3,5 rounded up

Interesting historical novel set in the 1920s on a trans-Canadian train and following a black 'porter' taking care of the posh white passengers in his sleeping carriage.

The porter, Baxter, dreams of becoming a dentist and has been saving up for dentistry school for eight years now, working/being exploited day and night on the train. He is at constant risk of being fired, as any possible complaint, true or false, can add 'demerits' to his tally. And Baxter has another big secret which, if it comes out, will cost him more than only his job.

I would place this in the category of straightforward historical fiction, which is normally not my favorite, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.

This book captures the claustrophobia of one train journey and acts almost as an inversion of an Agatha Christie murder mystery- we are trapped in one location, but mostly inside the head of a porter who is fighting forces, both real and mystical, to just get from one place to another.

We listen to his thoughts as he grapples with the shame and joy of his sexuality, the racial and class differences that keep him from his dream of medical school, and his tiredness as he tries to endure the journey.

It is gripping and powerful.

As the title suggests and the front cover depicts, the story centres on Baxter, a gay, Black sleeping car porter in 1929. Travelling between a Montreal to Vancouver, Baxter has to contend with the whims and desires of his white passengers while secretly dreaming of studying dentistry. I wasn’t totally convinced by the neatness of the ending, but overall, I really enjoyed the book.

A really captivating character study set at a time when racial prejudice was particularly acute and a man with dreams had to put up with a huge amount to try and make them a reality. Wonderfully-realised.

It’s 1929 and Baxter is a porter on sleeper trains crossing Canada. He is a young black man who has ambitions to be a dentist and is saving hard to go to college. He is overworked, sleep-deprived, struggling to deliver the best service, aware that if he is given demerits on the word of a customer, fairly or not, he can lose his job and with it his dream. Other porters who have been dismissed have found themselves condemned to low-paid work. He is also wrestling with the secret of his sexuality and the fallout from an encounter with a fellow porter.

The Sleeping Car Porter follows Baxter on one long journey, made longer as the train is stalled for two days. We see the sheer range and volume of the tasks he has to perform, the demands of the passengers, the humiliations such as being called George, the generic name passengers give to all black porters, as if they were interchangeable. As sleeplessness takes more intense hold, his musings on his past life and present problems drift into hypnagogic hallucinations.

Baxter is a wonderful character. I love that his ambition is to be a dentist, rather than something more obviously heroic or high status, like surgeon or lawyer. The source of his longstanding fascination with the subject is gradually unwound in the narrative. There is also some nice observation and humour as he unpacks the story of each person he meets through their teeth.

The train is a world in microcosm, riven by race and class. You see the camaraderie and the conflicts between the porters, the dramas of the passengers, many of them also at crisis points in their lives. From the porter who is agitating for union representation to the conductor traumatised by his experiences in the First World War, to the newly orphaned child travelling with her grandmother, their stories unfold beautifully through Baxter’s eyes.

The Sleeping Car Porter also makes you think more widely about the nature of customer service, what it means to be on either side of that relationship, the intimate nature of the work, the myriad invisible acts that go into keeping the passengers safe and fed and groomed. It is the very dependence of the passengers on their porters for comfort and solace which perhaps leads them to demean and distance them by turning them all into “George”.

Reading The Sleeping Car Porter mirrors the experience of a train journey. The pace appears smooth and gentle but as the story progresses you realise how much ground as been covered, as you absorb the stories of Baxter, the staff, the passengers and the rail line itself. At their destination, we part from the passengers and the porters, but, like Baxter, our world is quietly but irrevocably changed.
*
I received a copy of The Sleeping Car Porter from the publisher via NetGalley.

Ran out of time to read this before it was archived but loved what I had started!! Will be looking out for a physical copy for sure.

Baxter is a black, homosexual porter on an overnight train from Montreal to Canada. The white passengers call him George which is of course not his name and we never do find out his first name, only initials. He is working this job to save money to complete his dental science education. But saving money is difficult in this job, depending on passenger tips, ensuring linen and towels don’t go missing and trying to avoid demerits caused by passenger complaints. On top of that the train company does not provide sleeping arrangements or meals for their sleeping car porters.
Baxter is tired and hungry and appears to be suffering from sleep deprived hallucinations. He is dealing with an eclectic mix of passengers constantly demanding his attention.
I’m not sure how I really feel about this book, 3 stars seems a bit harsh but not worthy of 4 for me. I found it difficult at times to keep track of what was going on and what exactly was an hallucination. Indeed at the point where the passengers were organising a seance to seek out the ghost they thought was haunting the carriage it occurred to me that Baxter himself was the ghost. This is very much a character driven novel and the characters are very interesting if a little bit over the top at times. The ending is disappointing, not really an ending at all in fact.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for this ARC in exchange for a review

A hallucinatory waking dream of a novel. Suzette Mayr captures the essence of Baxter, the gay, black sleeping car porter as he works a seemingly endless train journey to Vancouver. The fear of dismissal, as a result of a harsh report from a passenger haunts him as he struggles to stay awake and keep his travellers happy. As a black man,
his word would never be believed over that of a white customer. A kindness or, far more dangerously, a sexual advance from someone could be a trap - a spotter there to catch him in a misdemeanour, so every encounter is fraught. Baxter wants to earn enough, through his meagre salary and paltry tips to pay for dentistry school, but missing towels and demerits mean forfeiting money and pushing his goal further away. There is a touch of magic in Baxter's sleep-deprived hallucinations, fuelled perhaps by the science fiction he reads. His secret is his sexuality, but the passengers are not without theirs as we discover en route.. Fascinating, humane and well-researched, I really enjoyed this insight into a period of black gay history as well as an exploitative job I never knew existed.

In the late 1920s, Baxter, a gay black man, works on a Canadian passenger train as a porter, embarking upon mammoth several-day journeys that criss-cross the country. The first third of Suzette Mayr's The Sleeping Car Porter, which recently won the Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Carol Shields, is superb. Mayr takes us entirely into Baxter's reality, as he struggles not to earn demerits for minor infractions, quashes his sexuality and starts to hallucinate through sleep deprivation. I especially enjoyed the way he devours pulp science fiction through the pages of Weird Tales, although gruesome stories about cursed Egyptian scarabs devouring explorers from within don't help when he's already started seeing things. But, much like a long train journey, The Sleeping Car Porter becomes a bit wearisome from then on. The social intrigues with the white passengers Baxter has to serve feel like a distraction, and even the evocation of his interiority starts to become repetitive. While this certainly made me empathise even more with Baxter's tortuous working conditions, it didn't help me engage with the novel. And, for a book that isn't afraid to skirt the edges of realism, the ending felt much too neat. 3.5 stars.

Overall I was disappointed with this. It has its moments but they are few and far between. Not a great deal happens wrapped up in a unnecessarily long winded narrative.

This is award-winning Canadian author Suzette Mayr’s fifth novel and was the 2022 recipient of the Giller Prize for Canadian writing. Set in 1929 largely on a long train journey from Montreal to Vancouver where the focus is on main character Baxter, a black gay man who has taken a position as a sleeping car porter to help fund his dream to study dentistry. We see the passengers through Baxter’s eyes as he strives to get tips and avoid complaints which would lead to demerits and being fired. He is close to his fund-raising goals so this trip is very important for him.
It's written in the present tense which is never my favourite narrative structure. I can find it confusing and a little one-note and there is a danger we fall into stream of consciousness territory. Baxter has to function very much in the moment, responding to demands and crises so it might seem fitting but then this is not actually his narrative, it’s third person. I can see why it works to a point but I might have liked the author to mix it up a little but admittedly as time goes on and the exhaustion of both staff and passengers brings in surreal elements the layering of event after event does work well.
Baxter is the shining gem of this novel, unable to afford to eat properly and with little rest he is susceptible to hallucinations and his choice of sensational sci-fi reading material in his rare downtimes gives the potential of a nightmarish edge to the proceedings. Attitudes towards race are explored skilfully as the passengers need this man to be both largely invisible and yet answerable to their beck and call- his individuality dismissed by the generic name “George”, which is not his name. (I didn’t know about this but this was obviously a thing at the time as the author’s bibliography references works such as “Hey Boy! Hey George!: The Pullman Porter”, “They Call Me George” and “10,000 Black Men Named George”).
When Baxter discovers a postcard whilst cleaning we suspect that his route to his dentistry dream will not run smoothly with a creeping inevitability which the author handles very well. It’s a chilling depiction of the sleeping car porter’s role which was arduous and fraught with a whole range of dangers brought to life in this engaging novel. Whilst reading this I realised I have read very little Canadian literature and that this particular train journey might just have opened up a whole new reading world for me.
The Sleeping Car Porter will be published in the UK by Dialogue Books on 18th May 2023. Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

A fascinating, weird, compelling and well written story. There's a black gay main characters, there's a vivid historical background and a well plotted story.
It's not the usual historical fiction, it's a fascinating book
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

An immersive historical fiction book where the behaviour of the white train passengers will make you incredibly infuriated on Baxter’s behalf. A slow burn up until the last quarter but very enjoyable.
Thank you to Dialogue Books and NetGalley for the chance to read this advanced copy.

At the one-quarter mark, I was thinking this was a well-written, if plotless, character study; by the two-thirds point I was thinking that after all it had a surprising and interesting plot. And at the end it was somewhere in between.

It's fair to say this is a book with two different things going on.

On the one hand we have a historical novel about Baxter, a lonely young man, a Caribbean immigrant in Canada working the dehumanizing gig as a train porter, turning down beds for the super-wealthy on cross-country trains. It’s the 1920s and he’s poor, scrimping, and closeted (there’s no other choice) on a five-day Montreal-Vancouver run. His challenges are to save up the remaining hundred dollars he needs for dentistry school, not get fired, not die of sleep deprivation, finish his latest science fiction read, and keep some strange visions at bay.

In the later stages, we have an ensemble piece with the intersecting stories of many different train passengers as they remain trapped by a mudslide in a mountain path. Some of those visions of Baxter’s start to take on new meanings…

So on the one hand this is a conventional novel exploring themes of racism, classicism and homophobia. On the other, it is a potentially <i>Murder on the Orient Express</i> experience with, potentially, ghosts. I say potentially because this only gets off the ground in a slanting way, with plausible deniability at all times. I personally would have been delighted with slightly more of this, but Baxter is a well-drawn character and I was happy enough to go along with him and root for him. And it helped that the writing was strong and a pleasure to read.

The ending was a slight disappointment; a little too tidy. I was invested in Baxter's future happiness and so, it seems, was the author. I wasn’t altogether convinced by how things came together. I felt satisfied as a reader… but my inner critic cried foul. But why shouldn’t we have happy endings? I knocked my inner critic over the head and stuffed her under a sleeping berth on the train. But I suspect she may be haunting the Vancouver-Montreal line still.

It’s Canada, 1929, Baxter’s employed as a sleeping-car porter on long-distance trains but he dreams of becoming a dentist. In his all-too-brief breaks he reads snatches of science fiction, visions of a world beyond this one. Recruited from the Caribbean like so many others, his feelings of dislocation are intensified by his position as both Black and gay. Suzette Mayr’s novel was inspired by her desire to recreate lost queer and Black histories and unearth neglected chapters of Canada’s past. Her narrative is a meticulous recreation of the lives of the countless Black porters who laboured under a painfully exploitative system founded on fear, leaving them dependent on the whims of their mostly wealthy, mostly white passengers. Baxter’s job is modelled on America’s Pullman porters, referred to as “George’s boys” after Pullman himself, many also routinely addressed as “George” a means of robbing them of any sense of their individuality or humanity: expected to endure humiliations, and maintain levels of servility, reminiscent of slavery.

Mayr’s book’s based on years of research and Baxter’s a convincing creation. I found the story most impressive when it focused solely on him: perpetually exhausted, he hallucinates from lack of sleep, while the train company’s refusal to provide for porters means he can barely afford to eat on board the train. There are some marvellous stretches of breathless, vivid prose which echo the relentless pace of Baxter’s duties, the sheer exhaustion of complying with punitive regulations and catering to his passengers’ seemingly ceaseless demands. But there were also sections I found less compelling, particularly the interactions between passengers after Baxter’s train is massively delayed by a landslide. It sometimes felt as if Mayr had taken what could have been devastatingly powerful as a short story and unnecessarily stretched it out. I also found aspects of Baxter’s ongoing fascination with dentistry and teeth a little tiring. Although, I also enjoyed elements of Mayr’s attention to detail: Baxter’s strange ‘figments’ glimpsed after days without solid sleep, which he interprets by referring back to popular magazines of the era like Weird Tales.

The title pretty much gives the subject of the book away.....Baxter is a Sleeping Car Porter. On this relentless train journey to Vancouver, Baxter takes care of his passengers' every needs, desperately adhering to the rules in the Sleeping Car Porter's Handbook, trying to avoid any demerits - enough of which would leave him fired and out on the street. Trying to stay awake on miniscule amounts of sleep and perfectly perform his tasks on the little food he can afford, he is saving every cent so he can go to dentistry school. As the train makes the journey, Baxter, light headed with lack of sleep, hallucinates his way through his tasks, often with Esme, a very young motherless girl passenger clinging to him while her grieving Grandmother tries to sleep and adapt to the loss of her daughter. A novel of daily grind, exhaustion and fear of repercussion, this is the tale of a young black man with a passion for molars, misaligned teeth, extractions all things orthodontic, determined to follow his dream while harbouring a (very necessarily) secret desire for another man - and dealing with the extraordinary encounters produced by both his charges and his sleep deprived brain. Edgy and entertaining.

The Sleeping Car Porter tells the story of Baxter, a porter working on the railway cars in 1930s Canada

It’s apparent very quickly that the porters are treated shodily by their railway employers with the slightest excuse being used to punish or sack them. Baxter lives in fear of losing his job so has to remain obsequious even in the face of real provocation from the passengers and superiors and despite hardly ever being able to sleep.

As a black man, Baxter has more to suffer as he and his role are often belittled. He is also gay so lives in constant fear of discovery and therefore a real sense of foreboding hangs over the story as he battles to keep his job and his secret.

An interesting read and a book that has obviously been well researched. I was fascinated to get a glimpse into the world of a railway porter in this era and the harsh treatment they received not only from their employers but often from passengers too

It's an interesting writing style which ticks along almost like a train journey. Unfortunately it wasn’t for me though. It almost felt like a stream of consciousness in places and I often found it repetitive or hard to separate out what was real and what Baxter was imagining.

Thanks to Dialogue and Net galley for the chance to read an early review

All content within this book includes all races and as a white woman, it has opened my eyes and made me more thoughtful about changes we can make. This is not a light-hearted read but is an important read.

The E-Book could be improved and more user-friendly, such as links to the chapters, and no significant gaps between words and a cover for the book would be better. It is very document-like instead of a book. A star has been deducted because of this.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and would read more of their work. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

3.5/5.

Mentioned on twitter:

https://twitter.com/NussbaumAbigail/status/1638309914140352513

Which also recommended the book to Eve Tushnet:

https://twitter.com/evetushnet/status/1648125371328659456

This was an excellent read! Unsure at first I quickly became hooked as the writing style carried me forward in the manner of the train itself. Thorough research by the author meant that the sights, sounds and conditions on the train were totally evocative. The idea of a revenant aboard the train enhanced the sheer exhaustion of Baxter and the tension surrounding his homosexuality.