Trains of Europe
John Holten, The Trains of Europe (Broken Dimanche Press, 2024)
Since the Covid pandemic, there has been no shortage of fiction speculating on planetary catastrophes yet-to-come. As with typical iterations of this species of anxiety-driven literature, the cause of the apocalypse is never an abstract entity but a manifestation of an existing mega-threat already facing the world. Recent examples include the technocapitalist hellscape of Niall Bourke’s Line, the spectre of brutal authoritarianism and civil war in Paul Lynch’s Booker-winning Prophet Song, and environmental disaster in Jessie Greengrass’s The High House. To any such list one could now add Berlin-based Irish author John Holten’s latest book, The Trains of Europe, the third novel of his loose roman fleuve that includes The Readymades (2011) and Oslo, Norway (2015). Though at 245 pages The Trains of Europe is not particularly long, it offers many things: it is a disturbing vision of Europe in ruins; an exploration of the tenuousness of human relationships; a transnational love story; a glimpse at the avant-garde marginalia of the Berlin art world; a self-reflexive mediation on the form and function of fiction; a physics lesson on thermodynamics, entropy and the arrow of time; and a history of the trains of continental Europe. It is also an audacious experiment in literary form, combining modes as diverse as myth, realism and speculative fiction, as well as in narrative construction, for this is a novel that is structured in reverse.
If that all sounds rather eclectic, the story itself is relatively straightforward. The novel opens in Berlin, a few years in the future from now. The disaster, we learn, is that there is no electricity, which has caused the breakdown of societies across Europe (specifically, northern Europe, but presumably the rest of the continent and the world too). Berlin is a ruined network of ‘roads and streets…sunk cellars and basements and underground areas and sealed rooms, bunkers, tunnels and pipeways, above which rose buildings, rooms and corridors and stairwells, all empty and sighing in the slow convective heat of summer’. Humans and animals move through the debris of the city, which is slowly being reclaimed by nature. We encounter three women — Sybille, her young daughter Luzie, and Sybille’s mother Hilda — who are being marched along a disused railway line into the city by two sinister brothers. A sense of malevolent disorder pervades the scene, which ends in a cocktail of violence.
The march along the abandoned train tracks foreshadows the central theme of the novel: it is a fundamental law of nature that everything integrated will eventually break down. At this point the narrative switches to the mythic voice of three Norse deities, who, throughout the remainder of the book, will, between chapters, punctuate the unfolding story with a selective history of trains in Europe. Their voice is not detached; rather it is provocative and cautioning: ‘what is the lintel between civilisation and barbarity?’ they ask, before providing the answer. Look to the trains, they say. In the nineteenth century, trains represented the arrival of an accelerated phase in human progress: the new rail technology allowed the entire continent to become interconnected over vast distances. And yet, as the deities observe, ‘the murderous trains of Europe’ of this new network also enabled the rapid transport of soldiers and military equipment. Thus, science and progress are intrinsic to the mechanised amplification of human cruelty over time. The First World War was the first war to be conducted by train timetable. During the Second World War, the transcontinental train network was essential to the Nazi war machine: ‘15,000 trains are deployed in the invasion of Poland in August of the year 1939’, while ‘Himmler chose the location of the ghetto based on rail accessibility… a horror net is raised up across the continent, trains start to depart stations filled with Jews, Roma, homosexuals, communists’.
The grim inevitability of this brutality is emphasised by the opening of the novel, where Germany has descended into wreckage. The vision at work here, then, is one whereby looking backwards we are enabled to see forwards, where everything integrated tends towards disintegration, and where the seeds of barbarism are sown into the soil of a so-called advancing civilisation. Holten’s reverse structure obliges us to look backwards; not to project what the future might be, but to unfold the past within the present. And so, when The Trains of Europe opens, we discover that we are not at the beginning of the story, but at its end: we start at Chapter 9 and conclude at Chapter 1. The effect is slightly dizzying. There can be large spaces in time and action between each chapter as we move backwards across Northern Europe from Berlin to Denmark to Norway and then back to Berlin. Secondary characters who are introduced at certain points in the narrative will drop out of the story altogether, intimating that some histories are irrecoverable. But as others disappear, the narrative begins to coalesce around the central story of the fragile and slightly bohemian relationship between Sybille and Luzie’s father, an Irish engineer with artistic inclinations named William. As the story winds back, they come more sharply into focus. It is no accident either that William and Sybille grow more naïve as the story unfolds, younger, and with great irony, more optimistic. We learn later in the story that like many of their mind they idealistically came to Berlin for the art.
This playing with time encapsulates the themes of development and entropy within the story. It also beautifully reveals the brittle hope that underpins human relationships: armed with the knowledge that William and Sybille’s relationship will not survive (William is mysteriously missing at the opening), there is a good deal of melancholy pathos in the depiction of the playful, optimistic stages of their burgeoning relationship at the end of the novel. And yet, at the same time, Holten manages the feat of intensifying the drama as the book goes on. The moment the electricity fails (a mysterious event which will become known as ‘the darkening’) in Chapter 3, quite near the end of the novel, is a terrific set-piece where chaos breaks out on the streets. In the middle of the confusion there are also some well-observed and amusing passages reminiscent of the panic-buying during the early stages of the Covid pandemic: ‘wir brauchen nur die dinge für die toilette’, Sybille implores a harassed shop assistant.
The end of the book develops the picture of the Berlin art and music scene, lightly charged with sex, jealousy, and enthusiastic, harmless hedonism, that William and Sybille move in. New characters come in — William’s brother, an array of friends, an artist or two — bringing with them an almost ghostly presence. Their absence haunts the early parts of the book that exist in the reader’s memory, these lively, almost-never people who fleetingly inhabit the bars, cafes, clubs, and art exhibitions of Berlin (Holten himself appears to make a brief, self-referential cameo).
But if there is a lingering note of hopefulness, however melancholy, in this remarkable work of fiction, it lies perhaps in the final image — which is really the opening image — of the novel. In it, a youthful, love-flushed William and Sybille on a train arriving at Berlin exchange prelapsarian promises of tenderness and commitment. There is a dreadful irony at work of course, but amid the rubble, Holten compels the reader to recuperate an idea of unity, if only for a shimmering, transitory moment.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Eoghan Smith is the author of the novels The Failing Heart, A Provincial Death and A Mind of Winter, all published by Dedalus Books. He has written on contemporary fiction for numerous publications including The Irish Times, The Literary Review and Books Ireland.