... Well, Ian Marchant uses alternative titles, so why shouldn't I? The full title of this, his first non-fiction book, is 'Parallel Lines, or Journeys on the Railway of Dreams, or Every Girl's Big Book of Trains'. Actually, his first title was best. It certainly tells us most about his central ... Read review
Advantages: Funny and wide-ranging meditation on the real and the romantic railway Disadvantages: Never quite comes together
...place.
Like parallel lines, he says, the two railways will never meet. His explorations of the reasons for this are diverse, witty and fascinating. But they are, by definition, doomed to remain unresolved.
Still, he starts well. Almost too well, in fact, because the rest of the book struggles to match the opening. The first page describes a hilarious encounter outside St Pancras station with a pair of prostitutes who ... ...it has many similarities to Parallel Lines. Both are based around a mundane aspect of our transport infrastructure. Both comprise a series of linked excursions. Both feature odd and oddly-nicknamed artistic travelling companions and many entertaining digressions. But Sinclair's book wove those elements into art. Marchant lacked that alchemical spark for me; he could only approach, but never quite reach, that elusive destination.
...Or 'Rails Against the System'. Or 'Train-set Hornby,' maybe. Well, Ian Marchant uses alternative titles, so why shouldn't I? The full title of this, his first non-fiction book, is 'Parallel Lines, or Journeys on the Railway of Dreams, or Every Girl's Big Book of Trains'. Actually, his first title was best. It certainly tells us most about his central thesis.
His theory is that there are two railways. The first is, to quote Marchant, "The railway you sit on every morning on your way to another shitty fucking pointless day in a drab office...". The other is the romantic railway, the one that inspires Great Railway Journeys, 'Brief Encounter,' countless enthusiasts and, Marchant argues, great men like Brunel and Stephenson who built the thing in the first place.
Like parallel lines, he says, the two railways will never meet. His explorations of the reasons for this are diverse, witty and fascinating. But they are, by definition, doomed to remain unresolved.
Still, he starts well. Almost too well, in fact, because the rest of the book struggles to match the opening. The first page describes a hilarious encounter outside St Pancras station with a pair of prostitutes who mistake him for a potential punter. But he was just interested in the gothic architecture.
Marchant has worked as a stand-up comic, among many other things: it shows in scenes like that, and in his ability to drop in an amusing aside or set up a silly gag. For instance, describing the relative sizes of model trains, he says that O-gauge engines are "about half the size of a cat (a smallish cat, about the size of my Aunty Pam's)".
We get a fair amount of detail about Marchant's various other jobs too. In this, he is like Nick Hornby, building biography from the foundations of a hobby. Thus we hear about his early years in Newhaven ("this ugly old town"), his failures as a student and as a punk musician, his work as a second-hand bookseller, and his later failure as a husband. In all these accounts he is unfailingly honest and self-deprecating. The reviews quoted on the cover liken him to Bill Bryson. And, while he is not as consistently amusing as Bryson, he is almost as likeable, if rather more grumpy.
In fact, Marchant's dislikes threaten to outnumber his enthusiasms. He rants against the obvious targets like surly rail staff and the disastrous privatisation of the railways. But he also lays into inattentive parents, nuclear power, and the creeping homogenisation of Britain.
From this, you may have guessed that this isn't your average book about trains. Ian Marchant certainly isn't your average railway writer. For one thing, he is given to swearing and smoking spliff. He was also introduced to rail buffery by an ex-girlfriend - how many trainspotters have had one of them? And he is what is known as a line-basher - one who prefers travelling the rails, with little interest in the engines themselves.
He differs from other railway writers too in his breadth of reference. He quotes poets: Betjeman, Graves, Owen and Wordsworth. He mentions Syd Barrett, The Clash and Elvis Costello. He is equally at home discussing hippy yurts and football teams.
More conventional is the amount of railway history that he weaves into his 12 chapters. He has clearly done his research. At times, this shows too starkly in the sometimes dull litanies of dates. I've never been good at assimilating historical facts and, for me, Marchant's history only really comes to life in accounts such as the story of Marc (father of Isambard) Brunel's astonishing attempts to tunnel under the Thames.
Thankfully, the core of the book stays mostly in the present, in a series of journeys to discover the many-faceted romantic face of the railways. So in one chapter he tries (and fails) to travel all of the London Underground in one day. Then he's off to visit the National Railway Museum in York, on a pot-fuelled journey along the Tal-y-Llyn line, or over to Dublin to discover the world's first commuter route.
He does try to give the book some coherence with constant references to the ringing of his mobile phone (it's always his girlfriend, just to remind us he's not one of those platform-bound social misfits in anoraks). Another abiding feature is the foul, but energising ubiquitous Ritazza coffee.
Some of the trips are also united by the presence of 'Perry Venus' aka photographer Paul Williams. His wonderful colour photographs feature in the book (and in greater quantity on his website - address below). One pair of shots juxtaposes a diorama of a rural Welsh narrow-gauge line, with the underpass at Stratford station looking like a corridor in a nuclear power station. They sum up perfectly the disparity between the romantic railway and the real one.
In the chapter which sets up this contradiction most starkly, Marchant follows Michael Palin's Great Railway Journey to the Kyle of Localsh. Even to this day, the Kyle line embodies the romantic ideal: "The line plunges through gorges, clings to the sides of cliffs, rattles through pine forests lined with spindly silver birches". Although, for Marchant, this beauty is blighted by the fact of the Highland clearances (the true curmudgeon can spoil even the most idyllic prospect). But even the hated Railtrack, instead of closing a line that carries only a handful of passengers, was spending £4.5m to repair a landslip.
Marchant's return journey, however, brings him face to face with the ugly reality of train travel. He is cooped up for hours with a Scottish young woman and her boorish, drunken, moronic English companions, Joe and Sheff. After a few hours of this, Marchant is not in the best of moods. He wants to kill them: "Yes, that's it... kill them. Yes that's right... kill them and push their bodies from the train. Or hide their remains in left luggage! Yes! YES! It was perfect..."
The difference in tone between the two quotes above shows that Marchant is a versatile writer. And his prose, for the most part, flows gracefully, informal and chatty. At the risk of sounding pedantic, I found the only obtrusive aspect of his style was his insistence on referring to himself as 'me' when he and someone else are the subject of the sentence. So a paragraph begins "Gary and me played a gig in Edinburgh...". He presumably took a conscious decision not to start such lines "Gary and I" because it sounded too formal and therefore less sincere. But on the page, it just looks plain wrong, to I anyway.
I'm loath to end the review negatively, but maybe Ian Marchant has brought out the eternal curmudgeon in me. His book, after all, concludes on an equally unresolved note. He sums up with a plea for "a better railway, a railway that answers local transport needs, is democratically controlled and is altogether more pretty, charming and downright old-fashioned nice."
But we know he's just a hopeless romantic. As he says many times in the book, politicians aren't interested in the long-term vision and investment needed to improve the railways. They are not scared of rail passengers; they are scared of motorists. So governments plough billions into roads, with no question of profit, while they force railways to run as a business.
I left this book liking and admiring the author, but wondering whether to recommend his work. It's too wide-ranging and unfocused to be an effective polemic. It's too full of history to be a humorous travelogue à la Bryson or Theroux. And it won't appeal to most rail buffs, who'll know many of the facts already and won't appreciate the irreverent tone. It tries to be too many things and ends up doing less than it might, apart from provoking a few thoughts and occasionally entertaining and informing the reader.
Maybe you shouldn't ask for anything more. But I kept thinking back to another book I'd read (and reviewed) a while back. Called 'London Orbital' by Iain Sinclair, it has many similarities to Parallel Lines. Both are based around a mundane aspect of our transport infrastructure. Both comprise a series of linked excursions. Both feature odd and oddly-nicknamed artistic travelling companions and many entertaining digressions. But Sinclair's book wove those elements into art. Marchant lacked that alchemical spark for me; he could only approach, but never quite reach, that elusive destination.
Published by Bloomsbury Paperbacks, 2003, 308pp, £7.99
Websites: www.ianmarchant.com To see all of the pictures which Paul Williams took for the book: www.ceinewydd.com/parallel
