The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands
Sarah Brooks
Flatiron Books
Fiction, Fantasy
Themes: Alternate Earths, Diversity, Girl Power, Locations with Character, Religious and Spiritual Themes, Spirits, Steampunk, Etc., Weirdness, Wilderness Tales
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Description
In the 1800s, a great change overtook Siberia, altering the landscape and birthing monsters and driving
survivors mad as often as it killed them. Walls were built to protect civilization, shutting out the
Wastelands and their wildness. But in losing Siberia, Russia and China - and, therefore, the world - lost
a lucrative trade route. Thus, half a century later and after countless false starts and setbacks (and
deaths), the Trans-Siberian Company built an immense train like no other, laying iron rails across the
shifting landscape from Moscow to Beijing, and becoming perhaps the most powerful business in the
hemisphere. Now trade flows again, and the elite see the Wastelands as just another tourist destination,
for all that setting foot off the train is forbidden and "incidents" are still known to happen. The
now-classic travel guide, Rostov's The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands, has brought
many a curiosity seeker to the rails... though many ignore the author's warnings that the Wastelands will
always change that which passes through them.
Marya's father used to supply the glass for the Trans-Siberian Company train, a very unique and demanding
formula designed to keep the transformative, toxic influences of the wilderness away from the cargo and
paying passengers. But something went terribly wrong on the last journey, something that nearly ended the
service for good, even though not a single person aboard remembers just what. All the Company knew is that
they needed someone to blame, and they decided that person should be Marya's father. He died from the
shame and loss of face... and, perhaps, something else, something he contracted during that fateful
incident. The Company took all his notes and papers, but Marya is determined to clear his name, for her
own sake if nobody else's. Armed with a new identity and Rostov's tome, she steps aboard...
Weiwei was born in Third Class to a mother who died shortly afterwards, and has lived her whole young
life on the train, attuned to its rhythms and moods in a way even the Captain is not. The Wastelands
fascinate and scare her, for all that their strangeness is as familiar to her as her own heartbeat. She
feared her beloved home, the train, would never move again after that last terrible, unremembered trip,
and is thrilled when it's returned to service... but something is off-kilter long before the behemoth
leaves Beijing. The normal rituals have not been performed. The Captain, normally a constant and
steadfast presence, is locked away in her cabin rather than reassuring her crew. And there's a peculiar
presence in the cargo carriage. Is it the Wasteland playing tricks on her mind, as it plays tricks with
the minds of so many people? Or is something from outside already on board?
Henry Grey was a promising naturalist until he was humiliated in front of his peers for a dreadful error
while presenting his ideas on natural mimicry, but he has a plan for an audacious comeback. He has a
theory that, unlike what many people think, the Wastelands are not a land of unknowable chaos and
possible diabolic influence, but a window into the dawn of Creation and a crucible in which God's own
will might be glimpsed, if only someone will be bold enough to study it scientifically and without
superstition. If he could bring a few specimens to present at the grand Exhibition in Moscow, he would
redeem his reputation and launch a scientific revolution, he is sure. The Company has very strict
policies about those who attempt to exit the train in the Wastelands, let alone try to bring items from
it on board: they are willing to not only submit the violators to "train justice" by tossing them off
the moving cars, but will seal away and allow to perish entire train fulls of people if there is the
least suspicion that contamination from outside has gotten in. But great discoveries demand great
risk.
These three lives, and many more, will be utterly transformed in this fateful journey across Siberia.
Review
This was the second book I picked up during my last Barnes and Noble trip (the other being Dungeon
Crawler Carl); I wanted something different in tone, and the blurb promised wonderful and strange
things. (That, and it was a standalone, which is nice now and again.) While I tore through Dungeon
Crawler Carl like a parched camel at an oasis, this one took longer to get through. It was the
reading equivalent of a strange dish served at a high-end concept restaurant, where there's nothing
objectively wrong with it, but I found the service somewhat cold and distant, the ingredients confusing,
and the taste hard to describe, making for a generally unsatisfying, if still admittedly different and
interesting, experience.
Set in an alternate-history mid-19th century, there's a bit of a steampunk vibe in the immense train
and the clash of cold, cruel corporate powers against wild nature that refuses to conform to human
ideas or fit into human logic or reason; the very landscape changes between one trip and the next, with
colors that can induce madness and creatures that seem half-ethereal and half-demonic. It's little
wonder that many people and some churches see the Wastelands as a portal to Hell; many people lost
their lives during the unexplained event that transformed Siberia, and despite the massive Walls
protecting China and Russia there are still opportunists and rebels who attempt to enter the
wilderness only to be driven mad or unmade by the forces at work. To even conceive of a transit like
the Trans-Siberian Company train is the epitome of hubris, fueled by the epitome of greed, and after
half a century of more-or-less success, it has led to the epitome of arrogance as the Company ignores
the warning of the previous trip and sends their train out across the Wastelands again, perfectly
willing to sacrifice its crew and passengers in the name of profit and the appearance of total
domination over the land, an appearance badly shaken in the public eye by that last incident.
What was the incident? What actually happened? Nobody knows, and only glimpses are ever remembered. The
Wastelands cannot, do not, and will not fit into human perceptions, let alone human descriptions. At
first, this creates an intriguing mystery, along with the bizarre, half-glimpsed, half-suggested nature
of the altered Siberia through which the train travels. At some point, though, forever being told that
the characters (and thus the reader) cannot possibly comprehend what happened, what is happening, and
what could or will happen becomes a tiresome dodge. If it's all too metaphysical and grand for me to
understand any of what's happening, or why, then why should I care?
"Who cares?" became my mental refrain by the halfway point, and mostly persisted to the end. Marya,
under an assumed name (lest the Company figure out who she is and what she aims to do, defy their
declaration that her father was to blame and prove something else went wrong with their precious
train), frets that she'll be found out by the "Crows" - company agents - or the other passengers more
than she actively seeks evidence... but who cares what she finds, when I couldn't care much about her?
Weiwei discovers a stowaway of sorts that smacks of Wastelands through and through (it takes place
early on, so hardly a spoiler), yet still - in defiance of everything drilled into her from her first
breath, in defiance of her loyalty to the captain, in defiance to sheer human instinct - decides that
she's imagining the oddness... so who cares when "Elena" turns out to be more than she seems? And who
cares what Elena's motives are? And Henry Grey, a man so blinded by religious conviction and hubris
that he's as fanatical in his own determination that Siberia is a "New Eden" as the Russian cleric
who spends the whole trip preaching about hellfire and brimstone, such a flat caricature of an
obsessed zealot who is so obviously going to do something monumentally stupid to endanger
everyone... but who cares? I never really liked any of the characters, and only occasionally found
them interesting; they were all prone to paralysis in the face of decision and boneheaded actions
when intelligence was called for (not always, but enough times to induce a few eye rolls).
Anyway, eventually things happen, more or less, building to an utterly surreal and drawn-out finale
that featured some remarkably bizarre imagery, but which ultimately was so strange I'm not entirely
sure it wasn't all meant to be a fever dream anyway. I'd say some parts of the ending felt unearned
for some characters, but that would require me to have cared much about them by that point, and I
generally did not.
If you're a fan of surreal alternate histories, the clash of man and machine against chaotic and
untameable life, or tales with strong metaphysical and religious subtexts, and you don't mind a
somewhat distancing narrative voice that can't always show or tell readers what's actually going on
or why, you'll likely enjoy A Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands more than I did.
As it is, while I can't say I hated it, and while I can't say it didn't deliver on its promised
surreal aspects with some distinct and vivid imagery, it just plain was not my cup of cocoa.