The Way to Work

by Sean Ashton

Have you ever boarded your morning commute and wished you'd never arrive at your destination? That is what happens to the protagonist of The Way to Work. Having boarded what he assumes to be his usual 8:08 service, he soon discovers that all is not as it first seemed.
Does this train stop at any station? Do the carriages ever come to an end? And where is the colleague he thought he saw, as he took his place in the quiet coach? Our narrator reflects on his job as salesman for a cat litter manufacturer as he wanders down-train in search of answers – yet the sliding doors that close behind him appear to be malfunctioning, and every person he meets seems to remember very little of their past.
Seduction, destiny and salvation all come into play as this relentless novel unfolds, and we discover precisely where the 8:08 is heading and just who is in charge.

300 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 15, 2023

Reviews

[James · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read a fair amount of this book, about a man trapped on a train, on 5 hour train journeys to and from Edinburgh. Terrible terrible idea. Bad use of free will.

[Jeane · Rating 2 out of 5]

What to say about a book you finished and are staring in space, trying to understand what you read? The synopsis of The way to work sounded intriguing: Have you ever boarded a train and wished you'd never arrive at your destination? having boarded what he assumes to be his usual 8.08 service, he soon discovers that all is not as it should be.

It still sounds intriguing to me. But the story seems for me to have been about a person walking through a train which doesn't stop, with people he has seen before but don't seem to realise or understand that there is a life outside the train. It felt like a story which is a waist of paper and time. I can't even call the story bad, it just feels bland and no idea why it was written. Normally I am amazed how writers can come up with sentences after sentences and make a beautiful book of many pages long. This time I am amazed at how someone could write sentence after sentence and create nothing.

[Susan Maxwell]

In its first pages, this has a strong Leonard and Hungry Paul feel to it. The voice is of a very ordered person, one who thinks ahead about details. He is a forty-something salesman, cat-litter being his product, and the first-person narrative enumerates the significant aspects of his daily routine, and any tiny deviations therefrom, suggesting he has been institutionalized by the undemanding demands of life.

His daily commute is on the 8:08 train. A colleague takes the same train, and the narrator goes into some detail about the unspoken understanding they have that allows them to negotiate their uncomfortable proximity; uncomfortable because they are not in work, or in a meeting, but in that ill-defined time and place between their personal and their work lives. This detailed reflection on the borderlands within a life become the dominant topic of the story, and as it does, the tone shifts out of the routine into the unpredictable, from the ordered everyday to the absurd.

The morning commuter train turns out to be something entirely different. Ashton has said that his aim was to keep his character “on the threshold of the familiar and the strange”, that the novel was an exercise in “sustaining liminality”. It is an admirable and convincing experiment, but does not quite succeed, possibly because of the speed with which the narrator becomes acclimatized to the world of the train. This gives the sense that the strangeness very quickly, through being expressed as his experience, loses its strangeness and becomes as familiar as the soul-crushing corporate speak of the new cat-litter boss. The framework of strangeness and liminality is there, with the endless propulsion forward, the increased identification of the narrator, not just with life on the train, but with the train itself (echoes here of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and his theory about bicycle ‘mollycules’).

There is certainly a great deal that is strange, even grotesque, including the narrator himself at times but just as O’Brien’s narrator (like Ashton’s, nameless) brings with him to the afterlife a warp of his own, so does the passenger on the 8:08 service to infinity bring with him an ordinariness that always tips the balance away from the strange. It also has some excellent one-line reflections, not comic but revealing, and all the more effective for being delivered in the same rather fussy manner in which the narrator delivers his other, often banausic concerns. Like the 8:08 train, it does not reach its destination; perhaps there is none, or if there is, arrival is not necessary.

This is a novel that very nearly works, and while there is an unfinished feel, it is an impressive near-miss. It is a bold and striking experiment that is cleverly and sometimes elegantly sustained.