We may exist for thousands of days, but our lives pivot on a handful of moments. No matter how cautious our choices, how judicious our actions, how wise our deliberations, we cannot control, nor can we anticipate, the varied and random events that come together to rain disaster down upon our heads. Like converging icebergs in a stormy sea, chaos and chance can effortlessly smash us to pieces between their limitless slabs of icy steel. How do we cope with such pain? How do we move on and live with this burden upon our souls when we cannot forget? Johnson reflects.
Robert Granger never was a brilliant or talented man. Born of meager means, into the harsh frontier of the 19th century Wild West, he grew up aimless in a pitiless world. Having never benefited from the guidance of parents to shape him, to motivate him beyond his limitations, his was a desultory youth until a chance encounter with a man condemned to die taught him to find some focus in an unforgiving world where the law was as scarce as mercy. Understanding his limitations and yet driven to make something of himself, Granger found a job, laying down new track for the railroad, and a wife who made it all worthwhile. But when a disastrous fire ripped through the Pacific Northwest, taking away all that he loved, all his plans, his work, his toil, became ashes and dust. He would have to start again in a world just beginning to succumb to the powers and the technologies of man.
As brief as it is powerful, Train Dreams is a glorious glimpse at the rise of American power. Granger, an average man in every respect, is the lens through which we watch human ingenuity begin to conquer the land and subject it to the whims of man. We watch the track of civilization laid down through hills and gorges, through valleys and towns, track that reaches out to connect the untamed frontier of the west with the domesticated class of the east. But no matter how powerful our machines, no matter how fearsome our engines, no matter how profoundly we rework the earth that birthed us, we are still subject to both the whims of fate and the erosion of time, eternal forces that brush aside our plans and wear us down until we are but shadows of what we were, a truth that Granger comes to learn all too well.
There's silence here, silence and grace reminiscent of Hemingway and McCarthy. Few words are wasted in the portrayal of colliding worlds: Indian and European, nature and civilization, family and commerce, east and west. All swirl about Granger, hardly noticed by a man who, having endured a tragedy he could not have prevented, endeavors unbowed through a world that has less and less time for mysticism, for chicanery, as the harsh lights of industry blast away all but the most monetary conceits.
A quiet but deeply affecting novel about change in all its forms. Mr. Johnson picked a perfect, unobtrusive protagonist, a man of such bland character that he becomes a template upon which the reader can weld himself, experiencing the tumult of the transition from the old world to the new. Beautiful in its artful simplicity... The rise of a grander world has rarely been so exquisitely juxtaposed against the frailties of man. (4/5 Stars)
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