Mackinnon (Mack) Macdonald Flores, a Scottish Salvadoran bagpipe band member, is on his way through the American Northwest to Merveilleux City in Quebec, Canada for a pipe band convention.
Mack, who hails from the eastern end of Los Angeles County, is having a hard time figuring out his life. Recently, he left his graduate film studies program after his ex-girlfriend made his cohort despise him. He is working on his teaching credential. He now uses the “San Dimas Serene AwarenessTM” program to calm himself and remain positive about any setbacks along the way. While his inner, better self often criticizes him, his interiority is a lot of fun for the reader. Mack sees the world around him in terms of movie plots, settings and characters. Quickly the reader realizes that the novella’s fictional world pays homage to classic films while spinning the characters into diverse, contemporary, and possibly magical beings.
“They are masters of evasion, you know. Octopuses. Marvelously flexible. They can stretch and contract. They can escape any container.”
Mack plans to take an old-fashioned train with other bagpipe players. It has all the luxury of a movie train—first class compartments, an elegant dining car, an observation car and even a balcony off the caboose. Unsure of his destination, Mack tries to flirt with the ticket seller. As he takes too long and backs up the ticket line, a petite goth girl wearing all black and Doc Martens berates him. He finds her privileged—and, in addition, she badly sings a Frank Sinatra tune. Yet in her conversation with her friends, who call her “Quirk” and are in the station to see her off, she mentions an oddity. Her octopus tattoo has been absorbed into her body. I’ve read a few other of Barbé Hammer’s books and was delighted by this detail as it hinted that magic is afoot. (Here’s a review of Barbé Hammer’s chapbook Rescue Plan, which is great for teens.)
“I seriously think it would make him feel better if he could get in touch with those feelings by projecting them onto an iconic and very masculine fictional persona. Continue talking, says Inner Mack. Connect meaningfully with a potentially disruptive student.”
When Quirk—whose real name is Allison—turns her ankle getting on the train, Mack puts his lousy first impression behind him and tries to help her. This doesn’t go as well as it could (“How can someone so miniscule be so hard to lift?”). However, Allison tells him that a passenger she met in the station and boarded the train with is missing but must be on the train somewhere. Mack agrees to help find the elderly man.
As the two work on the mystery of the missing passenger, the reader meets several oddball characters, whose jobs and dreams are often a send up of American desire. The pretenders and wacky American institutions leave the reader gleeful at times.
“‘Movies about trains make me feel safe,’ [Mack’s father] said. ‘Every train movie is an emotional journey. The journey always completes and a better world is discovered at the end.’”
A woman who acts as the face double for the president’s daughter has written a memoir: Almost Tiffany: How I Gave My Face for the First Family, Volume 1. Two WWE wrestlers show a Chinese vlogger how they work together to create their act. The Chinese vlogger, May-Bel, is filming segments so her mainly Chinese audience can get an idea of American life. “‘We have not seen any guns,’” she, in surprise, tells her audience. Jimmy Shoulders, a Christian cowboy entertainer, has a phony Southern accent and an odd family. His advertising material gives details of his show:
Watch Jimmy Shoulders lasso a sinner right from the audience! Crack whips and make money changers disappear! Perform the famous Will Rogers rope tricks and sing his hit single “Jesus Is My Kind of Cowboy”!
Joe is a former congressman who is running for reelection and glad handing on the train. He’s also a Princeton grad, a former soap opera star and an Afghanistan veteran. He agrees to help Mack and Allison find the missing passenger.
A bit of dark reality enters in the relationship between a college professor and his thirty-something student, Diamond. While it’s a hilarious send up of the self-satisfied, paternalistic college professor/minor writer, it’s also a glimpse of the difficulty a talented Black female poet has in trying to land herself in the professor’s world. From the professor:
“This architecture that we inhabit—a gallery if you will, a library, a refuge or sometimes it’s only a pop up caravan—that architecture I keep on telling you Diamond, is FRAGILE. It can only take so much before the wheels come off the little airstream and the toilet stops working and you have to come to a halt on the freeway or wherever it is you’re driving, and you have to flag down the cops and no one wants that. I know I’m being obscure. It’s just that I keep on telling you we are very lucky and yes, you are lucky to be in this position and we have to be careful, and sometimes this little spot in the panopticon (that’s a Foucault reference [yes, I know you know; I’m just reminding you]) is going to feel a bit cramped and over-surveilled, but we get to make art and have people look at it or at least pretend to look at it, and I don’t know what else you can ask for. Yes, I know I have white male privilege. Diamond, I KNOW all that. You aren’t telling me anything new here.”
“On the train one talks about sex and spying and money. And death too- of course.”
Who-done-its set in trains are classic fun. This one with updated themes of class, racial discrimination and modern views of spirituality is refreshing. The movies-set-on-trains motif throughout is lots of fun. Movies with trains mentioned include:
- North by Northwest
- Silver Streak
- Strangers on a Train
- Murder on the Orient Express
- The Lady Vanishes
- Mystery Train
High School Housekeeping
Though this is a book for an adult audience, Journey to Merveilleux City is a novella, so it’s short, fast-paced and fun. Both its societal references and nods to numerous movies (many more than the train movies mentioned above) are appealing to teen activists as well as film fans. There’s a bit of magic there as well. While there is a couple on the train—a professor and his adult (thirty-something) student—who are having an illicit affair, there are no descriptions of sex. The affair serves to show the power dynamics in an unequal relationship, something I believe is useful for teen readers.
School Library Lady 