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 language, structure and narrative, theme and image, Sinclair’s novel is obsessed with articulation: connection, sequence, unity, relation, distinction. Automatic World masterfully explores how writing, people and the world fit together and make sense, or not.

Although eminently about story, Automatic World is not much of a story in itself; a reader in search of a good yarn is advised to look elsewhere. Rather, Sinclair’s approach to the novel evokes Borges’ Ficciones: a philosophical experiment in prose narrative form. Four tales are told in the novel, nested within one another and traversed by news of a 19th-century train wreck: the aforementioned burn victim; a grieving young man trying to makes sense of his father’s suicide and life; an older woman’s recollection of her coming of age in a small town; an inventor and the crippled assistant who tells his story as they fall into ruin in pursuit of mad dreams. These stories are disjointed and interrupted—“in the story you are telling straight-keeping is not a virtue. Better modality, better eccentricity.”

Sinclair sets things askew from the outset. He tells us who we are going to meet and what we should expect them to do in the opening pages: “the girl, the bereft young man, the inventor and his drudge. Mercy killing, suicide, exquisite machines. And you, of course.” You? The reader? The writer? Or, perhaps, both. “You have the main points and the fine detailing that will put flesh, as it were, on the bones.” Having identified story elements, and having conflated writer and reader with one another and with character, Sinclair proceeds to put these elements on the examining table, to poke and prod at their articulation. He asks us to question how we make meaningful sense of the story, of the world and of self.

Sinclair’s articulations and disarticulations—modalities and eccentricities—take centre stage in the novel. His fiction is an advanced algebra of time, character and causality. This algebra operates at every level of Automatic World. The novel, according to an extended metaphor, is a train and “you appreciate that this train is bound by certain laws: physical, temporal. But you see also that it is bound by narrative laws … with their distinctive causality and effect.” These laws may indeed be strange: “some parts of the train are heavier than others. Some are cleverer. Some more amenable.” Automatic World does not simply move through plot as a train traverses mile after mile of track; Sinclair takes a bird’s eye view of the system, showing us at once where the train is, where it has been and where it will go. His book is a challenging work that refuses to allow the reader to sit back and let the story do the driving.

These strange laws of articulation apply equally to Sinclair’s characters, who are also heavy, clever or amenable to varying degrees, in varying parts. Body is central to the novel, and the characters’ bodies are constantly breaking down and being rebuilt. This applies to mind, too. One feels that the automation of the world lies in the inevitable dance between health and infirmity, youth and age, life and death, flourishing and decay.

Sinclair’s style may be unsettling to the complacent reader. From one sentence to the next—one page, one character, one story to the next—there is no guarantee of meaning, no clearly given link between one idea and the next. His words are gnomic and portentous, his writing charismatic. He can certainly turn a good phrase, which is a great boon because the somber, earnest tone sometimes plods (“People may talk like that,” said one wag of Ondaatje’s Divisadero, “but it sounds an awful lot like literature to me.”) and ricocheting paragraphs of non sequiturs can leave one’s head spinning. At his best, Sinclair is both elegant and strange in his wordplay: “on the radio men comfort a woman who has lost her spouse to carnal fascinations, her children to the government, and now her hair and sense of smell.” His satire has teeth: “A critical mass of believers will pray and a great unlimited moral putty will fill the fissures made by want and cynicism.” And when a proud father introduces his sons, Darren and Brad, “as if these names were innovations first applied to his boys,” Sinclair is delightfully clever.

One tends either to love or hate this kind of literature; it is not hard to imagine Automatic World on a university syllabus, sure to stir up debate. This reviewer is inclined to consider this a genuinely successful, well-wrought work. Eschewing convention, Sinclair challenges and explores. This is more than a simple tale gussied up in the trappings of pseudo-cleverness. If one is inclined to adventurous writing, one is well advised to take a closer look: the jarring strangeness of Automatic World is no mere gimmick and, although it may be challenging, the novel is effective, thought provoking and even enjoyable.

Automatic World bears affinity to the novels of Russell Hoban, both in style and in theme. Like Hoban, Sinclair trades in a cryptic, quirky kind of post-existentialism, chronicling regular people’s private battles with the world around them. Automatic World explores the idiosyncratic articulations of the language of the self, and the friction and conflict created by its disjunction with the hard givenness of reality. In both writers’ works we read of characters negotiating this disjunction, trying to make sense of themselves and their surroundings; the results are sometimes comic, other times tragic, and often simply banal. However, whereas Hoban’s characters—in, among others, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz and Pilgermann—set out on pseudo-epic quests of meaning-making, Sinclair’s find themselves alone and introspective in a process of slow, inexorable mutation.

Also notable about this work is the muddied distinction between novel and short story collection, especially after having discarded most conventions of plotting. The stories share trains, feet, mechanisms, loss, questioning and searches for meaning; one suspects the unnamed tabula rasa in the hospital is related to Cal searching for his lost father, and the town of Moar figures in both the stories of Dory and Merrick. But otherwise, what connects them? “Okay, you tell them,” Sinclair concedes. “Four trains, four strands, four characters, four rungs, a ladder, a spine. A spine, you say. You’re building a spine.”

In the recounting of the story of the train wreck, the question is raised: is the event the sum and sequence of facts? Similarly, Automatic World asks: is life the sum of bodily functions and mental faculties? Is a novel the sum of its plot?