Discovery Recommends:The inhabitants of Gilas, the small town where most of The Railway is set, include Armenians, Chechens, Germans, Jews, Koreans, Kurds, Persians, Russians, Tatars, Ukrainians, a variety of smaller nationalities from Siberia, the Arctic and the Caucasus - and, of course, representatives of all the main nationalities of Central Asia. Gilas is a Noah's Ark of humanity - and a microcosm of the Soviet Union. There is nothing fictitious about this emphasis; for several decades after the Second World War, Tashkent was a thriving and cosmopolitan city. Some of its inhabitants had freely chosen to make their home in Central Asia; others had been exiled or deported there.
The path that has brought most of these people to Gilas is, of course, the 'iron road' (the standard Russian term for a railway) that provides the novel with its title. Hamid's iron road, however, is not only an actual railway but also a symbol that brings together the novel's Soviet and Sufi themes. To a group of pilgrims returning from Mecca not long before the 1917 Revolution, this twentieth-century equivalent of the silk route is 'a never-ending ladder whose wooden rungs and iron rails lay stretched across the earth from horizon to horizon'. To Obid-Kori, the mullah who is imprisoned in the 1930s and then taken off in a goods wagon to be shot, the two rails and the sleepers that bind them together are like a seemingly infinite extension of the iron grating of his prison window. To a young woman born in exile, the railway is an inexorable force that 'warps the earth and its people, twisting lives out of shape'. To Gogolushko the ex-Party-functionary and failed mystic the railway is a spiritual path that has gone rigid and that has led him nowhere; it is covered in shit from the toilets of passing trains.
A particularly striking chapter evokes the nomadic Turkic tribespeople who were press-ganged, during the last decades of the Tsarist regime, into building the first railway to Central Asia. At the cost of their lives they struggle to assert the vertical dimension of spiritual belief, repeatedly tearing up small sections of track and transforming them into the ladders the souls of their dead need in order to climb up to heaven. The novel's most truly redemptive moment, however, occurs in one of the chapters about the character known simply as 'the boy'. Angry and depressed after running away from home, the boy wants 'to get his own back' on a train that has startled him as he stands dreamily beside the line; in the event, however, he surprises himself by throwing a kiss and calling 'I love you' to an unknown girl standing by the door of one of the carriages. The boy is still free; he is the only character whose identity has not been fixed by a name; and it is his gradual initiation into the adult world that constitutes the heart of the novel. His unexpected 'I love you' is central to this process of initiation; his simple and spontaneous words transform a Soviet iron road - the unyielding way of linear thinking and material progress - into a Sufi path of Love. The general tone of The Railway is exuberant, even if this exuberance sometimes seems to mask a pain so deep that the narrator cannot allow himself to dwell on it for long. There is an exuberant humour in most of the individual stories, and there is an exuberance in the way that the stories multiply; one story, or even just the beginning of a story, quickly generates another. Many sentences seem so full of energy that they are reluctant to settle down and come to a full stop. The word play is dense; its unruliness exemplifies an important theme of the novel, that words -whether they are the words of magic charms or of Communist slogans - are endowed with an autonomous power. We read how Granny Hadjiya writes an Arabic charm on a scrap of paper, wraps a bit of cloth round it and hangs it from a tree in a cemetery; her magic charm then terrifies a group of schoolboys. We read of people who collect stories, people who collect manuscripts, a man who collect slogans, a man who collect words... Robert Chandler


This book available at www.discovery-bookshop.com