Like existentialism, surreal, and (sorry, Alanis Morisette) ironic, the term “Orwellian” is ubiquitous and often misused. It’s typically applied to government surveillance or totalitarianism in general. This is understandable, given that British author Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name, George Orwell, is likely best known for his novel 1984, which generations of high school students have written papers about. 1984 turns 75 this year and has been adapted into movies and a TV series and referenced in songs by the likes of David Bowie and Radiohead. Orwell indeed thought a great deal about the nature of tyranny and the uses and misuses of political power, but if he’d known what his pen name would eventually be associated with, he might have wished for a different legacy.
Brooks is able to maintain both mystery and magic, with deftly woven strands connecting the main characters’s stories, and that of the train itself. This isn’t just a story about a trip from one city to another, not just about a trip across dangerous physical territories, but a journey within: These characters must figure out who they are, what they want and what they would give up for a greater cause… and what that cause may be.
What propels the narrative isn’t so much the dramatic set pieces (though the novel isn’t short on those; several of the chapters set in the far future are genuinely jaw-dropping) but the constant flood of ideas and new ways of thinking and perceiving the world.
Ten fathoms deep below the Gulf of Mexico, and several miles off the coast of Alabama, lies a submerged cypress forest sprouting with sea anemones. More than 60,000 years old, the cypress trees – some of them 6ft in diameter – were buried in sediments for millennia before they were exposed in 2004 when waves driven by Hurricane Ivan scoured the sea floor.
“Although the trees were dead, they were still standing in place,” writes Daniel Lewis in his global arboreal odyssey, Twelve Trees. Cypress samples brought to the surface could offer clues to the effects of climate on wood from that long-ago era, he explains. But soon after the discovery of the watery forest, salvage companies sought permits to dig up the ancient logs and turn them into furniture.