Song of the Brakeman

Bill Direen

...Like those great albums from the '80s, Song of the Brakeman is a restless, genre-hopping work, which mixes some fairly straight passages of narrative and some lovely descriptive writing with disorientating, staccato dialogues and dense wordplay. Reading the novel is a little like getting in a car with Brett Cross, Bill's publisher at Titus Books, as I've found to my expense once or twice.

In some ways Song of the Brakeman is two novels in one. We have a reasonably conventional narrative which probably falls into the science fiction sub-genre labeled post-apocalypse. Bill introduces us to a world which has barely survived the breakdown of the disorder we can still call civilisation, and he involves us in the lives of two characters - one is the Brakeman of the title, the other his lover, a woman from a mysterious tribe - who are struggling to make sense of the ruins around them. The hero and heroine become involved in a sort of a quest, and in a struggle between two rival power blocs representing not only two alternative futures for humanity but two interpretations of the collapse of civilisation.

-- Scott Hamilton's address at the launch

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