"The dream of real freedom would have to be realized in some other country. It was too late here."
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Voyage Through A Stone Age by Chris O'Grady Amazon Digital Services
book review by Dylan Ward
In Chris O'Grady's novel, a nameless narrator travels across America by train, experiencing a lonely journey as an outsider from the "seas of people" living in a bureaucratic society. He seeks out his trains in the freight yards and rides among other transients, some befriending him, others barely noticing him as he watches them come and go. He hears and learns about the places to avoid or where to find work, or sometimes just engages in some small conversation. While our narrator doesn't mind the others, he still prefers isolation on this lonely journey, yet knows on some level that he will never really be free from civilization and its laws and dangers.
What seems to motivate him toward this journey is someone deemed as "The Actress," a mysterious woman who has managed to form "The Private Detective Agency," a network of recruits that watch him everywhere he goes, reminding him that he is not alone nor is he ever free. Subjected to this continuing "systematic abuse," it is left to the reader to determine by the novel's end if he does find what he is seeking or if he will continue on this journey for a long time.
Some of the better parts of Grady's novel are the moments when the narrator describes the beatific landscape, as he gazes out from the open boxcar of the train at the West, a landscape seemingly devoid of people and free from the constraints of conformity. "There was nothing out there at all except flatness and white salt, left over from the inland sea that had dried up through the millennia and left only the Great Salt Lake as a remnant of what had once been there." This is an interesting story layered with symbolism and references and much is left to the reader for interpretation. It reminds us to consider what is important when burdened by everyday, mundane life. The free spiritedness of travel and escape beckons us.