This Week I Am Mostly Reading

Midnight Express by Alfred Noyes

    The story begins with the words "It was a battered old book, bound in red Bucram. He found it, when he was twelve years old, on an upper shelf in his father's library, and, against all the rules, he took it to his bedroom to read by candle light, when the rest of the rambling Elizabethan house was flooded in darkness. That was how young Mortimer always thought of it."

    "The battered old book had the strangest fascination for young Mortimer though he never quite grasped the thread of the story. It was called The Midnight Express, and there was one illustration, on the fiftieth page, at which he could never bear to look. It frightened him. Young Mortimer never understood the affect of that picture made on him."

   "There was nothing in the picture - apparently - to account for this haunting dread. darkness, indeed, was almost its chief characteristic. It showed an empty railway platform - at night - lit by a single dreary lamp: an empty platform suggested a deserted and lonely junction in some remote part of the country. There was only one figure on the platform: the dark figure of a man, standing almost directly under the lamp with his face turned away towards the black mouth of the tunnel which - for some strange reason - plunged the imagination of the child into a pit of horror. The man seemed to be listening. his attitude was tense, expectant, as though he was awaiting some fearful tragedy. There was nothing in the text, so far the child read, and could understand, to account for this waking nightmare. He could neither resist the fascination of the book, nor face that picture in the stillness and loneliness of the night. He pinned the page facing it with two long pins, so that he should not come upon it by accident."

   This is that picture.

   I have to say that I have a strange fascination for this story myself, of which the above is but mere extracts from the commencement of the story. Like Mortimer, who found the battered old book in red buckram at the age of 12 years, I myself was twelve when I came to the Prisoner. And like Mortimer who never quite grasped the thread of the story at that age, I never fully understood the Prisoner. But like Mortimer I was fascinated by the Prisoner, and over the years I have never been able to let it go. Because in later life, when  Mortimer had grown up and became a man, came across that battered old book in red buckram again, but not until after this........

    "Leaving the direct path behind him, he found himself, a little before midnight, waiting for a train at a lonely junction; and, as the station-clock began to strike twelve he remembered, remembered like a man awakening from a long dream - There, under the single dreary lamp, on the long, glimmering platform, was the dark and solitary figure that he knew. Its face was turned away from him towards the black mouth of the tunnel. It seemed to be listening, tense, expectant, just as it had been thirty-eight years ago.

   But he was not frightened now, as he had been in childhood. He would go up to that solitary figure, confront it, and see the face that had so long been hidden, so long averted from him. He would walk up quietly, and make some excuse for speaking to it: he would ask it, for instance, if the train was going to be late. It should be easy for a grown man to do this; but his hands were clenched, when he took the first step, as if he, too, were tense and expectant. Quietly, but with the old vague instincts awaking, he went towards the dark figure under the lamp, passed it, swung round abruptly to speak to it; and saw - without speaking, without being able to speak - It was himself - staring at himself - as in some mocking mirror, his own eyes alive in his own white face, looking into his own eyes, alive."

   For me Midnight Express is a very prisonesque story, published in 1935, and Fall Outish when like No.6, Mortimer comes face to face with himself. As you read Alfred Noyes story you realise that Midnight Express is a vicious circle, in which Mortimer is forced to live though a living nightmare over, and over - time and time again - just as the Prisoner must live out his own vicious circle time and time again. As with the Prisoner which both begins and ends with a clash of thunder, Midnight Express begins and ends with the words "It was a battered old book in red buckram............"

Be seeing you.