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Train Lord is a memoir that must incessantly justify its own existence to those who are reading it. Consider the following passage:
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: 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. Sometimes you manage to find a book that truly speaks to your soul. The kind of book that you can’t imagine having lived without reading. This was that book for me. What happens when a writer can no longer write? What happens when pain is so intense that you question who you are and whether you can bare it any longer? I now know what it’s like to be a pinball, bouncing around in different directions, heading off who knows where, having impact and being impacted upon…..and then there’s the pain.Train Lord is a memoir. The author’s life was drastically changed by chronic pain. He manages to get a job working on trains and eventually things start changing. I had never met a more diverse group of people in my life’: Oliver Mol. Photograph: Penguin Random House With the help of two expert spookologists: Stephen Volk - horror writer & mastermind behind the BBCs infamous 'GHOSTWATCH', and Dr Ciaran O'Keeffe - famed ghostbuster & parapsychologist, we're attempting to figure out what gives us the heebie jeebies, so that we can all go away and write the world's GREATEST EVER GHOST STORY. He tells me about the men who’d come to see his one-man show – these grizzled old blokes in their 50s and 60s – and how they’d wait for him afterwards so they could quietly share stories they’d never felt they could tell anyone else. And of his own father, and how it took the mighty wrench of the migraine – the forced vulnerability of it – for them to find a language through which to communicate. Esse Es Percipicrafts a mood of conspiracy in which some aspect of authenticity has been mislaid. If you reroute the story along the lines of a different cultural figure you’ll find that it still rings true. Here’s one I prepared earlier: From that exact moment, fiction, along with the whole gamut of literature, belongs to the genre of drama, performed by a single man in a Paris Review interview or by actors before a Writers’ Festival Panel. In other words, the mannerisms, lifestyle choices, political opinions, daily routines and career trajectories of the Writer are the grist on one side of a publicity machine which expels, on the other, artefacts of public consumption for a digitally connected feedlot of aspiring writers.
Congratulations, our teacher said on the last day of school. 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. 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. 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.” When I told my friends that I was applying to become a train guard, most of them thought it was a joke. I had been a writer for nearly 10 years by then, and most people assumed it was a writing stunt, that I had run out ideas, that I had turned to method-writing, that I was going what they called Full-Bukowski. The book writes itself! they would say, laughing, and while I would nod, smiling, briefly imagining the book I might one day write, none of this could have been further from the truth. Award-winning author Oliver Mol's debut is a true, funny and heartbreaking tale about a 10-month migraine, his recovery in Brisbane and job on the railway when he couldn't do anything else. Performed to music by Thomas Gray & Liam Ebbs, Seekae and Nils Frahm amongst others, and to visuals by Kat Chellos, it is a story of hope, laughter, pain, relationships, drugs, failed orgies, mothers, fathers and 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. So get writing - and hopefully we can all sit down round the fire and share a little anthology of all our spooky stories in December. We can't guarantee any of this will help with your word count, but we all need to take breaks, right?
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