by Suzette Mayr
COACH HOUSE BOOKS
2022/$17.95/244 pp.
Pages 209–214 of The Sleeping Car Porter list fictional works, memoirs and historical accounts that Calgary author Suzette Mayr consulted on the subject of sleeping car porters. With such a large body of work already available, why write a novel about the subject? Mayr must have felt that exploring the experience from the perspective of a gay man would offer a new perspective.
The story centres on Baxter, who only gets work if he is needed. In this case, he’s replacing a porter who is ill. Baxter is a lonely young man away from his Jamaican birthplace. He is portering in the hope of saving enough money to pay the tuition to study dentistry.
Mayr lets the reader observe Baxter performing all his tasks. A sleeping car porter must remain sleepless for several days. Some of Mayr’s best writing shows Baxter struggling to remain awake. The reader thinks this is humanly impossible and expects him to crash at any moment. But if he crashes, he’ll be fired, and Blacks are excluded from gainful employment in other fields. Baxter is expected to report any unusual behaviour by the passengers but may also be fired for doing so if the passenger complains. The reader observes Baxter responding to the needs and caprices of the passengers, terrified that some dissatisfied traveller might report him for some fault he did not commit—for example, failing to increase the heat in a traveller’s berth, a task that’s completely out of his control. Epitomized here is the cruelty of unregulated capitalism, further abetted by racism, during the first half of the 20th century.
A subtheme of the novel is the travail of being homosexual at a time when one could be denied employment or face imprisonment for merely being gay. In spite of the disguises that gays employ—adopting heteronormative behaviour, for example—sexual desire, the novel shows, is imperious and tyrannical even in the most dangerous of situations.
An intriguing aspect of the story is the journey itself. At the superficial level, the reader observes the various topographical formations the train traverses. At a more profound level, however, it unobtrusively functions as an archetype. When, for example, a landslide blocks the track for days, the train becomes something of a prison. The passengers, thrown together by circumstance and obsessed with getting to their destinations on time, find their plans scuttled by a landslide. At this moment their best and worst characteristics emerge.
Shortlisted for the 2022 Giller Prize, this is a brilliantly multilayered novel, written for the most part in pictorial language and rich in its observations of the human condition.
H. Nigel Thomas is an award-winning author of 13 books.
