A popular Russian narrative joke of the post-Stalin era visualized Soviet
history as a train whose erratic running generated characteristic responses
from successive leaders – Lenin, “Passengers, get out and finish building
the line!”; Stalin, “Shoot the driver!”, etc. The first part of Thomas
Keneally’s new novel, The People’s Train, takes the Russian Bolshevik Artem
Samsurov to Australia in the 1910s. Here, a monorail model built by a
radical dreamer in Brisbane is neglected, apparently bare of signification.
In the second part of the novel, after Samsurov has returned to Russia in
1917, “the people’s train” stands for revolution itself – literalized in the
characters’ feverish to- and fro- motion between the capital, Petrograd, and
other places of unrest or political significance.
Narrated in turn as a memoir by Samsurov himself (My Exile and Wanderings, by
F. A. Samsurov, Late Hero of the Soviet Revolution, Progress Publishing,
Moscow, 1953), and a “diary” (though as this is without dated entries it
reads like a memoir too) by his Australian friend Paddy Dykes, this is very
much a novel of action. Even when the characters adhere to just one locus –
Brisbane, Petrograd – motion remains frenzied. “In case we were followed, we
kept changing trams, rushing from one to another”; “I heard Suvarov whistle
and turned and saw Slatkin had pulled a Mauser from a holster strapped near
his armpit”.
Thus, The People’s Train lurches on from event to event, beginning with the
Queensland Tramways strike of 1911 and a good deal of radical agitation in
Brisbane, before switching to confrontations and shoot-outs in Revolutionary
Russia. Both Artem and Paddy also fit in bouts of sex with sternly
attractive revolutionary women (Artem takes horizontal breaks from
leaflet-printing with the bien-pensant Hope Mockridge, the wife of a
Brisbane dignitary, while Paddy is bowled over by an unsmiling Bolshevik
widow, Evgenia Trofimova. “She placed her body over me and mewled in a way
that was divine music.”) Of the two narrators, Artem is much better company.
His supposed memoir is (fortunately) far more racy than anything ever
published by Progress, or any other Soviet publisher for that matter, under
the guise of a revolutionary memoir. What Russians call “uncensored”
language figures on almost every page (“Fuck you for a foreign
troublemaker”). The canonical moments of the Soviet biographical narrative –
encounters with transforming books and people in the breakthrough to
revolutionary consciousness – simply don’t take place. Things that a
real-life Bolshevik might have written are presented with a saving irony, as
in the delightfully bathetic description of Artem’s grandfather as having
“his own capitalist desires – to buy timber land, to acquire a mill, to burn
elegant kerosene lamps in his house”. Artem’s entanglement with the earnest
and fervent Hope bears some resemblance to the awkward attraction between
Odintsova and Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. However, it is
overlaid not just with embarrassment at sentimental self-deception, but with
cultural confusion.
Like Humbert Humbert (whom he doesn’t otherwise at all resemble), Artem is
obsessed by the new world as much as by anyone in it. His slightly imperfect
English – beautifully captured by Keneally – enhances the sense of how new
this is for him: “Brisbane ran up a hill in a bow of river and sat without
any fuss under the humid sky”. Though renamed “Tom” by his Australian
comrades, Artem does not fit in linguistically or in terms of his responses
– “I paused. Then on I went. Pulling the clots of information out of a deep
vein”.
When Artem thinks he understands, he is often wrong. His rigid framework of
class politics cannot accommodate the molten ambiguities of Brisbane society
– such as the case of Amelia Pethick, a gentleman’s daughter who ran away to
Australia with a docker. His grasp of the mechanics of oppression, and
ability to survive Australian jail through strategies learned in his
homeland, go with some comical bouts, or as he himself would say, “gulps”,
of misapprehension. Insisting to one of the Brisbane activists that the
strikers should have guns, like the police, he is surprised at the reaction:
“Kelly threw up his hands. You’ve got to be kidding, Tom!”. Thus, Artem’s
return to Russia constitutes not so much an escape from a future of
vegetating among the paw-paws, which he thinks might have been his lot had
he stayed in Australia, as a retreat to old certainties.
The shift to Russia, however, presents Keneally himself with serious
challenges. To begin with, the precipitation of the characters into recorded
history generates vertiginous anticipatory lurches of the kind faced by the
audience at a musical who know that at some point the characters will burst
into song. It is no surprise when a small, bald man with slanting eyes turns
out to be called Vladimir Ilich, or when it emerges that Koba, a pockmarked
but darkly attractive Georgian, has recently taken to calling himself
Stalin.
It is clear also that Keneally’s knowledge of Russia and Russian history is
limited; misspellings of common surnames (“Rybukov” for “Rybakov”, for
instance) and solecisms (a samovar doesn’t have a second tap for tea,
fuchsia would not survive an Eastern European winter) abound. The use of a
narrator who has never visited Russia excuses a certain factual blurriness
(it doesn’t matter that Nevsky Prospect was never full of white buildings
and “hammered gold” church domes, since Paddy might well have perceived it
according to cliché). But some of the misperceptions are distracting. No one
could, in the summer of 1917, have arrived at the “Vitebsk Station” in
Petrograd, and even a naive Western visitor would surely have realized that
the Julian calendar lags behind the Gregorian one, not vice versa.
More importantly, Paddy himself, a pocket-sized firebrand who comes across as
a sort of Australian revolutionary Asterix (“Even as I felt a terrifying
whack on my ear, I was aware that Paddy was still causing men to hang back
and stamping the ribs, heads and genitals of those who didn’t”), acts as a
narrow prism for the events he witnesses. Unable to understand Russian, he
can only observe, “The whole country seemed to be yapping and arguing”.
Psychological plausibility demands that he should describe what he sees in
building-brick prose: “We rolled out past factories and factory barracks
where workers slept on the premises”. But this makes for monochrome
depiction. The gymnastic set-tos Paddy describes have none of the shock
effect of, say, the scene of revolutionary mob violence in Joseph Ameel’s
anti-Soviet memoir Red Hell (1941), while at the same time this first-hand
observer cannot capture the sense of nagging uneventfulness recalled by
witnesses of the Revolution who were not caught up in the thick of things
(as portrayed, for instance, in William Gerhardie’s novel Futility).
The decision to compose The People’s Train as a montage of two memoirs by
fictional characters who are not prone to self-scrutiny, instead of in the
magisterially contemplative voice of Keneally himself, has limitations.
Admirers of A Commonwealth of Thieves (2005) will miss the wry combination
of realist omniscience and saturation in the characters’ voices to be found
there. Keneally’s magnificent narrative about the founding of Australia is
in fact much closer in spirit to the great Russian writing about the
cataclysms of war and revolution than The People’s Train. Sentences from A
Commonwealth of Thieves, such as “In that late January heat Surgeon White’s
sicker patients sat out on blankets in the sun and raised their mouths to
bite off the air of this place without places”, or “The vast, mute,
electric-blue sky hung sceptically over the giant claims of the British”,
are eerily dislocating in the manner of Andrei Platonov; with its sense of
the tragedy of the post- Enlightenment civilizing project, A Commonwealth of
Thieves resembles The Sluices of Epifan and The Foundation Pit.
In Paddy’s memoir here, Keneally has created a depiction of revolutionary
upheaval that bears a curious resemblance to such foundational texts of
Socialist Realism as Alexander Fadeyev’s The Rout. Doubts, misunderstandings
and introspection are eschewed. Abandoning the panoramic view afforded by
train travel in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the narrative moves frantically,
like a speeded-up early newsreel. The emphasis on event precludes any search
for larger historical causes or mythic significance. The contrast between
different memoirists is not exploited in order to raise questions about the
accuracy of the record (by contrast, Sebastian Barry’s poetically
labyrinthine The Secret Scripture addresses an equally violent period of
Irish history with far greater subtlety).
In the afterword to The People’s Train, Keneally writes that he hopes to keep
his “narrative powder dry” for a possible sequel, with further “adventures”
of Artem, Tasha, Suvarov and Paddy Dykes. A little more saturation in
contemporary sources, and a greater sense of experience, as opposed to
“adventure”, might make for a more compelling ride in the People’s Train.
Thomas Keneally
THE PEOPLE’S TRAIN
408pp. Sceptre. £17.99.
978 0 340 95185 9
Catriona Kelly’s book Comrade Pavlik: The rise and fall of a Soviet boy
hero was published in 2005. Children’s World: Growing up in Russia,
1890–1991 appeared in 2007. She is Professor of Russian at New College,
Oxford.
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