(courtesy Allen & Unwin Australia)
The weight of life upon us can often be considerable; but for many people, it is not until a sudden event or change of heart hits them that they become aware of just great a load they are carrying.
For some people, of course, it doesn’t happen at all, but that number does not include Raimund Gregorius, the protagonist of Night Train to Lisbon, a classical languages teacher at a lycée (high school) in Bern, Switzerland, who after decades of doing the same thing at the same thing each day, rendering him so predictably boring that his wife leaves him, suddenly wakes up one day, mid-lesson with his students and walks out of the classroom, after which he departs for, of all places, Lisbon, Portugal.
The trigger for this existential snap, which is entirely out of character for a man every sees as reliable but little more?
He rescues a Portuguese woman on the bridge he routinely walks over at around eight o’clock each morning who appears to be on the verge of committing suicide.
After intervening to stop her, she goes with him to the school where he teaches, watches him teach for a while before disappearing, gifting him a slim volume of work by Amadeu de Prado, a doctor of fierce intelligence and undeniable charisma, who ended up playing taking a role in opposing Portugal’s Salazar dictatorship which ended in 1975.
As soon as Gregorius put on the first record at home and heard the first Portuguese sentences, the phone rang. The school. The ringing wouldn’t stop. He stood next to the phone and tried out sentences he could say. Ever since this morning I’ve been feeling that I’d like to make something different out of my life. That I don’t want to be your Mundus anymore. I have no idea what the new one will be. But I can’t put it off anymore. That is, my time is running out and there may not be much more of it left. Gregorius spoke the sentences aloud. They were right, he knew that, he had said few sentences in his life that were so precisely right as these. But they sound empty and bombastic when they were spoken, and it was impossible to say them into the phone.
What might otherwise have been a momentary blip in Gregorius’ stultifyingly well-ordered life instead becomes a lightning rod moment for a man who suddenly realises he has been sleep walking through life and not taking into account anything of value or truth around him.
Without even realising admitting to himself that he is in the midst of a seismic existential reawakening, Gregorius books the titular train to Lisbon, with no firm plan other than a barely-thought out and certainly not well articulated idea that he needs to sort out what it is that’s triggering him to upend his life in spectacularly uncharacteristic fashion.
As he realises that Prado’s life mirrors his own, at least in spiritual intent – though, of course, Prado’s path through life, marked by battling an authoritarian regime and an early mark is markedly more weight in thought and deed than Gregorius’s – he embarks on a wholly unexpected quest to find out more about a man who inspired so many others and whose impact is still felt some three decades after his death on a street in Lisbon from an aneurysm.
While Night Train to Lisbon does not exactly possess an action-packed narrative in the conventional sense, what it does have is a massively impactful sense of one man’s moribund life shifting in profoundly intense and huge ways, the kind of movement that surprises not just those who know Gregorius but the man himself who is amazed at how much reading Prado’s insightful rumination on life motivates, changes and inspired him to alter the path of his life, at least for a time.
A couple of scenes from the 2013 movie adaptation of the novel
The impressive thing about Night Train to Lisbon is how deeply thoughtful and insightful it is without once weighing down the storyline.
It’s not of course the sort of book you might take to the beach or on a plane (though goodness knows you have the time on most long-haul flights to give the remarkable thoughts in the novel their due regard) and it’s perhaps better suited to a week away in a quiet cabin somewhere where the time pressures so often present in modern day life don’t steal away your ability to simply linger and ponder what Mercier, a philosopher as well as a writer, has to say.
And you will want to take the time to consider not only what is said but what happens to Gregorius who goes from a man who loves classical languages because they are dead and nothing further can happen to them and who stays out in Bern because he knows it intimately and it demands nothing new of him to someone who meets a slew of new people and who does a thousand different things on a whim.
He is by the end of the novel a changed man, and while his life may not have changed dramatically in terms of where he eventually lands, he cannot approach it the same way again, not only because of Prado’s life-changing observances but because of his conversations with the people who knew him like his best friend Jorge O’Kelly and his devoted sister Adriana.
I love praying people. I need the sight of them. I need it against the malicious poison of the superficial and the thoughtless. Gregorius pictured the student Prado as he had spoken in the auditorium of the Liceu about his love of cathedrals. O sacerdote ateu, he heard João Eça say.
As you read the meditative delight that is Night Train to Lisbon, you are forcefully struck by how often we all ignore those internal prompts that tell us that not everything is right with our life.
Prado is forced by a series of events to reconcile himself with his unhappiness at the way certain aspects of his life have played out, including his fraught relationship with his judge father whom Prado saw, unfairly as it turns out, as the agent of a repressive regime and his own actions as a doctor, and it’s reading about Prado’s reflections on his life, and subsequent letters and dossiers supplied by friends and family, that so profoundly changes Gregorius for the better.
If you’re looking for some big, brash blockbuster of a Hollywood storyline where Gregorius falls to the ground, road-to-Damascus like, and arises a new and better man, then perhaps Night Train to Lisbon is not your next novel of choice; but if you like reading about how people, long lost to novelty and change rediscover their powerful effects then you will find much to love in Mercier’s work.
Even more importantly are the grounded insights Mercier shares.
If you have ever though philosophy to be remote and useless naval gazing then be prepared to have your preconceptions shattered as Night Train to Lisbon serves up piercing insight after transformative thought, all of them real and practical, the sort of life ideas that don’t just reshape the life of Gregorious but may change yours wholly for the better too.