Book Review: 'The Viaduct' by David Wheldon
2 / 5 Stars
'The Viaduct' first was published in the UK in 1983. This Valancourt Books edition (136 pp.) was published in 2024 and features cover art by Roderick Brydon.
'The Viaduct' was the first novel from author Wheldon (1950 - 2021), a physician. Goodreads lists 10 books authored by Wheldon; these other titles include 'The Course of Instruction' (1984); 'A Vocation' (1986), which also utilizes the theme of a railway as an experiential motiff; and 'At the Quay' (1990). A posthumously published short story collection, 'The Guiltless Bystander,' was issued in 2022.
The novel is set in a Vaguely British landscape, where the eponymous viaduct was, in the past, constructed and used by the Eastern Provincial Railway Company. It's an imposing structure, taller than the tallest buildings in the cities and towns that it runs through, but it has fallen into disuse over the decades. Now, in its abandoned state, it is regarded with wariness by the people of the villages that lie under and around it.
The lead character is a younger man named 'A.,' who has been freed from prison after serving a lengthy term for sedition. He decides to leave the city and set out along the viaduct, aiming to enjoy his newfound freedom, with no obligations to hold him to any place. But his traveling is given additional impetus when lawmen of the city pursue him on additional, much more serious, charges. A. evades them, but understands that he never can return to the city.
The bulk of the narrative details A.'s encounters with various fellow 'vagrants' who move along the viaduct: some with urgency, others, with a sort of anomie-driven passivity. There is much dialogue between these fellow travelers and A., on topics tending to the existential. There are moments of alarm and pathos, but also camaraderie, as A. joins others in bedding down for the night inside the dilapidated buildings adjoining the now-abandoned railway tracks, in the undergrowth lining the tracks, or sometimes under the arches of the viaduct.
In the closing chapters of the novel summer gives way to fall, and fall then to winter, and what had at the outset seemed like a jaunt comes to take on a grimmer aspect. And it is in the winter that A. comes to a reckoning with his purpose in traveling the viaduct.
There are quite a few reviews of 'The Viaduct' available online (warning - ! some have spoilers). Some echo the approbatory blurbs from UK newspapers, and celebrated novelist Graham Greene himself, that are present on the book's cover. Others describe the novel as a disappointment. I'm in the latter camp.
The author has skill in cultivating the meditative sensibility that one would expect in a novel cast as an 'allegory,' and as the very simple plot unfolded, I found myself engrossed in learning what A. would discover at his journey's end. But the patience asked of the reader is ill-served by a denouement that is predictable and unsatisfying. I won't say that the journey along the viaduct turns out to be a dream, but it sits in that territory.
'The Viaduct' is, in my opinion, more than a little over-rated. I'm content with assigning it a Two Star rating.
