Train Lord: The Astonishing True Story of One Man's Journey to Getting His Life Back On Track

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You might glean that I didn’t enjoy this book, you’d glean wrong. A roller coaster ride into a drug addled world (some prescribed, many not) I found immensely interesting. How and why he’s still alive could accurately be described as minor miracles. Esse Es Percipicrafts a mood of conspiracy in which some aspect of authenticity has been mislaid. If you reroute the story along the lines of a different cultural figure you’ll find that it still rings true. Here’s one I prepared earlier: From that exact moment, fiction, along with the whole gamut of literature, belongs to the genre of drama, performed by a single man in a Paris Review interview or by actors before a Writers’ Festival Panel. In other words, the mannerisms, lifestyle choices, political opinions, daily routines and career trajectories of the Writer are the grist on one side of a publicity machine which expels, on the other, artefacts of public consumption for a digitally connected feedlot of aspiring writers. Train Lord is not so much a book about trains as an account of an unfinished process of healing. At its weakest it’s a self-help book, with too many passages quoted from “cod philosophers”, such as the discredited British journalist Johann Hari, that are left unexplored and unexplained. But as it flits between the genres of memoir and short-story collection, it beautifully captures the complexities of illness and of coming to terms with life as an adult. Mol recalls childhood memories and present-day intimate conversations with a tenderness that rivals Karl Ove Knausgård, though his prose is more cluttered and less succinct. In 1967, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares co-authored a piece of short fiction called Esse Es Percipi.In it, the protagonist discovers that the River Plate stadium in Buenos Aires has mysteriously disappeared. He is led to the office of a high-ranking executive who admits that the last soccer match in Buenos Aires took place on 24 June, 1937:

Sydney author Oliver Mol delivers his autobiographical monologue with such clarity and heart ... best just go.’ I ask him if he’s figured it out. If he has been able to move beyond the purgative urgency he felt writing Train Lord to something kinder.

Congratulations, our teacher said on the last day of school. You’ve all won the lottery. I’ve been with the railway for 47 years, and I’ve never worked a day in my life. So why do you do it? Sam asks, after another year goes by and i’m still working on the book. You’ll think it’s sappy, I say. Or worse — stupid. Try me, he says. Because I made prayers to myself all those years ago, and I’m trying to answer them with this book. The impact of the more sensitive anecdotes and descriptions is sometimes weakened by adding music which can sometimes drown out the speech and only detracts from the emotional weight of the story. Despite this minor distraction, Train Lord excels in its frank and moving journey of self-rediscovery as he recounts the most challenging, yet transformative, period of his life.

This is a love story,” Mol writes in Train Lord. “I fell in love with writing, and then I stopped. I’m trying to figure out if I can fall in love again.” Tender, vital and quietly hopeful: a tale of remaking … As much about the art, craft and alchemy of storytelling as it is about healing. A beautiful book’ The Guardian That invitation extends to you too, listeners! We want your submissions for our Traditional Ghost Story Christmas Special later in the year.

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Train Lordwill be performed from 10-12 August at theSpace @ Niddry Street – Studio at 7:20pm as part of Edinburgh Fringe. The way of the train is also the way of the boarding school, the convent, the prison and the psychiatric hospital,” Jenny Diski wrote in her 2002 travel memoir Stranger on a Train, in which she interweaves the story of a trip around the United States by Amtrak with her memories of incarceration in mental hospitals in her youth. She is taking the journey to write a book but her stated intention is “to keep still”. Her hope is for “a substantial journey without going anywhere exactly, meetings and conversations which also would go nowhere”. But lying in her sleeping compartment, she finds that “all the separate stories, all those minds and hearts took on volume and mass, occupying the empty space in my compartment, squeezing out the very air before spreading to the corridor outside and the entire train”. One afternoon, while waiting for our trains, I began talking to a guard about the usual: how much of the shift they had left, how long they had been on the job, what they had done before. He moved a bit closer, lowered his voice and said, Do you ever get lonely? He told me that since he’d graduated he’d barely seen his wife. He lived north, somewhere on the Central Coast, and between her day shifts and his night shifts and the commute he was struggling to find time to sleep, to see his kids, to relax. There’s just no quality time anymore, he said. I told him I knew what he meant.