Train d'enfer

by Trevor Ferguson

Dans la forêt, là où les routes s'épuisent, à l'extrême nord, mètre après mètre progresse la voie ferrée. Pour la poser, avancer toujours plus au cœur de la taïga américaine, il est une petite communauté d'hommes. Venant des prisons, des hôpitaux, tous rejetés de la ville, ils vivent désormais pour ce travail dépourvu de sens, pour la paye et pour l'alcool, sous la double emprise d'un cuisinier prophète de leurs souffrances et d'un contremaître brutal, puissante image du mal.Sorti on ne sait d'où, du bien, un jeune homme va défier la déraison de cette meute haineuse. Dans la forêt, il retrouvera la horde tragique des autres, les errants, les craqués, entreprendra avec eux une épuisante fuite, jusqu'à l'ultime confrontation. Dans la droite ligne des épopées sauvages d'un Cormac McCarthy, Train d'Enfer possède un souffle rare, inoubliable, une force qui déchire l'homme entre l'humain et le bestial.

Genres: Fiction

360 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 12, 2000

About the author

Trevor Ferguson, aka. John Farrow is a Canadian writer who has written nine novels and four plays and has been named Canada's best novelist in both Books in Canada and the Toronto Star. Under the name John Farrow, he has written three crime novels featuring Émile Cinq-Mars; both are highly acclaimed and popular around the world. He was raised in Montreal and lives in Hudson, Quebec.

Reviews

[Matty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Man is a violent animal. How many times do we have to hammer in this concept? It's been explored many times before, and will most certainly continue to be a dominant theme in our literature. However, Trevor Ferguson explores this in his own way. In this novel, it is quite obvious that Man is violent by nature, but rather than describe instances where men do horrible things, Ferguson is more interested by how it arises in the first place. Everything in this harsh environment contributes to the violent desires of Men, from the weather, to the Supervisor, the Others that are banned from the campsite and are forced to scavenge for garbage....Ferguson puts the reader through a tough time. That's the kind of novel I like: where we actually get the feeling of what we are reading.