On the tracks

Well received on its publication in 1983, David Wheldon’s first novel, The Viaduct, went on to win the Triple First award, judged by Graham Greene and William Trevor. His prose garnered comparisons to that of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett – although Wheldon claimed to have never read the former.

Wheldon described the novel as an “allegory of life as travel and expectation”. It opens with Alex­ander – more often rendered A., on account of the finicky typewriter Wheldon used – newly released from prison following a stint behind bars for writing a seditious book. Before long, however, he finds himself facing further charges – unknown to the reader – and flees his pursuers by setting off down a set of abandoned railway tracks. What he hopes to find at the end of the line is unclear, and what is first presented as a cat-and-mouse crime novel soon becomes something altogether more surreal.

The author strives initially to locate the reader in A.’s home town, somewhere in the east of England. His journey on the derelict tracks starts at the line’s terminus, but he soon passes a “boundary”, and the eastern city is gone just as soon as it was established. On the other side, reality is made up of railway lines and small villages.

Through the boundary, A. and the fellow travellers he discovers follow the line without any discernible purpose beyond reaching an empty horizon in the distance. We are also presented with the villagers, who have set up small communities just off the tracks. In contrast to A. and other wanderers, they lead a sedentary existence and are confused by the travellers’ aimlessness. Each side sees the other’s mode of life as foreign and unliveable. The villagers are accused of settling and having “limited aspiration[s]”, while the travellers continue onwards, not knowing “whether they’re pushed from behind or drawn from the front”. The Viaduct suggests that all human life can be found in either the travellers’ or the villagers’ circumstances. Both seem equally futile. The book presents the act of living as a yearning for a “feeling of security which can never be real”.

As the novel progresses, the values that usually ground the reader are inverted or done away with entirely. Language oscillates between insincere small talk and highfalutin platitudes; both obscure characters’ attempts to interact meaningfully with one another. One traveller considers “mouth[ing] comments [about] the weather” in the mirror as a form of rebellion; another is able only to spout aphorisms while “looking unhappily down at the ground.” All language is uttered by “non-existent voice[s]” feigning sincerity. In fact, in all attempts to scratch beneath the surface, the personal identities of the novel’s characters are withheld, in twists that are almost farcical.

This is a lonely book, in which offerings of human connection and companionship always result in further disillusionment. Thanks to Valancourt’s reissue, The Viaduct is back to haunt a new generation.

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