Train of Thought

In one thread of Struan Sinclair’s debut novel, Automatic World, an unidentified, amnesiac narrator has lost his identity and almost his life in a fire. We meet this character in the process of reassembling his body and mind: his sense of social reality has been set askew and he cannot make sequential sense of the world around him, of events and causation; his flesh has been burned away and his bodily processes delegated to an array of machines; distinctions between inside and outside are blurred. We are privy to the laundry list of human faculties, mental and physical, broken down and reassembled; once taken apart, however, we see that things do not add up the way they once did.

This story describes an overarching theme of the novel, as well as Automatic World’s approach to the form of the novel itself. It is tempting to call it a deconstructionist work, but for the baggage of that term; instead, I shall call it a work of disarticulation. In...