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I think anyone who struggled with ill health or chronic pain will be able to relate to Oliver’s story. The impact that ill health can have on you mentally is something that is different for everyone and not always understood but this book will have you feeling seen in some way or another. He can also do observational comedy, especially when it comes to the intricacies of railway life. On one occasion he is “riding up front” with the driver, “smoking cigarettes and listening to jazz from a transistor radio with our feet on the dash”, when his workmate tells him of a signaller ahead who, because his arm is missing, can’t wave it as the job requires. Alt-lit often employs self-conscious repetition as a literary technique in ways that call to mind the mechanics of internet virality. Mol repeats how he feverishly wrote his novel on scraps of paper in between stops while driving the train, or repeats how he created puns to announce the arrival of each station like ‘attention, customers… next stop is Ashfield. But for all the singles out there, we call it PASHFIELD.’ In the early days of viral content (as in Charlie bit my finger),home video wouldcirculateonline in a kind of organicprocessof attentional mimesis. Today, viral content possesses a synthetic quality because we, as both consumers and creators, have market-researched how best to imitate our own authenticity. Mol repeatedly asserts that ‘the stories we tell ourselves are the ones that become true;’ that ‘from my writer days, I knew if you repeated something then it would come true’ and that ‘I knew if you could believe in lies, you could believe in anything. I knew if you did it enough then those lies would become true.’ Granted, it reads as though Mol is inducing his own virality by spamming your feed with an origin story of his own making.
the literature of the over-educated and under-employed (usually white) young person,attempting to reject their privilege. The Gchats and hamsters and vegan muffins, in other words, are ancillary. More specifically, Alt Lit writers tend to position themselves at the very centre of their universe, but employ a flattening of affect and deliberately naive outlook designed todeflect inevitable charges of narcissismby situating their work as akin to Outsider Art. Beautifully captures the complexities of illness and of coming to terms with life as an adult’ The Saturday PaperI ask him if he’s figured it out. If he has been able to move beyond the purgative urgency he felt writing Train Lord to something kinder. A book that speaks to anyone who’s gone to the darker side of life and still come out alive’ Paul Dalla Rosa So why do you do it? Sam asks, after another year goes by and i’m still working on the book. You’ll think it’s sappy, I say. Or worse — stupid. Try me, he says. Because I made prayers to myself all those years ago, and I’m trying to answer them with this book. I didn’t have many friends at work, and this suited me fine. I wasn’t there to make friends – I was there to go around and around for as long as I needed to figure out my problems, and to work out if it might be possible to love myself again.
And so he and I swap stories in the dark. We talk about Mol’s literary heroes and mentors – Roberto Bolaño, Alejandro Zambra, Scott McClanahan, Amanda Lohrey – and the wild necessity of hope (“My book wouldn’t have worked if it wasn’t a book of hope”). We talk about the fine line that exists between romanticising, patronising and honouring working-class Australia, and the democratising linearity of train travel. We talk about the cringing shame Mol feels about his first book (“I was extremely young and terribly ambitious”), and the humility he feels about his second. And we talk about love. Oliver Mol is a writer who found himself unable to write due to a debilitating migraine that lasted ten months. During the time, his entire life changed; not only could he not write, but he also couldn’t use screens and thus couldn’t communicate in the modern world. And so, he created a new kind of normal for himself and started working as a train conductor. The pain was so unrelenting, so monstrous, that Mol could no longer read or write. Screens were agony; even texting a friend was excruciating. His new memoir, Train Lord, tells the tale of those 10 life-shaking months and their reverberations. “I felt like if I didn’t tell this story, it would rot inside me,” Mol explains over a late-night Skype call. “Like something inside me would die.”Another thing, that didn’t bother me but might others, is that “the” is not the most common word. No indeed, the “I”s have it in almost every sentence and generally more than once. Train Lord is an honest look into the circumstances surrounding us and how these can change suddenly to affect our lives’ In 1967, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares co-authored a piece of short fiction called Esse Es Percipi.In it, the protagonist discovers that the River Plate stadium in Buenos Aires has mysteriously disappeared. He is led to the office of a high-ranking executive who admits that the last soccer match in Buenos Aires took place on 24 June, 1937: Then there’s the things that aren’t explained; such as what he’s doing in Sydney, why he’s on the Central Coast, what job did his father lose in Texas that saw the family end up in Canberra and where does Brisbane fit into all of this? Oliver doesn’t have a compass that suggests that maybe people would like the dots joined.
The trainer told us to be prepared for anything. He told us about the accidents, about the suicides. He told us there was nearly one a day, but the tabloids didn’t report it. He told us father’s day was the worst. Followed by Christmas. More cunts die on the railway than the roads. Just look around. Everything can kill you. The first day of train school our teacher asked us what we would do if we were on the train, and we had to go to the toilet, and we’d already had our break. For a while, no one spoke. Then Susie said, Shit in a bag, sir. Yeah. Probably shit in a bag. Good on ya, Suze, our teacher said. The shit in a bag approach. A classic. Then we went around the room and said our names and where we’d come from and a fun fact about us too. Ed said he’d worked in logistics and sailed around the world with the Navy in his youth, and Zayd had been a transit cop with a baby on the way. But now it was my turn and I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to talk about the migraine or how I’d failed as a writer. I didn’t want to talk about pain. So I said my name was Oliver and flipped my wrist frypan-style. I winked and said that I loved to cook. His doctors can't figure out how to fix him. He suffers a breakdown. One evening, high on pain killers, Oliver Googles the only thing he can think of: 'full-time job, no experience, Sydney'. An ad for a train guard appears and, desperate, Oliver takes it.
I told him I didn’t know how he did it, commuting an hour and a half each way. We required eleven hours between shifts, but assuming, for example, that he finished at 2.30am, he would, at best, if he had a car, be home around 3.45am, though if he had to rely on public transport, it would be closer to 5 in the morning. Then, he would sleep six or seven or eight hours only to wake in time for the return commute in the event that he had a 3.30pm start. Of course, a shift like this was rare, but not unheard of, and as a new guard, one had to wait until a line opened up on the roster, until they had accrued enough seniority, which only happened when someone died, or quit. Only then could a guard transition to a permanent line that allowed them to sleep, to see their partners, to live a life of one’s own rather that facilitating the movement and direction of others. No one cares,” a friend tells Mol at the “tail end of a bender”. Train Lord is imbued with that morning-after feeling of trying to make it make sense – and realising precisely that no one does care. The world’s indifference can be liberating too. “We were on a train, out of the way of our lives, any of us could tell any story we liked,” as Diski puts it. “We were, for the time being, just the story we told.” Meanwhile, its members were criticised for their unabashed solipsism, for revelling in the concerns of the privileged, for asking how many angels can dance on the head of a ketamine spoon. But such accusations actually undersell the intelligence of the alt-lit writers who strive to incorporate every possible critique into their book’s designs. The issue, if any, is that the alt-lit writer is too aware of his own privilege such that he feels the need to create an entire body of work publicly excusing it. Connor Thomas O’Brien correctly diagnosesthe alt-lit phenomena as: Confused, the protagonist Domecq presses further. ‘Do you mean to tell me that out there in the world nothing is happening?’ To which the executive replies, ‘Very Little.’ Before ushering Domecq out of his office, he issues a caution: We write to understand humanness and Oliver Mol achieves it with exceptional honesty and gripping emotionalism. This book is special’ Ennis Cehic
Diski isn’t the only person to board a train with no direction in mind. After developing an excruciating migraine that did not relent for 10 months, Oliver Mol struggles to read more than a few words. Even after it eases, he can no longer conceive of doing the things that had defined him for his entire adult life: “I had become a reader who no longer read and a writer who no longer wrote.” So he applies for a job as a guard on Sydney Trains for which, crucially, he needs no prior qualifications. His duties provide a welcome relief from both intellectual stimulation and the fashion in which this was ripped away by the migraine: “I had the trains, and it was a relief to know my role, to be given a daily plan, to surrender to something larger than myself.” At the end of his five-month training course, his instructor tells the class: “You’ve all won the lottery. I’ve been with the railway for 47 years, and I’ve never worked a day in my life.” Train Lordwill be performed from 10-12 August at theSpace @ Niddry Street – Studio at 7:20pm as part of Edinburgh Fringe. This is a love story,” Mol writes in Train Lord. “I fell in love with writing, and then I stopped. I’m trying to figure out if I can fall in love again.” Train Lord is a memoir that must incessantly justify its own existence to those who are reading it. Consider the following passage: We can't guarantee any of this will help with your word count, but we all need to take breaks, right?
Oliver Mol was a successful, clever, healthy twenty-five-year old. Then one day the migraine started. Sydney author Oliver Mol delivers his autobiographical monologue with such clarity and heart ... best just go.’ For the first generation of writers to have grown-up online, alt-lit was characterised by the employment of chat-forums and tweet formats as formal constraints and by references to chronic internet use. At their most successful — as in the work of Scott McClanahan or Blake Butler — alt-lit writers can paint a portrait of millennial alienation by toggling unexpectedly between compulsive earnestness and absurdistdetachment.
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