RAIN OF FIRE is available through the author at 

johnpassfieldnovels@gmail.com

The Story

On July 15, 1887, a picnic excursion train, loaded with happy, tired, singing passengers, rushed at high speed through St. Thomas, Ontario, and crashed into a freight train. An oil tank burst and a lake of burning oil engulfed the passenger carriages. A half-hour later, in the midst of rescue operations, a second oil tank exploded, causing hot oil to rise one hundred feet in the air and descend in a rain of fire, causing devastation, death and injury on a massive scale. The initial collision and the rain of burning oil caused a raging fire in which fifteen people died, four city blocks were destroyed and two hundred people were injured.

In response to this calamity, the community moved through the 9-11 scenario of death and rescue, mourning and relief, remembrance and thanksgiving, inquiry and blame, and finally, adjustment and restoration.

In this telling of the event, the communal pattern includes a second pattern – a personal cross-rhythm – which inter-fuses with the larger story, as the community disaster is recalled through the agonizing memories of Conductor Richard Spettigue, an individual who is unable to participate in this communal ritual.

The Setting

The scene has changed from what it was on the date of the gigantic explosion. There are no charred cobblestones, or new paint, or brand-new buildings – no new salt house, or granary or livery stable – as there would have been a year, say, after the cataclysm.

And on Talbot Street – the river of life – a block away form the point of impact there are no people walking around with bandages on their heads and necks and faces, as there would have been for months after the accident happened. There are still some remnants of the railway tracks; just enough are left of make it possible to be able to picture the diamond – the crossroads where the two railway tracks met – if you are looking for the spot where so much happened.

The Town

St. Thomas was a railway city in the 1880s – a web of six railways – and a connecting link, due to the surprising dip that Ontario takes down into the United States, between Chicago-Detroit and Buffalo-New York City. It was also the link on the Canadian corridor that connected Chicago-Detroit to Windsor-Toronto-Montreal. The Canada Southern Railway, The Great Western Railway, The Grand Trunk Railway, the London and Port Stanley Railway, The Michigan Central Railroad and the Canadian Pacific Railway all met in this community. Railroad is American; Railway is Canadian; St. Thomas served both countries. As Conductor Spettigue says: there wasn’t a toothpick on a fancy table that hadn’t passed through this town.

My family were railway people. My grandfather worked on the Michigan Central Railroad and the Pere Marquette Railway. My father worked on the Michigan Central and the Pere Marquette and retired from the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad.

The Image of the Story

A story starts as an image. As I was writing my third novel, Water Lane, The Pilgrimage of Christopher Marlowe, it struck me that this story of a cataclysmic railway disaster in my home town would make a fascinating metaphor for many of the ideas that I was exploring in a series of novels. A crowded picnic excursion train full of laughing. Singing. Sleeping Passengers. A mobile, temporary community in the care of well meaning and seemingly competent leaders moves too fast through an urban landscape straight toward a freight train which is carrying tanker cars which are loaded with oil. What more resonant image, whether individual, social or cosmic could I have found than that?

The Canterbury Tales

My original plan was to pattern the journey after Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: a number of passengers on a journey would tell tales that would serve to illustrate the concerns of their lives and the accumulated conversations and tales would create a portrait of a society. Of course, the–spectacular crash at the end of the journey would be a variation on the Chaucer pattern.

The Chaucer idea soon evolved into a combination of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway a story of the thoughts of people on their journey through life. I had written four novels previously, and each was written from inside the consciousness of a character. I had told a story from inside the thoughts of two alternating protagonists in my third novel, Pinafore Park and it struck me that rather than having the characters of the train journey tell stories to one another, I would base the chapters on the inner lives of these characters and have the baton of consciousness pass from character to character as it does in Mrs. Dalloway which derived fromVirginia’s habit of imagining the thoughts of her fellow passengers on the London omnibus. The structure would have about fifteen characters, each in turn thinking his or her thoughts as the train speeds towards disaster: Canterbury Tales as re-imagined by Virginia Woolf.

Cohesion

However, the idea of fifteen or so individual characters seemed to lack focus, and I decided that it would be better to have one character who would have recurring chapters in order to hold the journey together. Then, while on the train from Faversham to London, England, the obvious thought struck me that the logical person to hold the Chaucer -Woolf journey together would be the conductor of the train. He would move up and down the coaches during the journey, he would know the passengers in varying degrees of closeness, and he would be aware of their concerns and facilitate their cohesion as a community. The conductor  would be the over -seer of the journey, the social glue whose sense of community would hold the passengers together for the length of the journey, the repeat character whose chapters would inter-layer with those of the other characters, and who would pass the baton of consciousness on from passenger to passenger. The conductor would be the Harry Bailly - Chaucer’s genial host - of the St. Thomas picnic pilgrimage.

A Set-Back

It was a shock then - with the idea firmly in my mind that the conductor would be a man who loved his job and community - to hit a stumbling block! I had only known the outlines of the historical story, and when I had time to do the research that gave me the story in detail, I was surprised and disappointed. As I read the newspaper accounts of the 1887 disaster, I was disturbed to realize that the conductor of the ill -fated picnic excursion had been accused of causing, or at least contributing to, the accident: Harry Bailly as a criminal! This was a stumbling-block in my planning, as my imaginary conductor was a positive figure who saw the maintenance of the welfare of the train community as his life’s work.

I looked, in vain, for another conductor in the accounts, rejected the idea of not mentioning the question of the conductor’s guilt, and then settled down to consider the possibilities of the story as it had come down to me.

Leadership

I decided that the story would not only be one of society , but one of leadership. The conductor would still be the affable host - the shepherd of his flock; the concerned watcher-over of his passengers, as I had originally planned – but he would also be less-than-perfect and over-charged with responsibility in his leadership role. The story would be a metaphor for the societies - historical and contemporary - that I have found so interesting to contemplate. The conductor would love people, but would neglect to secure and maintain the underpinnings of their continued welfare. The novel would tell of a society in trouble, but without knowledge of the undermining force that was threatening, at every moment, to destroy it. The image grew to have more resonance as I worked on it.

The Structure

All of this planning gave me a structure: a host -figure would be the central consciousness character for the first chapter and for every even-numbered chapter in the novel; selected passengers would take turns being the central consciousness characters for all of the oddly-numbered chapters in the–novel. Each of the characters would be a fictional version of someone who is named in the historical source as having been in the first carriage of the train, the carriage that suffered the brunt of the horrific crash.

With a 50,000 word novel in mind, I settled on eight individual character chapters and nine conductor chapters for a total of seventeen chapters.

The Time Scheme

However, I saw a further problem. I wanted to tell the story of the disaster in chronological order, with traditional suspense and sign-posting, as the chapters proceeded. I wondered how I could reconcile my two competing ideas: how could my passengers continue with their Virginia Woolf on-the-omnibus reveries while taking part in a speeding train ride, a spectacular crash and a holocaust scenario of destruction and death?

Out of this question came a double time-scheme. I decided that the chronological story of the journey and disaster would be revealed in the conductor’s nine chapters. In the other eight chapters, the daydreaming passengers would not know about the disaster. During the journey, each passenger would be interacting with those in the passenger carriage. At the same time, each would be lost in thought, while reflecting on the day, their families, and social situations, perhaps even the larger meaning of their lives, and making plans for tomorrow and all the days that lay ahead. Each would be oblivious to any threat of danger, and only slightly aware of indications that all is not right on the journey, as the train travels at excessive speed and rushes past signs of warning. In the individual character chapters, the over-riding time-scheme of the early warnings of impeding disaster would be a very minor note during the journey.

Of course, the implication would be that the story had only been delayed; that at the moment of impact, the  reveries would cease and the individual passengers would be plunged into the cauldron of a major urban disaster.

Two-Time Schemes

The fact that the two time-schemes were inter-layered meant that the reader would encounter the story in two speeds: on time and delayed. The conductor chapters would move on to the collision with the oil tank, the initial rescue, the explosion, the second rescue, the memorial service and the inquiry. The individual passenger chapters would conclude just before the moment of  impact, when the final passenger would be aware of the squealing of the brakes. The reader would have a double  -perception: the story of what had happened to some of the passengers after impact would be apparent, in the even chapters, while they would still be engaged in the preconscious reveries in the odd chapters. The thematic implication - in the midst of life we are in death - is very clear.

The Ending

The plan was now firm. Eight passengers would speed through a journey, only slightly aware of minor indications of a problem. They would remain in stasis leading up the moment, in the last passenger’s chapter, of impact. Their stories would illustrate the human dimension of the terrible accident. The conductor’s interior thoughts would tell the chronological story of the journey and the disaster and end the novel with the results of the Inquiry.

But as I worked on the plan for the novel, and read over the historical sources, I was struck by the idea of a whole new ending for  the novel, which,  after some thought, I accepted and which is now Chapter 19. This necessitated adding a ninth individual passenger chapter in order to keep to the scheme of alternating the conductor and the passengers.

The reason for this change in ending was due to my evolving sense of the interior  journey of the main character, Conductor Richard Spettigue, and what the last chapter would indicate about his state of mind as the story ends. Rather than just being the recurring character who hold the community together, he would become the character  whose consciousness - whose immediate psychological problem, and whose need to find a solution - determine and dominate the structure of the novel.

With this idea of character in mind, I decided  that the  story would actually be set in 1888, one year after the disaster, and would be not the actual journey of 1887, but a memory of the journey of  1887, one that would occupy the conductor’s thoughts for the rest of his life. In effect, this would cast the story as one moment’s thought in the conductor’s continued  attempts to come to an understanding of his role in the event. The whole story became a replay by the conductor - at the level of preconscious  thought - in order to decide, if he can, what actually happened on that day, and how guilty, if guilty at all, he should feel about his role in that terrible event.

Technique

No one would be surprised to see a disputed goal or offside repeated many times during a sports telecast. In fact, we would be upset if sports replays were omitted. It is surprising, then, that television and film have had so little influence on the techniques of the novel. In this telling of the story, Conductor Spettigue replays the brake check four times in the novel, each time with the question of what actually happened at that seemingly-routine and seemingly-insignificant moment. Each time, he inter-layers that replay with another event that, he is sure, will help him to measure the significance of that moment in his life.

Rain of Fire is available through the author at johnpassfieldnovels@gmail.com