Declan O’Driscoll
Different Trains
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Winterberg’s Last Journey, Jaroslav Rudiš, trans. Kris Best, Jantar, 2024, 444 pages, £20.
The Trains Of Europe, John Holten, Broken Dimanche Press, 246 pages, £15
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More exasperating than the bad novel is the almost very good novel. To read a book that has within it the elements, form and purpose of a really fine work of literature only to find that it has been over-flavoured or undercooked is a distinct let-down. Both Winterberg’s Last Journey and The Trains Of Europe have great seriousness of intent and meet it with some excellent writing and close attention to the shaping of the novels. But both fall short of being the fully satisfying novels they could have been.
Wenzel Winterberg is a ninety-nine-year-old man who, with death’s cold hand reaching towards him, wishes to see the cities that he regards as having the greatest historical importance in Europe’s war-ravaged landscape. Winterberg has a thorough knowledge of history and an assured understanding of the ways in which the tragic legacy of history led to the 20th-century’s greatest cataclysms, some of which he may have participated in directly. Of greatest significance in his reading of history is the Battle of Königgrätz – the decisive battle of the Austro-Prussian war –which took place in 1866.
‘The Battle of Königgrätz doesn’t just run through my heart, it also runs through my head, and through my brain, and through my lungs and liver and stomach, it’s part of my body and my soul.’
With ancestors who died on each side of the battle, Winterberg is convinced that only by understanding his position within this inheritance,will he – at this late stage – gain an understanding of regrettable decisions he made in his own life. To enable him to undertake the journey through a past within which he is deeply embedded, Winterberg’s daughter, Silke, has found a man called Jan Kraus to accompany him as a minder and facilitator. Kraus, however, considers himself to be in the role he has performed for people in the past, that of a Charon-like guide, ferrying people in the last stage of their life, through the frontier between the living and the dead. When he is first introduced to Winterberg, the old man seems almost devoid of life, until he responds to an image of a cemetery by uttering the word ‘Feuerhalle’ (too precise in its significance and meaning to be translated), sparking a memory of the crematorium his father built. Death has continuously stalked Kraus whose affinity with the transition of the living began when his little sister was run over by a Soviet tank –one of those that had invaded Czechoslovakia on the 21 August 1968 – one summer evening. For him, history is an ineluctable force, delivering death to those he has known and loved, even when they have not engaged directly in its actions. By contrast, for Winterberg, history animates every cell of his body. In the truest sense, he embodies the misfortunes of history.
The journey that Winterberg and Kraus undertake will be made, in all but one case, by train. Winterberg – a former tram driver – finds all other forms of transport unbearable. The journey begins, inevitably, in Königgrätz and here too begins one of the novel’s irritants. To convince us of the depth of Winterberg’s knowledge of the movements of history and the extent to which it has formed his sense of being, he begins to relate lengthy episodes of historical details to Kraus, and to everyone around him in the carriage.
‘The right flank of the Prussians, the Elbe army under Herwarth von Bittenfeld, stood by Smidar; the First Army, under Prince Friedrich Karl, by Horitz; the Second Army, under the Crown Prince, by Königshof … the Prussians with 220,984 men strong, yes, yes, and at eight in the morning the battle began …’
To illustrate his long-winded didacticism, we are given lengthy extracts of his impressive knowledge. In itself, this would be exhausting but he is also in the habit of reading protracted extracts from a 1913 Baedeker guide to Central Europe, oblivious to the annoyance of fellow passengers and of Kraus whose frequently voiced exasperation at Winterberg’s ramblings fittingly represent those of the reader. While such episodes demonstrate the extent to which Winterberg is living in the past, without a future to anticipate, they are overdone and disturb the balance of the far more significant and enjoyable aspects of the novel. A lack of self-awareness doesn’t prevent Winterberg from being amusing. A running gag about his father’s opinion of various types of corpses (having seen many in his work at the Feuerhalle) is unexpectedly funny. The fashion in which he demonstrates how his personal history – in particular, his relationship with a woman called Lenka – tightens around a knot of increasingly difficult circumstances is very well achieved, exercising a touching inclination that would have benefited other aspects of the novel. Kraus also has troubling memories, waylaid in recollections of one particular ‘crossing’, navigated with a woman he loved deeply. Eventually, he and we gain an understanding of Winterberg and empathise with this curmudgeonly character, who drags the rope of history behind him through ‘the beautiful landscape of battlefields, cemeteries and ruins’ (as he oft repeats, quoting a mysterious Englishman), trying to forgive himself for his failings towards Lenka.
While the trains in Winterberg’s Last Journey are a constant source of comfort – ‘He told me about how the railway composed the most beautiful music in the world’ – a very different attitude is struck in the intercalary chapters of The Trains Of Europe. Here they are implicated for their role in the ecological consequences of industrialisation and, later, for accommodating the efficiency of a plan to exterminate an entire race. An unidentified narrator tells us that the discoveries of Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, as written in his treatise Reflections on The Motive Power of Fire, ‘planted the seed for your understanding of why things fall apart, why one thing happens after another, why there is a past, a present and a future and why we cannot move from the latter to the former’. While we never learn who is telling us this – an entity that can address us as ‘you humans’ – and while these commentaries differ substantially from the numbered chapters, this pronouncement is directly antithetical to the most striking aspect of the novel, which is that we begin at Chapter IX and end at Chapter 1.
In that opening chapter, we are quickly aware that an alarming amount has gone wrong in the world. A mother and her young daughter are moving through a building in darkness, listening for the sound of two men described as ‘captors’. Glass crunches underneath the mother’s feet. They are high up in a ‘vast, ruined building’. Other people are to be feared: ‘For years now, you ran when you didn’t want anything from people whose path you crossed, and you didn’t want them to want anything from you in turn.’
They are in Berlin. But nothing mechanical has moved in the city for years. Instead of the white noise drone of an urban landscape, ‘the sound was of nature slowly asserting itself in the cracks of artificially compressed matter, the baked minerals of human artifice.’ Humans too have asserted an aspect of their natural self, foregrounding the animal once hidden within polite, socially adjusted bodies concerned with the competitive display of lifestyles. Now they must compete in the fight for food. Only a passing reference to ‘the week the electricity disappeared’ indicates some causal factor for who or what has instigated this enormous change. Why the power has not returned is never explained. Nor do we find out if this cataclysmic alteration to human life is confined to one region of the world or has affected the entire planet. Methods of communication have deteriorated to an extent that would, in itself, induce the breakdown of social cohesion.
In the next chapter, we are in an earlier stage of these events. Survival is still the preoccupation of the characters we met in Chapter IX. But there are others with them now, including a man called Koby who claims to have met William, the father of the young girl called Luzie who we met earlier being carried through the high building by her mother, Sybille. Fear and distrust are essential elements in the daily lives of these people. Koby might be of help but they judge it better to leave the countryside area they have briefly shared with him and once Koby is asleep, they leave, taking his horse.
Between chapters, we learn that, ‘The first military conflict fed by trains sees the French and Prussians transport their men by carriage locomotive. It is the year 1870 [just after The Battle of Königgrätz] and the machine dresses up the brutal barbarity of war in new vestments… The future is here and it rushes in great billows of sooty air through the darkened night, soldiers singing as resolute cannon fodder.’ With every technical innovation comes a way to harness its destructive capabilities.
Throughout this thought experiment, a sense of expectation is created. We are led through desolate rural and urban terrains that are altered in ways both familiar – like those areas of cities abandoned because major employers left or because of fires or other ecological disasters – and unfamiliar. It is, as yet, unusual to find survival fights among people in European cities for food and water. As we read the beginning of each chapter there is a jolt of expectation as we realise that what was left unresolved in the previous chapter will remain so as we progress backwards to a time when the minor problems of the novel’s protagonists – though major to them then – were foremost in their minds, never imagining that deprivation and endurance would become a daily experience. Yet, this is already the reality for people in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine. It is not difficult to reason why such a novel might be written now.
However, a feeling persists on reading the novel that, having set these outcomes in motion and then allowed the thread of these lives to be wound back, more could have been done to both illuminate and illustrate the scenario with which they are presented. This is not the first novel to have people wandering through a post-apocalyptic landscape, populated with frightened, famished people and burnt-out cars. Use could have been made of the opportunity to explore how it might be to realise that everything familiar has ceased to be. Imaginative leaps into the mental adjustments needed to negotiate a post-consumerist world – the urgent acquisition of resources and knowledge only our long-gone ancestors would have practised – might have given the novel the sense of disorientation it lacks, however alien the setting.
Within the text, as it exists, it was a serious misjudgement to break the timeline of a late chapter (thus earlier in the lives of the characters) for a page of exposition about how some of the characters we have met in the art world we are now immersed in, will turn out. We need to stay where we are, in the terrifying-enough-in-itself art world, obsessed with its own codes: ‘This silent knowing between everyone, along with the fact that everyone has something to hawk or flaunt.’ The self-importance and innocence mix, becoming almost poignant when we know how little it all means given what is to follow. ‘Trains enjoy mixed fortunes. The trains of Europe continue to run…’ we are told between chapters but at the end that is also a beginning, it is once again trains, despite everything, that transport us back to simplicity: ‘I’m really glad we decided to travel by train, William says. All my favourite trips involve trains.’
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Declan O’Driscoll regularly reviews translated fiction for The Irish Times. He was one of the judges for 2024’s Republic of Consciousness prize.
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