A Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands: A Novel

There is a woman on the platform with a borrowed name. With steam in her eyes and the taste of oil on her lips. The shrill, desperate whistle of the train turns into the sobbing of a young girl nearby and the cries of the trinket vendors, hawking their flimsy amulets as protection against Wastelands sickness. She forces herself to look up, to stare at it face on, the train that looms above her, hissing and humming; waiting, vibrating with pent-up power. How huge it is, how implacably solid, three times the width of a horse-drawn carriage. It makes the station buildings look as flimsy as a child’s toys.

The book is laden down with lush descriptions and the story exists in a nicely crafted alternate Victorian earth where an armoured super train runs from Beijing to Moscow through an ever dangerous, ever changing Siberia. I would love to see this book get the full Moebius treatment. As I was 2/3s of the way through this book, it occurred that I could compare this book to Where the Wild Things Are, but I don’t want to spoil it.

On the other hand, the (more or less) Victorian setting, an era marked in my mind as one of emotional repression, is echoed in the writing in that there are several interesting character arcs that stay vaguely outlined but never come to an emotionally satisfying fruition. These stories include a romance between the exile japanese cartographer and the glass maker’s daughter, the redemption of the scientist, the changing of the guard from the captain to Weiwei the train girl, and especially the origin story with real motivation for the stowaway; I wish that the author could have committed to wringing more depth of feeling in at least one of the interesting plots that she developed.