Book Review and Critique By Harsimran Kaur | Rating: 4/5

If we ever try to break the past and camouflage the darkness of it, then comes an ease of accepting it; of putting such a past in a desolate corner, leaving it in isolation so that the reason of its existence becomes condemnable. Now such ‘past’ that broke us has been tempered with, and this is in fact an illusionary gimmick that we often perform in the mind, and such repetition, such pestering to change it; does this hint at existential crisis or I may call it performative delirium? As we wake up, there is a dubiousness that exist. The credible sternness of the past must remain, almost fanatical it is and then we, in resistant, use the ‘present’ as an adhesive, and do we really have a choice it that?

Wilbur has! He is a ghost now. I find ghosts to be a kind of determined darkness coiling in its own silhouette. His apparition is his reality; he is dead. It makes him a ghost so dead are presumably ghost, and I must say, that living beings are intimidated of such a reappearance of their own grotesque refinement. An irony, of course!

To become a ghost, death is inevitable, but the question arises can gravity of death be ever felt? Why to turn into a ghost? Is it a permissible contempt of the fabricated mess left behind which must be fixed, if not in human form?

So, what is the gravity of death? Does it only amount to the reason for death, or somewhere we are carrying the exaggerated spasms of life lived to question its redundancy with the higher power as if life is just a preponderance of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. Or is death capable of stealing both the ‘faith’ and the ‘absurdity’ of living, and then such a face of death, is it a revulsion to our recollective living. So, death is the final end, but what if it is not?

Wilbur catches The Midnight Train; an opportunity he must galvanize for he is dead, but his eternity depends on just observing what has gone by all through the years, and thereby make no alterations. But when he looks back, its almost like a scrutiny, almost like an experiment as if it were an exhausted timeline, almost looking through the past in a self-pitying refinement, and to travel such a frequency again, should we call it a conscious in dissonance, and in such a scenario, is Wilbur looking at the familiar with an uncanny recognition?

Let’s talk about the Wilbur when he was not a ghost. He was a bookseller, gradually rising to a scattered success, and then gradually losing the reason to his unpredictable behaviour. I usually rest with this belief that in primal youth, ‘remorse’ and ‘regret’ become a part of collapsed poignancy. As years pass by, however, a frenzied intoxication takes over.

So now, the old Wilbur has a piano to talk to, and there is this unscrutinized loneliness that makes his life less immersive. As we all age, a shadow of memories lingers behind. There is less distraction, and the voluminous time in hand holds discourses with such memories. What is then seen is the sustenance of reality vanishes, the memories show less restrain, plummeting again and again.

So, this is also Wilbur’s life who is not a ghost. But, now, at present, as we read the book, he is dead and a ghost who travels through his past in a speedy recognition of associations, his loses, the fleeting victories, the treacherous darkness of losing his wife Maggie, and in such an evaluation, I must put a point that isn’t man always coursing through solipsistic greed of ambition & the extraordinary ability to sustain that ambition is actually not forbearance but a form of existential agreement. 

Are we ready for such anomie?

‘The Midnight Train’ is explosive. A ‘dead man’ reliving his past, and then through this ‘past’ redirecting the peculiarity of a belief into something humbling, which previously in all-pervading certainty, carried a sense of arrogance, ignorance & swelled pride. Thus, Wilbur, the ghost, penetrates into the dream of the Wilbur that once lived sparingly in the past.

Will the dreamer Wilbur extract the nuances of his unresolved grief, his unpardonable imprudence and the massacred fragility and turn it into a novelty? Will he be able to alter the past?

So, now if the past were to be magnified, there is perhaps always a different texture to it. A rising melancholy or a composed happiness or a few disoriented moments. Can they all exonerate the capacity of the human mind to not think of such a past again, and through such remembrance, we see the relevance changing, isn’t it? The weariness of losing someone can still bring a smile albeit the same moment once crafted tears.

Would be call this transition an unconscious lapse in the human analogy of sentiments or our virtues are always at stake?  

Wilbur and Maggie; what a ‘love’ and then the same ‘love’, to see it collapse, to see it desecrating, the ‘divorce’, the impact of it on ‘love’ – owes contrapuntal. And here, I wish to elaborate of such a ‘love’.

‘Can love be mesmerizingly lucid’?

‘Can it be broken and then can it be fixed as if it were not ‘love’ but a rationale that can be curved, twisted & torn to finally become a belief and then to let go of that belief would be called sanity as if ‘insanity’ must prevail for the abstract.

They say ‘love’ is eccentric, without rationale. I say it is for the illusionist who resurrect such love, not for pleasure, but for pain, and if love is all trouble & tyranny, then why memory fails to discard it, and then crutches it in the phantasmagoria of self-conceived theories?

The love of Wilbur and Maggie is complex as ‘love’ is, and the whole idea of its demystification is preposterous. ‘The Midnight Train’ extrapolates on the theory of pain & grief, and now if we need to discern if it is circumstantial.

Pain—the pain felt by Wilbur, his brother Dougie and their mother—is the pain left unresolved. There is pain of separation when Dougie dies; the pain of abandonment felt by Wilbur to know his infancy is a liability, and then the pain of his mother and this pain if I were to redefine, would it be an indissoluble, indiscernible treachery; to lose one son to eternity and the other to vestigial yearning.  

And then suddenly pain brings in a sense of purpose as if it were not pain but an intervention to carry forward the essence of continuity, of competence like a river flows in primordial ecstasy leaving behind the unrestrainable currents. There is a sense of luxury the human mind implies to restore, an exuberance of one own’s intellectual prolificacy, and to feel grief not as grief-stricken but a melody passed through.

The book is Wilbur’s contemporaneous roll of conflict with the life he has lived and the life he is about to change. Its hypnotical!!

To elaborate further, it’s a privilege to be alive, as we all think so, to be sentimentally woven to the significance, to the pleasures, to the imprecations and to the imperceptibility of moments that make or break us. And then one day death strikes putting an end to the privilege. We take in shelter. So here, do we call death reprehensible? I don’t think so because life is selfish, suffocating at times, and over a susurrus of awkward scandals, puts us in incessant conflicts.

So, what privilege are we talking about?

Even in the palimpsest of life, we are ‘ghosts’ wandering to determine our own empirical truths, no matter how obfuscated they seem, so what’s the difference between the ‘ghosts’ of the dead and the ‘ghosts’ of our exhausted living?

Wilbur after death is called the ghost as if all that is left after life is darkness, so demonic that death seems like a predator. But when Wilbur gets a chance to travel in The Midnight Train as a ghost, passing through his past life as they must have happened, he thus presses on ‘hope’ if things could have been different.

So, can I conclude by saying that the experience of Wilbur to see through the imperious truths is Transitive Exegesis?