'A woman wakes up, frightened and alone - with no idea where she is. She's in a room but it's shaking and jumping like it's alive. Stumbling through a door, she realises she is in a train carriage. A carriage full of the dead.
'This is the Night Train. A bizarre ride on a terrifying locomotive, heading somewhere into the endless night. How did the woman get here? Who is she? And who are the dead? As she struggles to reach the front of the train, through strange and horrifying creatures with stranger stories, each step takes her closer to finding out the train's hideous secret. Next stop: unknown.'
I have to be honest, when I read the synopsis and saw the cover for David Quantick's Night Train I was expecting something of a horror book. The dark and moody cover and the description of waking up on a train surrounded by dead people definitely gave it more of a horror feel, but after a while it slowly emerged that I'd had the genre completely wrong. Night Train is more of a science fiction dystopia story, though it takes its time in revealing this.
The majority of the story is more concerned with the central characters than the world they inhabit, apart from a few fleeting moments and a handful of flashbacks you never even see this world. The story is about the train and the people inside it.
The lead character is a woman without memory of who she is of how she got inside the train. She finds herself in a carriage surrounded by dead bodies, but can't find any clues that can help her. She even seems to have lost the ability to read, and looking at writing gives her awful headaches, so the small scraps of newspaper that she finds can't even help. Luckily, she soon comes across Banks, a man in a similar jumpsuit to hers, who also woke up on the train without any memory. Luckily, however, he can read the name on her jacket, and tells her she's called Garland.
Together Garland and Banks work their way through the train, moving from one strange carriage to the next, trying to find answers to the mysteries that plague them.
And that's about all that I'm going to say about the plot, and anything else would really be giving too much away, and even now I kind of feel like I might have revealed too much. Night Train is about the sense of mystery that surrounds the characters. They don't know anything, and we're in the exact same boat as them. Occasionally we will get some answers, some background information or clues to the world, but these happen to us as they happen to the characters, and we don't end up knowing more than they do.
The book throws a lot at both readers and the characters, and at one point in the book its stated that each carriage is a clue to what's going on, but I have to be honest, that statement doesn't really help too much. Thinking back on what I saw throughout the book with the knowledge I had at the end I don't see how us, or Garland, were supposed to reach that conclusion with the clues provided. Perhaps more information would have presented itself if the characters had investigated more, but this doesn't really happen. So because of that I'd advise to not try to figure out too much of what's going on. You won't predict everything that happens, and you won't know everything until its spelled out for us.
I have to admit, this did annoy me a little. A good mystery presents you with clues that will help you to figure out what's going on. A big bit of the fun is trying to figure out the answers to the puzzle. When half of the clues that you need to find those answers are held back it becomes almost pointless to try to find those answers, sadly, you're not told that this is the case until the end, and by then you're just being told the solution.
The book is also very light on details. We don't get a lot of insight into the characters or why they're doing what they're doing. I know that they don't have their memories at the start of the book, and that's fine, we don't need to get their entire back story, but some insight into how their mind is working would have been nice. We don't get this, we don't get to see how this situation is affecting them, or what their thought processes are, we just have to see them reacting in sometimes very odd ways. Their are times where the tings that the characters say and do don't quite make much sense, and seem to go against who they've been established as so far, and I can't help but think a little bit of insight into their mind would help with this.
I think this is something of a byproduct of the the fact that the book is written from a very detached third person point of view. I get why Quantick would want to do this. Their are points where the characters split up, or we get flashbacks, so a first person story wouldn't work with this in mind if the narrator was Garland for example. However, a third person perspective can still occasionally delve inside the characters heads.
Their were times that I didn't quite like the story being told here, where I found Quantick's style of writing, where he shifted between characters and locations from sentence to sentence made it a little hard to follow. At times the book felt like something of a dream, and some of the moments seemed to have a disjointed quality to them when it changed from scene to scene. This might not be for everyone, but it certainly gave the book its very own feel.
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