The Train Was On Time - Heinrich Böll

 THE TRAIN WAS ON TIME - HEINRICH BÖLL 

I was a Heinrich Böll virgin. But I'm not anymore. I've now done the deed and have now lost my Heinrich Böll virginity to his novelette The Train Was On Time. And was it worth it? Were any of the rumours true? Was it as cracked-up as it's meant to be? Well, from a boy to a man let me tell you while I can, the soda pop came free and I've not been left disappointed.

In a bid to make light of this book I write frivolously and appropriate the lyrics of a 10CC song but who am I kidding? The Train Was On Time is a work of what we in the industry call 'maximum heaviosity'.

First published in Germany in 1949, it tells the story of Andreas, a 24 year-old German soldier on a train to the Eastern Front where he knows he's going to die. The journey takes five days. Five days of sitting in the grime, the sweat and the stink of his fellow soldiers, some of whom also know they are heading for their deaths but many more others thinking only of the Greater Germany. The Fatherland. Loyal to the Fuhrer to the last.

They're all heading to a slaughterhouse and so intense is his awareness of this, that Andreas has turned it into a premonition so that he now knows the place, the day and even the time that he's going to die. The one single thought constant in his head from the moment he wakes is 'Soon I'm going to die'. The thought in itself is then whittled down to the one single word: 'Soon'.

'Soon. Soon. Soon. When is soon? What a terrible word: Soon. Soon can mean in one second. Soon can mean in one year. Soon is a terrible word. This Soon compresses the future, shrinks it, offers no certainty, no certainty whatever, it stands for absolute uncertainty. Soon is nothing and Soon is a lot. Soon is everything. Soon is death...

Soon I'm going to die, before the war is over. I shan't ever know peacetime again. No more peacetime. There'll be no more of anything, no music... no flowers...no poetry...no more human joy: soon I'm going to die.'

This is peak existential dread. This is the naked lunch that William Burroughs in his book of the same name wrote of: that frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork. This is the blinding sun that Albert Camus wrote of in The Outsider that led to the killing of the Arab on the beach. This is the bell jar that Sylvia Plath wrote of in her book of the same name, the bell jar under which she was trapped. This is the cleansing of the doors of perception of which William Blake wrote. This is the metamorphosis of which Kafka imagined.

This ain't rock'n'roll, this is genocide. No tip-toe through the tulips this. No, this is more like defoliation via Agent Orange. This isn't a book I would recommend that everybody should read and neither would I say it's one the greatest novels ever written because the slightly skewed ending puts paid to that. As an example, however, of the work of Heinrich Böll it stands as a pretty good explanation as to why he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972. And that in itself is reason enough to test the Heinrich Böll waters, to swim with the fishes, and to break your Heinrich Böll virginity.

John Serpico