253 - one of my favourite books of 2016
Jan. 2nd, 2017 02:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobear253 by Geoff Ryman was recommend to me by a couple of people I met at NAWG Fest back in September. It tells the stories of 252 passengers (plus driver) on a fictional Bakerloo tube train, travelling between Waterloo and Elephant & Castle one morning in January 1995. This was the first thing that took me by surprise, as I'd never heard of this book before and had assumed it was only a couple of years old. It's not a spoiler to say that the driver falls asleep and the train goes through the barriers at Elephant & Castle, since this is revealed right at the start. While the crash adds tension to the rest of the book, though, it's really the exploration of all the different people on the train that provides the interest in the book.
Each passenger has a page of the novel, which contains 253 words about them - their outward appearance, brief background, and a couple of paragraphs about what they are thinking or doing on the train. Described liked that, the book sounds as if it would be interminably dull - however, I found it so absorbing that I read it in two days, during a New Year house party!
Every passenger is brilliantly introduced and described, so as to get the reader really invested in what might happen to them later. I loved every single description, and found myself cheering inwardly every time someone got off at Waterloo or Lambeth North, knowing they had then escaped doom. The connections between the various passengers are really well drawn, whether they knew each other before getting on the train or not, and some of those connections don't become apparent until quite late on. The intricacies of how it all fits together are amazing.
I did have suspend quite a lot of disbelief to accept the idea of a rush hour tube train only containing as many passengers as there are seats (even back in 1995, I would imagine this would have been very unlikely), and some of the weirder aspects (William Blake, Anne Frank) didn't quite work for me, but overall I absolutely loved this book. The end sections were much briefer and more nebulous than I was expected, but this didn't matter as the ultimate fate of the train was very much not the point. Masterful storytelling and a very original format - plus the fake adverts scattered throughout were hilarious, both in and of themselves and for how the internet was viewed back in the mid 1990s.
Each passenger has a page of the novel, which contains 253 words about them - their outward appearance, brief background, and a couple of paragraphs about what they are thinking or doing on the train. Described liked that, the book sounds as if it would be interminably dull - however, I found it so absorbing that I read it in two days, during a New Year house party!
Every passenger is brilliantly introduced and described, so as to get the reader really invested in what might happen to them later. I loved every single description, and found myself cheering inwardly every time someone got off at Waterloo or Lambeth North, knowing they had then escaped doom. The connections between the various passengers are really well drawn, whether they knew each other before getting on the train or not, and some of those connections don't become apparent until quite late on. The intricacies of how it all fits together are amazing.
I did have suspend quite a lot of disbelief to accept the idea of a rush hour tube train only containing as many passengers as there are seats (even back in 1995, I would imagine this would have been very unlikely), and some of the weirder aspects (William Blake, Anne Frank) didn't quite work for me, but overall I absolutely loved this book. The end sections were much briefer and more nebulous than I was expected, but this didn't matter as the ultimate fate of the train was very much not the point. Masterful storytelling and a very original format - plus the fake adverts scattered throughout were hilarious, both in and of themselves and for how the internet was viewed back in the mid 1990s.
