First published 2021. Picador, paperback, 2022, pp 412, c.70,000 words.
This is quite a short book, despite being spread over 412 pages: 70,472 words to be exact, according to the pointless data given at the end of the text. A lot of pages are taken up with graphic images, which are unnecessary in terms of following the story, although they do illustrate some of the story elements; almost as though the author thinks that we are unable to imagine them. Hughes has been a graphic designer for around forty years and wrote his first novel in 2020. All the graphic elements, including several of the fonts used for the text (and fourteen ‘primary’ fonts are used), as well as the cover, were all drawn by the author. One suspects that a lot of the images had been created for other purposes and re-used here because of the immense labour involved in creating some which are finely detailed.
The story concerns a secret tunnel being driven under London to connect Buckingham Palace and Parliament to the new Crossrail underground line. The tunnellers hit an anomaly which brings work to a halt. It soon becomes clear that this is an alien artifact. Discovery of such artifacts have been a staple of science fiction for a long time. One thinks of Quatermass and the Pit, the BBC TV serial from 1958, and more recently novels such as Revelation Space, Sleeping Giants and even Glorious Angels. It’s an excellent idea that can be endlessly reworked, and Hughes has created an original variation on the theme.
The main characters (each of whom is annoyingly given their own font, paragraph design, etc.) are a bunch of ordinary people who might be dismissed as dull engineers and ‘trainspotters’. However, they are vividly drawn and entirely credible, perhaps with the exception of the ‘artist’ who is closest to the author in profession, but who is rather bloodless and who’s actions seemed to lack motivation.
The settings are brought vividly to life: London itself is a central character, in all its gritty, messy, ever changing, restless, charm. No one has glorified the concrete flyover and the forgotten spaces as well since J. G. Ballard. Both authors have quite a thing for the Westway, in all its bastard, practical ugliness. All the main characters would rather be nowhere else. The alien spaces are equally imaginatively described, although they have no apparent logic or obvious function; they are spaces to be explored and described just as much as those of contemporary London above.
The black locomotive of the title is rather minor to the main thrust of the story, such as it is. However, it inspires some of the best passages in the book and was a truly inventive element. I laughed out loud at one of the chapters in this section, something I very rarely do. Hughes should take on the challenge of writing a novel without all the graphics and distracting font folderol. He clearly has imagination for place and character and can write extremely funnily on occasion. The plot of this one becomes completely unhinged at the end and is left hanging, perhaps in preparation for a sequel.
There were some minor elements that I doubted, such as the use of metal detectors in 1964 [p115], but they were around at that time and becoming more widespread with transistors, also an ancient Roman having a gold tooth [p341], which also was apparently quite common at the time. However, Bar Italia couldn’t be making cappuccinos in a power cut [p143], and that nice cover appears to include a mighty odd ‘T’ junction on an elevated section (but that’s just me being pedantic.) More seriously are plot weaknesses such as no apparent interest being taken by senior management, government or military in this staggering discovery: just a few archaeologists apart from the engineers. The Quatermass story majored on the most likely involvement of Government which allowed interesting reflections on power structures.
© William John Graham, September 2022