey across the vast plains of Siberia as a supposed impenetrable stream train traverses not just great distances but also a host of prejudices and assumptions with which its passengers have cloaked themselves.
Set at the very close of the 1800s when the heady optimism of a new century beckons, the novel is set on an alternate though still very familiar Victorian Earth where the environment between Beijing and Moscow, both of which shelter between towering, thick walls, has mutated into something terrifyingly different to anything else with which we are familiar.
No one understands how or why this happened but one thing is clear to everyone (well, almost everyone; some find it enthralling to see) – it is a dark and terrible place, positively even Satanic and you go there at your misguided or desperately necessary peril.
At her cabin door he gives a polite bow. ‘Thank you for a fulfilling evening,’ he says. ‘I enjoyed our conversation.’
‘And I too,’ she [Marya] says, truthfully. As she watches his retreating back, she thinks — she would like to trust this man. She likes the calm way he talks. She likes being listened to. But she wonders what it is that he is hiding.
Unless, of course, you are the well-heeled or the poor and desperate passengers of the Trans-Siberian Express who cannot afford the time or expense of sailing via India back to Europe, and who must trust in the operators of the train, who have amassed great wealth and political influence, to get them safely through the nightmarish terrors of a world remade into strange creatures and unknown shapes.
The train has made countless traverses of this strange new landscape, and while there have been some deaths and more than a few souls who have experience unnerving psychological and emotional disturbances, not to mention bizarre LSD-ish hallucinatory visions, people continue to use the train and hope they will be spared its extreme oddities and scary manifestations.
After a considerable gap, all due to a journey that no one at the company will publicly discuss, the train sets off again from Moscow with an absorbing cast of characters, including a grieving widow called Marya who is not what she seems, a resident of the train, Weiwei who has been aboard since she was left there as a baby (and who has achieved some fame as a result) and Henry Grey, a disgraced naturalist who is hoping the Wastelands will go some way to restoring a comprehensively battered reputation.
They, along with a great many others, put their faith in everything going to plan but, of course, you know when that is the prevailing hope and intent, that nothing of the kind will occur.
(courtesy Macmillan Publishers)
In fact, so much of a departure from the idiosyncratic norm is this journey that much of The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands is devoted to exploring what happens to people when expectations are upended, self-assuring truths are proved to be nothing but cosy lies, and a whole new world is proved to be nothing like assumed.
We all know that human being like to tell themselves stories to make sense of the world, and it’s becomes clear in The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands that the stories are long and elaborate, based on optimism, religious zeal and or desperate self-rationalisation, and they are about to break wide open.
And what happens when they do is that people have a choice to make – do they cling to old prejudices and ideas, even in the face of graphic evidence to the contrary and living beings who assure them their assumptions are very, very wrong, or do they cling to outmoded notions because that is their only source of comfort and security.
Brooks does a fascinatingly lyrical job of telling the story of this unravelling of the orthodox and the rigidly assumed, and you are subsumed into a brilliantly wrought story full of fulsomely realised characters, vivid imagination and extravagant, mainstream-challenging world-building and writing so beautifully and affectingly intense that an Annihilation-type journey into the fantastical and the bizarre suddenly becomes unexpectedly grounded and very human.
She freezes. As her eyes grow used to the darkness she sees patterns on the wall, not on the outside of the windows any more, but inside, the lichen spreading scales of silver and blue towards the ceiling. There is movement at the other end of her bunk, a crouched shape —
‘Thief,’ hisses Elena.
If you have even been forced to confront the fact that everything you believe about something isn’t true, and so untrue in fact that you will have to wholesale change how you see the world to embrace and accommodate it, then The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands is your novel.
It is a luxuriant challenge to the idea that we can ever lock down our understanding of the world nice and tight and that we can never know everything there is to know and to act, without incident, on those assumptions.
The truth is that we can’t and while a great many people find a false security in rigid religious belief or fossilised dogma, the truth of the matter is that it’s all paper-thin illusion and that it only takes the truth breaking in, as it most manifestly does in The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands as whatever is outside the train very much wants in, to rip it to shiny shreds.
You have a choice then, as do the people on the train – either reject the truth of what is right in front of you, or embrace and have your life and worldview be utterly changed, a scenario which confronts everyone in The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands and which elevates it to not simply a journey across geography and time but also the mind and the heart with the final destination, in all its transformative, liberating glory, bearing no resemblance to the one everyone assumed, once upon an ill-informed time, they would one day reach.