Thomas Keneally has visited the past for inspiration before with his award-winning (and best-selling) take on the complex Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s Ark.  Here, in The People’s Train, Keneally goes a step further: he has taken the story of Artem Sergeiev, a Bolshevik Russian immigrant to Australian in the early 20th century, and turned into the memoir of Artem Sasurov–a man who flees a Siberian labour camp and ends up in Brisbane. Alongside Artem is the fictional character of Paddy Dykes, a fictional journalist who shoulders the narration in the second half of the novel.

Like Schindler’s Ark, The People’s Train places itself in an historical area with a raft of recognizable names.  However, Train is twinned–it is actually two first person narratives standing alongside each other, two lives woven together and into history. It is this journey from biography to supposed memoir to second memoir that separates this book from the famous Schindler’s Ark. Artem Sasurov is both Keneally’s creation and an echo of the real Sergeiev, but in the end, he is more art than truth, and the power in the character comes from the voice that Keneally creates for him.

Sasurov has found his way on the treacherous path from a Siberian labour camp to the “people’s paradise” of Australia.  Much like the America where “streets are paved with gold”, this Australia, the haven for socialism, exists only in the imaginations of the fleeing Bolsheviks. Artem’s pure and unfettered devotion to socialism also comes under pressure when he meets the lovely Hope Mockridge, a woman whose upper-class life stands in direct contrast to the struggles of the workers and whose marriage and life are more complicated than Artem realizes.

The novel takes a number of pages to get moving.  A lot of time is spent with Artem’s internal musings, his memories of his flight from Siberia, and his interactions with some of the more famous of Russia’s socialists.  He is not alone in Brisbane, and he and a few fellow immigrants immediately begin to make the fantasy of the people’s paradise of Australia closer to reality.  His efforts are not without effect, and the local union and the power of the socialists grows until they are a serious problem for the Australian government.  It is not until Artem’s life becomes intertwined with Hope’s, and he is implicated in the death of a fellow immigrants, that he decides to make his way back to Russia with Paddy Dykes, a sympathetic and adventurous Brisbane journalist. The two men decide to travel to further the fight for the people’s revolution in Russia.

The second half of the novel is both quicker and more powerful.  Partially, this change is due to the maelstrom of events surrounding the characters–the Russian Revolution is beginning, and Artem and Paddy are swept into the action.  Paddy is more than a narrator here, like Artem, he is an active participant in what goes on around him, and his life, politics, and narration are all affected.

Keneally does a deft job balancing his two narrators and giving them compatible, but distinctive, voices.  The parallels between the agitation the socialists attempt in Australia and the revolution they follow in Russia are deftly drawn, and Paddy Dykes’ voice confidently carries the novel through to the end.  And, in the final pages, The People’s Train of the title exists, in Australia and Russia, in reality and metaphor:

“The People’s Train was rolling along in that steamy room and in the streets beyond. But I knew not just in my mind but in my blood that some travellers were the best of men and women.”

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