More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Valentin Rostov’s famous Guide to the Wastelands—her father’s copy, that she would read in secret, dreaming of the train and the world outside its windows, imagining herself onboard. But not like this. Not alone. A sudden, sharp loneliness engulfs her.
Rostov’s Guide
Rostov’s words swim into her mind: It is said that there is a price that every traveller through the Wastelands must pay. A price beyond the mere cost of a ticket on the train. Rostov paid the price with his faith.
Rostov’s Guide
The city will be listening, and only when it can no longer hear the sound of the rails and the whistle of the train will it let out its breath and go about its business, content to turn its mind away from the nightmares that lie to the north.
Man’s thin control of the wilds of nature
Her first job, then, was as a talisman, a good-luck charm. She slept in the warmth of the kitchen or in a nest of canvas sacks in the luggage car or sometimes in the engine box itself, where the stokers would later tell how she would regard the glowing coals gravely, as if she understood even then their importance in keeping her safe.
Man’s thin control of the wilds of nature
the countless parts of the clockwork of the train as it grinds slowly back into gear. A little rusty, a little slower than before; there’s an odd stuttering to once familiar routines, a new hesitancy, as if they are all afraid to move too fast in case something should break.
The train
The wretched Rostov and his book had a lot to answer for—without him the train would have been left to the serious traveller, firm in purpose, not these foolish gamblers, so rich in money and time that they must find dangerous ways of spending it. They take the train only to collect an experience, like a pretty keepsake they can hang on their wall, to boast about to their friends.
Rostov’s Guide
And so the crew complain among themselves that the banning of the Blessing is yet another sign that the dusty men in their offices do not understand the needs of the train, and does it not bode ill for this crossing, of all crossings?
Man’s thin control of the wilds of nature
No one wants to close their eyes for fear of what they might see there—the thin fingers of nightmares crowding in at their eyelids; the stories, the rumors, and now the reality, that they are past the point of safety now; that the darkness outside is unbroken by friendly lights or open doors and welcoming fires; that they have unimaginable distances to cross.
Man’s thin control of the wilds of nature
She runs her fingers over the faded letters and smiles. This was the first book she ever owned. She had told him, when she opened the brown paper it was wrapped in, that she didn’t need a guide. He had looked her in the eye and told her that it was just for emergencies—for if ever he wasn’t there.
Rostov’s Guide
She has no need for anyone else, not for the task ahead of her. It is better to be alone, with only Rostov to accompany her, as solitary in his travels as she is in hers.
Rostov’s Guide
But his own mind had wandered in the end, hadn’t it? He had become an embarrassment, a man living in twilight. His family had tried to take the book out of circulation, but of course this had only cemented its popularity.
Rostov’s Guide
The Wastelands were not simply a means to an end, he realized; not just a danger to be endured, but an opportunity.
Man’s thin control of the wilds of nature
But she can’t helping thinking of Rostov’s words: What else is hidden from our view? She
Rostov’s Guide
It is said that so much had been taken from the land that it was always hungry. It had been feeding off the blood spilled by the empires, and by the bones of the animals and people they left behind. It gained a taste for death.
Man’s thin control of the wilds of nature
Is it not meaning enough that we should wonder?
The desire to understand the unknown
For all that I love his books, I do wish he were not quite so insistent on the dangers of knowing too much. Surely it is better to understand everything about a place one visits, not simply the parts that are deemed suitably comfortable or correct.
Rostov’s Guide
at least be allowed to see for themselves.” She hears the sincerity in his voice, but something else, as well; a faint echo of words left unsaid. “I think perhaps that is what Rostov wanted, in the end.”
Rostov’s Guide
“it was the thought that human life could triumph even here, even in the midst of such chaos. You would be a symbol of our success, an act of defiance against the Wastelands.”
Man’s thin control of the wilds of nature
On any steam train, water is a constant, pressing need. On the Trans-Siberian Express it is an obsession. The train is always thirsty. It gulps down water in an endless, bottomless greed.
The train
But I confess that my encounter with the Wastelands creature made me curious, and I began to suspect that she may be a link to these lost men and women. Who is to say, indeed, that there are not more like her, who watch us from the safety of their wilderness?
The desire to understand the unknown
There are some questions that are easier to ask in the dark.
“Maybe some people look more closely,” Elena goes on. “Not many. People like you, who are looking for something. Who are not satisfied with what they have.”
The desire to understand the unknown
“It is important that it has been seen, and acknowledged,” he says. “Even if it has vanished.”
The desire to understand the unknown
but she doesn’t want to be sheltered, she wants to see. Even amidst the confusion of feathers and claws she thinks of her father saying, Look closely, and she darts out from the Cartographer’s protecting arms. She puts her eye back to the scope. A single yellow eye looks back.
The desire to understand the unknown
She wishes she could put her eye to the glass again, to feel that sense of attention. What had Rostov said? A world always just out of reach. I grasped at it only to feel it slip through my fingers.
Rostov’s Guide
The train must run. That is the only truth that matters. Not who is destroyed along the way.” The only truth that matters.
The train
But here, where everything grows, where moss can cover whole rock faces from one crossing to the next, where vines snake up tree trunks before your eyes, the ghost rails are bare. As if they’ve been waiting.
The train
Best not to see or be seen. Best not to think of how small they are; how the train, stopped out here in the vastness, is not as great as they tell themselves, as they boast to the passengers. All boasts are meaningless here. All promises waiting to be broken.
Man’s thin control of the wilds of nature
there is no careful symmetry here, no patient repetitions; they are terrifying in their irregularity, their arbitrariness. Nature is deliberate, he understands this; it is mathematical. But not here.
Man’s thin control of the wilds of nature
“We killed him, your Rostov.” Weiwei can hear the wind in the branches of the trees, the hum of insects. The blood pounding in her ears. “He came back,” Elena goes on. “He was older. He came past the Wall and the guards. He wanted the wide-open spaces, he wanted the soil and the grass and the stone. He couldn’t sleep, you see. He said that we called to him in his dreams, that we would not let him rest. He knelt in the grass and wept.”
Man’s thin control of the wilds of nature
Suzuki nods. “As we are observing, we are being observed in turn.”
The desire to understand the unknown
A life returned is a life borrowed; more fragile and brighter than he ever could have imagined. A life no longer his own. He can feel it burning away all doubt, all hesitation. “A new Eden,” he whispers. “A new Eden.”
Man’s thin control of the wilds of nature
They force us to read the Wastelands as we would read a book in a lost language; a series of signs which we cannot hope to decipher.
Man’s thin control of the wilds of nature
There is a kind of ecstasy in the faces of the people in the carriage. This is why we have our rituals, she thinks. This is why they are needed—so that we can lose ourselves for a while.
Man’s thin control of the wilds of nature
There is life all around him, new Eden breaking into the train itself.
The train
Elena who watches and mimics and believes that this means that she understands how people work, but there are cruelties she doesn’t grasp, like the urge to trap and display, to possess for the sake of possessing.
Man’s thin control of the wilds of nature
She can’t take her eyes off them. Is this what Rostov had felt? When he was drawn back to the Wastelands, did he feel this same mixture of repulsion and wonder? Did he take each step unsure if the ground beneath would hold?
Rostov’s Guide
“You are not a man of the Company,” she whispers. “You are a man of the train. And of the Wastelands. Of both, together.”
The train
Yet nothing will be as astonishing as Henry Grey’s new Eden—or his new Eve. He has never felt so close to the divine. To be walking here, in the foothills of a new world.
She watches as they come apart, piece by piece, and she doesn’t move until there is nothing left of the Company men but a little collection of feathers and bones, of shining coins, of bright black stones, of the detritus that might be found in a long-abandoned nest.
Man’s thin control of the wilds of nature
The end of the line he has been following. A new Eden. Now he has found it, there is nothing to do but rest. “A more perfect form,” he says, or perhaps he just thinks it. Within all things, a striving to achieve a more perfect form.
He wasn’t that kind of man. Too certain in his own beliefs, too sure of his own place in the complex machinery of the world.
Man’s thin control of the wilds of nature
Let the great gates open, let the guns of the guards be no match for the train, let the world forgive us for what we are about to do.
Man’s thin control of the wilds of nature
The river has broken its banks. It is rising up, impossibly fast. “Like Rostov’s dream…” That final, famous vision of apocalypse. How it had thrilled her, as a child. How she had urged the water to rise up, each time the train crossed the river. And now the waters are coming to meet them.
Rostov’s Guide
She can feel the rhythm of the rails. Insistent, familiar. She can feel the power released as the train picks up speed, and there will be no stopping now, no waiting for what they have left behind. She looks up at the Wall and sees that cracks have appeared, water and weeds pushing their way out of the stones, as if the Wastelands are escaping, as if the Wall itself is weeping.
The train
After all their days and nights onboard, they are afraid of what it means to be still.
They are past the point of knowing. They have left Rostov and his guide behind, they have traveled off the map, staying away from the cities where the might of the Russian army and the Company forces will be mustering.
Here are places they do not know.
And she can feel the train, pulling them onward. She knows where it wants them to go.
The train
presence. A beating heart. Here, and here, and here. A thread stretching back toward the Wastelands, back toward Elena—Here—and pulling toward something new. The earth alive with anticipation, with change. It makes her feel as if there are sparks bouncing from her skin.
